This year, Principal Jennifer Hammond and her team of assistant principals will conduct three formal classroom observations of every teacher at Grand Blanc High School, a campus of 2,700 students in suburban Flint, Mich.
With 135 teachers, that breaks down to roughly 100 classroom visits for each of the four administrators to evaluate faculty members who teach a wide array of courses, from Chinese language to woodworking.
"We'll spend somewhere between 25 and 55 minutes in each class, for each visit," said Ms. Hammond. "The research tells us that we need to have somewhere between four and six observations that each last at least 15 to 20 minutes to have good data."
Though teachers at Grand Blanc receive written feedback on their lessons and instruction following each classroom visit, it won't be until May, after the third and final observation, that many will sit down face-to-face to talk with Ms. Hammond or one of her assistants about what they did well and how they can get better.
"In a perfect world, we'd have a post-observation meeting with every single teacher, but it's not possible with the time we have," said Ms. Hammond.
Such a reality—that principals' time is too often strained by other requirements of the job to make room for substantive instructional coaching—is running headlong into the increasing demand for school leaders to be inside classrooms, watching and studying teachers, and helping them improve as part of new teacher-evaluation systems. And on top of that, there is scant evidence to show that the more time principals spend inside classrooms, the better student achievement will be.
In a study published late last year in the journal Educational Researcher which examined instructional leadership practices in the 350,000-student Miami-Dade County, Fla., school system, researchers found that the amount of time that principals spent on a broad range of activities related to instruction was not associated with gains in student performance, as measured by standardized tests.
Role of 'Walk-throughs'
After delving more deeply into specific practices and behaviors of instructional leadership, however, researchers Susanna Loeb and Ben Master of Stanford University and Jason Grissom of Vanderbilt University, found that classroom "walk-throughs"—the most typical instruction-related activity of principals in Miami-Dade schools—were negatively associated with student performance, especially in high schools.
But the time that principals spent on coaching teachers or working to improve the school's curriculum did predict positive achievement gains, especially in mathematics.
The study closely documented how the Miami-Dade principals spent their time by having trained observers follow more than 100 of them around for one full school day in each of three school years and record their activities. That information was paired with data on each administrator provided by the school district, along with survey data and interview responses provided by the principals themselves.
Overall, the results showed that principals spent an average of 12.7 percent of their time on activities related to instruction, and the biggest chunk of that time— 5.4 percent—was devoted to conducting brief classroom walk-throughs. Elementary school principals spent more of their time on instructional activities than their high school counterparts, the study found.
"It's not that those classroom walk-throughs can't be positive, it's just that they are particularly negative if principals don't follow up with some kind of meaningful professional development for teachers," Ms. Loeb said.
See the full story in Education Week.
See a related article on principal walk-throughs in The Washington Post.
Read the related study, Effective Instructional Time Use for School Leaders: Longitudinal Evidence from Observations of Principals.
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