On a spring Friday a few years ago, the teachers on our school's instructional leadership team (ILT) and I met for our weekly gathering before school. For the last several months, we had been studying the concept of retrieval practice, a learning strategy that involves actively recalling information from memory to improve learning and retention. This concept is very familiar to learning scientists but was not part of our team members' own training as teachers. We had read excerpts from several books, watched video examples, and participated in a webinar about the concept.
At the prior meeting, the team had agreed to experiment with strategies connected to the concept and report back. Pat, an English teacher, started the day's conversation by sharing how she had used a "brain dump" strategy while teaching The Great Gatsby:
I started the period telling the students to write everything they know about Nick, Daisy, and Gatsby . . . when they got stuck, I told them to keep thinking, and they retrieved more information on their own. I think it helped them understand the plot later in the week.
Anna, an English language teacher, chimed in:
I used a similar strategy with my Spanish speakers for our reading. For our warm-up, I quizzed them on five vocabulary words from our reading. It wasn't for a grade but participation, and we did it two days in a row during the first three minutes of class. I could see their confidence growing.
By the end of the meeting, team members expressed increasing confidence in both their understanding of retrieval practice and how to implement specific strategies like the "brain dump" in their classrooms. They were ready to begin talking about how to share their ideas with their colleagues outside of the ILT.
Three Obstacles to New Strategies in Schools
In my years as both an instructional coach and building principal, I have found the collaborative nature of an instructional leadership team to be the most effective way to move the instructional culture of a school.
Indeed, the time is ripe for faculty-wide conversations around strengthening instructional practice. Research around learning science presents new opportunities for improved instructional practice, and yet most in-service teachers remain unaware of this science. A 2019 survey of teachers found that only 31 percent endorsed scientifically backed strategies over less-effective ones (Boser, 2019). Further, over 70 percent voiced belief in disproven strategies that directly contradict what we know about learning.
Why is this? Part of the issue is that many educators did not learn these ideas in school themselves. One recent study found that of the 48 most widely used teacher-ed textbooks, none contained adequate explanations of the science behind fundamental strategies in how students learn (Pomerance, Greenberg, & Walsh, 2016). While teacher-prep programs have long included findings from psychology, findings from cognitive science—the study of the mind and how it processes information—has long been rarer.
As a result, there is a potential for a very real mismatch between the pedagogical knowledge of many educators and the knowledge of learning science. Yet building an instructional culture that explores and embraces these ideas takes time.
In my work, I have found three key obstacles to teachers embracing research-based instructional ideas—sensitivity, diffusion, and sincerity—and seen how the ILT model can account for these obstacles to support the instructional growth of the entire school faculty.
Obstacle 1: The Sensitivity Problem
Teaching is an incredibly sensitive job. We are entrusted with other people's children, and all of us want the best for our students. This means we can easily take umbrage when a well-meaning classroom observer provides feedback that suggests otherwise. Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham makes this point most succinctly: "You should recognize that working on your teaching will be a threat to your ego. Teaching is very personal, so taking a close look at it is scary" (2021, p. 258).
Recent literacy conversations in our field provide clear examples of these sensitivities. For example, many early literacy teachers expressed emotional reactions after discovering the scientific findings on how students learn to read did not completely mesh with the methods they were using (Huebeck, 2023). "I literally cried," one teacher said after getting training on the science of reading. "I knew I had let some kids slip through my fingers."
Teachers need to know the 'why' behind a new strategy before being asked to implement the 'how.'
It is counter-intuitive, but conversations around new instructional strategies based on research cannot start with the new strategies. To strengthen a school's instructional culture, leaders must first recognize the very real sensitivity that we are all professionals trying our best. Teachers need to know the "why" behind a new strategy before being asked to implement the "how." Therefore, a go-slow approach that first explores ideas of learning science without mandating demands is necessary. It is through this exploration and patient exposure that teachers will begin to feel confident about implementing unfamiliar research-based techniques.
Obstacle 2: The Diffusion Problem
Many of us are familiar with dynamic, innovative teachers who do amazing things in their classrooms—and only in their classrooms. Their ideas about teaching and learning stop at their classroom door, with very different pedagogy happening in rooms down the hall.
