Chapter ONE
Focusing Teacher Learning

Rachel Moriarty is the founding principal at Mountain View Middle School. She opened the school four years ago with the support of a brand-new assistant principal and a largely novice teaching staff. The school has grown year-by-year, reaching 925 students this fall, with an increasingly diverse student population in a neighborhood that used to be predominantly white and middle class. Now, although a third of the school has been designated "highly capable" (a group that tested into this program in first grade and also tends to be largely white and upper middle class), more than half of the population receives a free and reduced price lunch-including a growing homeless population.

As a whole, a little more than half the student population is white, 14% are Asian, 10% Latino, and 8% African American. There is a growing population of students who are also English language learners (ELLs), with more than 40 languages spoken at the school. The majority of the ELLs come from Spanish-speaking families, mainly from Central America. There is also an East African population, mostly Somali, in addition to some Eritrean and Ethiopian students. The ELL population is diverse in terms of schooling background. Some have attended public schools their whole lives and some had interrupted schooling prior to immigrating. Students' math test scores have shown a wide discrepancy between students of color, particularly the ELL students, and white students. Rachel, the principal, has noted over the past few years that Mountain View Middle School at times seems more like two schools-the "honors" and the "regular" school.

The challenge for Rachel is typical for school leaders who strive to foster rigorous and relevant learning experiences for each student at their schools. School leaders who are not satisfied with an existing status quo that tends to sort students along lines of race, class, and language face an enormous task-one that starts from the assumption that all students can learn, that learning depends on teachers creating powerful learning opportunities for their students, and that creating these learning opportunities for students is an incredibly complex and sophisticated endeavor. Not only do school leaders have to consider how to confront the implicit bias toward students of color or in poverty but also how to help teachers make shifts in their practice that will ask more of their students and that can challenge current conceptions of what students are capable of.

Rachel saw the gap in her students' math performance levels and knew something needed to change instructionally, but she was unsure about what those changes would be. Though she had taught for a decade, her own content expertise was in language arts, and she knew she needed to learn more about the shifts in math standards, how students learn these new content demands, and how teachers come to learn to these shifts. Rachel knew that the math teachers, by and large, knew their content area well and had a sense of what students should be able to do in sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade mathematics. However, she knew that the teachers did not know how to create enough scaffolding for students to be able to access the content that was presented. Furthermore, the more experienced teachers were also largely satisfied with what they were doing in the classroom. Given her own instructional background, Rachel could not yet name the specific changes in math instruction she wanted to see or what the teachers needed to learn to get there. But her own prior experience taught her that seeing what students are capable of, as a result of powerful teaching and learning opportunities, helps shift perceptions and expectations of what students can do. Indeed, John Hattie's research underscores this point: teachers' beliefs about their students' ability to learn and teachers' sense of efficacy about their impact on student learning is related to expertise. Expert teachers believe and expect their students to rise to the degree of challenge they present and they attend to the nature and the quality of the effect that they are having on every student (Hattie, 2009).

THE PRINCIPAL'S CHALLENGE

Instructional leaders face considerable challenges requiring instructional leadership expertise. They must figure out what teachers need to learn as well as how to orchestrate and nurture teacher learning that results in the improvement of teaching practices. In 2003, Stein and Nelson proposed that school leaders' understanding of a content area (e.g., mathematics), how it is learned, and how it is taught are critical components of instructional leadership. As they considered this challenge for leaders, Stein and Nelson proposed the idea of "post holing," or leaders' ability to draw from their expertise in one content area in order to understand how to support teacher learning in another content area. Thus, they argued, instructional leadership skills may be transferrable between content areas.

For Rachel, the newly state-mandated teacher evaluation system helped her move past binary ideas of "satisfactory" or "unsatisfactory" teaching to rubrics with more descriptions to help gauge the quality of teaching. Yet replacing the "sat/un-sat" ratings with a four-point rubric does not fully define what a 4 looks and sounds like for particular grade levels and content areas, as well as what it takes to develop teachers' practice toward that definition. This level of expertise requires more than "rater reliability" training. As well, the higher standards put in place over the last six years (e.g., Common Core, Next Generation Science Standards) have helped shape ideas of the level of rigor and student engagement we hope to see, but closing the gap between what we can envision for our students and what teachers know how to do will require even more support from leaders. Putting student learning standards and an evaluation tool in leaders' hands is not enough to help nurture and support the development of teachers' practice. Additionally, as the efficacy of professional learning opportunities typically offered to teachers has come into question (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 2014; The New Teacher Project, 2015), principals' roles in supporting teacher learning, versus compliance exercises, requires leaders to consider how they invest their leadership efforts to create and sustain relevant learning opportunities for teachers.

Because Rachel could draw on her expertise in language arts and experience supporting teachers' learning in literacy, she knew that the math department needed the kind of learning opportunities that cultivated changes in beliefs about what students were capable of and the development of instructional practices that helped teachers see the link between their specific teaching and what students could do as result. She knew that she would also have to support teachers' capacity to collaborate on and collectively problem-solve the instructional problems of practice that would emerge as teachers tried out new ways to scaffold student learning. She knew she had to support habits of collaboration and problem-solving in her math team: there were two veteran teachers with more than 10 years' experience among the group of largely novices, and she wanted to capitalize on their leadership potential as well as develop the entire team's capacity to learn with and from one another.

THE CHALLENGE OF PROFESSIONAL LEARNING

There is a high bar for learning opportunities for teachers: learning opportunities are effective insofar as we can see the impact on the quality of classroom learning experiences for students. Although indeed a high bar for teacher learning, as we've learned from the research on "expertise," becoming more expert in anything (in this case, teaching) is about the doing-the actual performance. And although there are standards for professional learning and wide agreement for what constitutes "quality" professional development (Learning Forward, 2011), as a field we often miss the mark when it comes to creating ongoing learning opportunities that increase teachers' expertise over time and that result in improved student learning. For leaders, creating a culture of continuous improvement and a collective effort to solve problems of student learning is as complex as teaching itself.

Katz and Dack (2013) assert that professional learning for teachers often lacks clear focus, collaborative inquiry that will challenge thinking and current practice, and formal and informal instructional leadership. Their research underscores (1) the importance of "intentional interruptions" that help teachers question current understandings and practice and (2) the role of instructional leadership to support teachers' learning and hold teachers accountable for their learning. In the following chapter, and using the case of our middle school leader, we will explicate what we mean by instructional leadership as it is described in our 4 Dimensions of Instructional Leadership framework and will say more about how leaders support teachers' learning and hold teachers accountable.

When we consider what it takes to develop expertise-that is, the ongoing opportunity for deliberate practice with feedback and coaching (Ericsson & Pool, 2016)-and we pause to consider the enormous complexity of teaching, the findings from The New Teacher Project's Mirage study (2015)...