Time Well Spent

Yep. You saw that right.  Blink twice and look again… 20-60 spontaneous classroom observations PER WEEK!

This is a powerful conclusion drawn from a study on effective school leadership which was commissioned by The Wallace Foundation and conducted jointly by the University of Minnesota and the University of Toronto.

Most of these observations were short, unannounced and were clearly about learning and professional growth.

Now that it has sunk in a little… Let’s do the math.

Let’s take 40 observations per week as our target.

Remember they are SHORT!

If you visited 40 classrooms per week for five minutes each… you need 200 minutes.

I know school hours vary a bit, but let’s use an 8:00 – 3:00 school day for our purposes.

That would be a seven hour day,  which if I did the math correctly is 420 minutes.

200 minutes is not quite one half of one school day.

In fact… it is just 40 minutes per day

You DO have the time.

You have 40 minutes per day to do this impactful work… work that makes principals and schools successful.

You may even have 60.

Now is the time.

Block out 200 minutes PER WEEK on your 2018-2019 calendars.

Mark it URGENT.

Protect it at all costs.

Do it now.

Seriously!

And then come back to read the rest of this post.

Now that you have that time blocked off on your calendars, there is a bit more I need to tell you. Those successful principals who made 20-60 spontaneous observations per week focused on learning and professional growth… they also coupled those observations with direct and immediate feedback.

So… you need a little bit more time.

Because… EVERY observation deserves feedback.

You don’t need to have 30 minute conversations about your observations.

You can have highly effective ANCHOR conversations and give valuable feedback in five minutes (even three minutes) or less.

It takes practice, but I promise you can.

So… more math. Let’s use four minutes for feedback. That’s 160 minutes per week that you need to block off to give feedback to the people you observed.

Add that to your 200 minutes and our grand total is 360 minutes.

That is 32 more minutes per day.

But just 72 minutes per day can dramatically transform your school.

In Lead Like a PIRATE we say “If it’s important, make time for it.”

This is important.

Make time for it.

And let us know if we can help!