This problem—the challenge of diffusing effective practice throughout an institution—is not unique to education. Professions are often slow to adapt to change, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Just look at the medical profession's slow adoption of modern surgical standards of cleanliness. Despite the scientific evidence of germ theory and the need for antiseptic operating rooms, 19th-century surgeons were loath to give up their blood-encrusted frock coats and saws for clean and sterile equipment—let alone wear a surgical mask (Gawande, 2013). It took the painstaking process of doctor speaking to doctor, one by one and repeatedly over time, for the profession to ultimately embrace what the science was saying.
The education profession is no different. Teacher effectiveness expert Charlotte Danielson writes, "Of all the approaches available to educators to promote teacher learning, the most powerful (and embedded in virtually all others) is that of professional conversations" (2016, p. 5). One-touch PD workshops are notoriously poor at affecting instructional change (Rodman, 2019). For new strategies to spread in a school, they need to be rooted in a process of peer-to-peer conversation and collaboration.
Obstacle 3: The Sincerity Problem
The final challenge to schoolwide instructional growth is also the most prevalent—teachers' sneaky suspicion that a "bottom-up" innovation is really a top-down plan in disguise. Veteran teachers are often cynical for a reason. It is far too common for school leaders to suggest they try something to see how it works while really meaning, "This is what we are going to do."
One of the most common iterations of this is a building strategy I call "faux-inquiry." In this approach, a team of teachers is tasked by the administration to identify a need their students have. For example, perhaps students are having trouble gleaning pertinent information from a text. An administrator suggests a strategy to address this need and asks the teacher team to launch an "inquiry process" to see if it will help. The teachers create a hypothesis that if they use this strategy, the identified student need will be remediated. Hours are then spent by the team collecting data and tracking growth. To the surprise of no one, the hypothesis is always proven true, and the team is congratulated on their investigation until next year, when they do it again in an iterative cycle of instructional stagnation.
Teachers' jobs are complicated enough without asking them to spend hours on faux-inquiry proving what has already been proven. Asking teachers to "hypothesize" what works in their own classrooms when learning scientists have already done so seems both redundant and inefficient. Teachers are not learning scientists and often resent being patronized as such when a low-skilled administrator leads them to a predetermined outcome.
No question—teachers need time to collaboratively learn how to incorporate new research into their teaching. But this process must be sincere. Instead of duplicating existing research to "see if it works," teachers need the time, patience, and resources to delve into the learning science already acknowledged to work (Curtis & City; 2009). The rest of this article discusses such an approach.
ILTs as a Learning Solution
The Instructional Leadership Team process is ideally designed to surmount these three obstacles. In a 2020 literature review of research on ILTs, Uddin Muhammad Sharif found that ILTs can "excellently foster teacher leadership to promote teachers to be creative and make them more meaningfully active in teaching and learning" (p. 666).
To create an effective instructional leadership team, school leaders must first understand what they are not. Many types of teams exist in schools, and there is often temptation to leverage the ILT to make other school decisions. These groups are not the place to plan school events, consider disciplinary policies, or discuss the bell schedule. Nor should this work be confused with a department team unpacking new curriculum or a grade team analyzing performance data. As the instructional leadership team, the ILT must remain laser-focused on just that: instruction.
To that point, research has shown that membership on an ILT should be based on capacity and willingness, not representation (Weiner, 2014). Representation from each grade or department is less important than identifying members who are curious and open to new ideas.
Put another way, imagine which teachers would volunteer to attend a rewarding educational conference scheduled on a Saturday. Not everyone is willing to give up a portion of their weekend to attend a conference—and that's OK. But you want the instructional leadership team to be made up of these "Saturday people."
The work of the ILT is to identify and support schoolwide ownership of a core set of research-based practices.
In our school, the ILT's purpose is clear and explicit: to create a set of common instructional practices across the school rooted in learning science. While there will always be room for teacher choice and individuality, our team has developed a list of common instructional techniques that represent the backbone of the instructional culture of our school. These are rooted in what scientists tell us works for instruction.
Hence the work of the ILT is to identify and support schoolwide ownership of a core set of research-based practices. ILTs can do this through a four-step process.
Step 1: Study the Science
ILTs should begin with an awareness of the challenges of the first obstacle: sensitivity toward teachers' professional competence and desire to do the best for their students.
In this step, before the team even considers any PD plans, it takes time to study the science of how we learn. Figure 1 lists concepts from cognitive science that probably were not part of team members' teacher training. It represents the key findings of the U.S. Department of Education's seminal 2007 report, "Organizing Instruction and Study to Improve Student Learning." Since that report, several teacher-focused books have gone deeper into these concepts (Agarwal & Bain, 2019; Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel, 2014; Willingham, 2021). Yet nearly 20 years later, these scientific findings still remain untapped in many classrooms.
The key here is to go slow. These ideas—if they are brand new to your team—take time to understand fully. Yet, as the team meets weekly to discuss and share their thinking, members will inevitably begin to experiment with concepts in their classrooms. This will in turn lead to further team discussion and authentic, sincere, and organic inquiry.
Step 2: Identify a Strategy
The first step could and should take several months. Yet as ILT members continue to share their classroom experiences in implementing new ideas, they should ultimately settle on one of the concepts from learning science. Within that concept, they then identify a specific instructional strategy to bring to the larger faculty.
For example, our ILT in the opening vignette ultimately brought the "brain dump" strategy forward, which is an example of retrieval practice (Agarwal & Bain, 2019). In their learning about retrieval, they discovered the strategy and its value. The team did not land on a pre-determined strategy that administration already intended. They organically recognized the need and value of the strategy for our instructional culture. "The 'Brain Dump': An Example of Retrieval Practice" example demonstrates how the ILT adapted and detailed the steps in the strategy for the faculty.
Step 3: Scale the Practice
This step specifically addresses the second obstacle, the challenge of diffusion. ILT members work to break down silos within the school by sharing their learning with colleagues before introducing the new common strategy they have identified. Like the medical profession's shift to more sanitary procedures, the schoolwide adoption of a new practice needs to focus on peer-to-peer, non-evaluative communication.
During this stage, ILT members support their colleagues in developing the strategy through several systemic interactions.
- Discussion Groups: Small group discussion groups facilitated by ILT members, where teachers implement the strategy in their classrooms between meetings and reflect on how it went with the group.
- Lesson Studies: Team meetings where a teacher shares a lesson plan that features the strategy with a group of peers and receives feedback on the draft. The teacher then implements the plan and shares how the class went the following meeting.
- Inter-visitations: No-risk classroom visits where a small group of teachers visit each other's classrooms to see the strategy in action. The team then meets during a free period to debrief what they saw.
One note: ILTs should resist the temptation of introducing more than one strategy at a time. Just like the ILT spent time to first understand the science behind a given strategy and reasons why a given strategy is effective, so too must the larger faculty be given space to understand the concept and how it works in their classrooms.
Step 4: Repeat
Once the strategy is established, the ILT can repeat the process with a new strategy. Again, going slow is key. The team returns to the research they reviewed in step one, learns more, and begins to experiment again. The team might go deeper into the same topic in learning science or select another to explore. Regardless, each strategy introduced to the faculty is not seen as "the next thing," but rather one to be added to the growing list of common instructional practices at the school.
Note this is not a one-year process. The team may only fully implement one strategy schoolwide in the first year. While not a quick fix, this process recognizes both the challenges of whole-school instructional improvement and its necessity. The principal and/or other administrative leaders serve as facilitators of the ILT process—providing resources, suggestions, and assistance in keeping the process moving forward.
The entire method is trust-based and the exact opposite of cynical, insincere initiatives often halted by the third obstacle. Through the trust-based facilitation of school administration, the faculty collectively and collaboratively builds an understanding of learning science and develops common instructional practices based on this understanding to use in all classrooms. Strategies like the "brain dump"—which without an understanding of the science behind them might otherwise be seen as gimmicky or trivial—become core components of a collective teaching philosophy for the school based on the science of how we learn.
"We cannot afford to let educational practice be guided by hunch or hope if better information is available," says Daniel Willingham (2021). ILTs are an effective way to heed his call. The process is teacher-centered, peer-led, and trust-based. It is a valuable process for school leaders serious about supporting their faculties in better understanding learning science.
Reflect & Discuss
➛ What conditions would need to be in place at your school to create an effective instructional leadership team focused on learning science?
➛ How might you identify and engage “Saturday people” in your school to build an effective ILT? What qualities would you look for beyond willingness to participate?
➛ The author emphasizes that addressing teacher sensitivity must come first. What specific steps could school leaders take to create an environment where teachers feel safe exploring new instructional approaches?
