Developing Leaders within Schools: A New Approach to Evaluations

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This can't be a process that you manage. It's gotta be a process that's meaningful for all members involved in the process across the organization. That's the argument [00:01:00] that Paul Mielke, Superintendent of the Hamilton School District, makes in today's conversation. We're pumped to have Paul hanging out with us.

So what's Paul's story? Paul has been the Superintendent of the Hamilton School District in sussex, Wisconsin for eight years under Paul's leadership. The district has maintained its status as a high performing educational institution. Paul is a nerd just like me. And he's got his doctoral degree that he completed from Cardinal stretch university.

He's got 25 years of educational experience, including positions as a high school English teacher, coach, athletic director, assistant principal, and a principal at the high school and middle school levels. Paul, great to have you on the show.

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[00:01:42] Dr. Jim: Looking forward to the discussion as well. You're going to bring a different perspective to the conversation and we'll dig into that in just a second. But I think what's going to be helpful is for you to give us a little bit more detail around some of the things about your career and even your district.

That's going to inform [: 00:02:00

[00:02:01] Paul Mielke: Sure. I think some of the things that are really important is I'm, I have a coaching background with it. So I love sports. I always grew up around that. And American culture is really about sports, right? In, in a lot of senses. And if you look at how How much time and effort goes into developing sports and those things.

There's a lot of really great lessons we can learn that we're going to get into a little bit later that I think really helped inform and allow us to tap into to help develop our people. So more of a coaching philosophy in terms of improvement for that. So I think that's really important.

Also as. In the classroom I've have experience from I taught in a rural school, I went to be a principal in a suburban urban type school, a principal at an urban school, and I'm back in a suburban setting. So I've covered all the gamut urban setting. That way as, as well,

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How does all of that tie together? Into how you lead and develop people within your district and within your team.

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In coaching, it's common if you had an athlete or if you're in a musical performance, if you're a director, if you see something that your kids aren't doing great, you would adapt and you'd create a drill for some of those things to get them better at doing things. And we can actually do that same thing in leadership.

put practices in place that [: 00:04:00

And I think also the concept of deliberate practice it was made real popular by the outliers Malcolm Gladwell that it wrote and probably very common to hear 10, 000 hours of practice to make an expert. So take some of those ideas. And use them to help develop people so that they can be the best they can be.

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When you look at the concept of mastery and deliberate practice, which underpins some of the things that you talked about, how do you [00:05:00] apply that to a teaching context?

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And one of the squares has a little red box filled in. Now if you think about that, there's about 180 days that we teach, approximate. You teach about five periods a day. That would be about 900 periods that you teach. And the one box that's filled in is the one time that somebody comes in to evaluate you or give you feedback on it.

Typically, evaluation gets pushed to the end of the year because everyone's busy. So a lot of those evaluations happen In may or in worst case scenario, June. Now, if we think about that from a coaching perspective, that'd be like starting to coach. In the fourth quarter with two minutes left to go in a game, like no one would ever do that.

ach isn't doing anything. So [: 00:06:00

This is what we had to work on. And this is going to be the plan moving forward. And that's really the basis of the whole model that we put together for that. And what it allows you to do is get in get in the classroom. At the same time, you can't have a situation where we're asking principals or instructional coaches or whoever your evaluators are, to be in the classrooms 30 times a year.

It's not practical. It doesn't make sense with it. So what can we do to allow teachers to give them skills to be more self aware? Just like when you're teaching an athlete, if you do a really good job as athletes if you have a picture, for example, you'll say, Hey, if I notice this is going on or this going on, you self correct.

. All of a sudden people are [: 00:07:00

We just translate all the great things you want to see going on in the classroom, but we shifted it over to a teacher perspective. So combine the worlds of what do we, what would we want a teacher doing for our students in the classroom? And what can we learn from sports performance improvement and how can we merge those together and come up with a system?

So the other question you asked was what does it look like for a teacher? So if I'm a basketball player or if I'm a sax, if I play saxophone, something like that, I can say, Hey, I need to get better. Dribbling, right? What if it's more defined than that? What does it say? Hey, I need to get better with my right hand going in to do layups.

The more specific that you can get, the better it is. So if you think about evaluation, sometimes. The number one thing, if you go in and it's almost a pet peeve of mine is like, what do you want to get better at? Student engagement, right? That's the hot topic. Everyone wants to hear the last couple of years.

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They come up with, I'm going to work on transitions. At the beginning of unit lessons, or I'm going to work on vocabulary at the beginning. So kids understand what's going on and very specific skills, just like if I'm an athlete, I'm going to work on very specific. I'm a batter. I'm going to work at fastballs on the lower way outside zone.

The more specific you get, the more practice you have with that, the better you are. You set goals up that way, and then you specifically work on those. And if I think globally about the 10 years of practice become an expert. If you give. A chart to a teacher and it's the evaluation process.

And it's with 40 or 50 components on it and say, we want you to be really good at this. It's super overwhelming.

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And one of the things that struck me about what [00:09:00] you just described. In the private sector, just about everybody hates quote unquote review season because it's just going through the motions. Managers hate it because it's just something that HR pushes people to do. And then they, some of the laziest managers will actually have their employees fill out the review and then sign off on it.

So you don't really even get anything meaningful. So when you were showing the grid format and then creating the More opportunities for evaluation through that process. I thought that was pretty powerful because it starts you on the way to building a different sort of evaluation process. So what I'm curious about is when you look at putting that into place and you look at getting teachers.

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[00:10:02] Paul Mielke: That's a great question. And again, that's all the way that the system is designed is all based on research. One of the things that's really important in Daniel pink, you probably familiar with him, right? People love autonomy and they have control over what they want. If you are more, have more autonomy, you are going to be more motivated.

So this whole. System is also built on the science behind adult learning. Adults love to have choice and adults love to be in control of what they're doing. So for example if my wife, if I wake up in the morning, my wife says, Hey, don't have any donuts today. I think you need to lose some weight. I'm probably going to go to work and eat five donuts instead of two.

But if I wake up and I'm like, you know what? I really gotta, I gotta start looking better. I'm probably better chance to stick to my diet. The same thing happens in this process. So there's two ways that about that happens. We ask people to do a self evaluation of where they're at with the practice.

So they self identify as the [: 00:11:00

And that's really important because we're going to say, Hey, I want you to focus on these two or three for this entire cycle, for this entire year. Now and that's where the deliberate practice starts to come in. And then what happens is they might so when we do this process, we ask them to self evaluate.

Then we ask them to do a videotape themselves teaching. And then they do a short reflection on it and answer a few questions. We asked them to then that's week one, week two, we asked them to go to a visit a teacher's classroom and see what's going on there. And again, focus on those same things.

ling to go ahead and do that.[: 00:12:00

I think that's really key to this. When people understand that they're getting better and they see the great things that are coming from it, then they're more than, They're not willing to do the work with it.

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So I think that's really valuable, especially when you talk about motivating the individual to drive their own development. So I think that's pretty pretty interesting. When you look at this process and how it's been put into place, what's been the impact on educator growth and even retention by taking this more collaborative approach and more ongoing approach to their development?

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And when you get numbers that high, where people are already like, just jumping in, they're like, Hey, this makes sense. Cause they're colleagues. We're talking about it. And the thing that's amazing to this is I think reflection or excuse me, evaluation is something that people typically dread and this case.

I've had other schools where the groups that they met would continue to meet throughout the entire year because they like to meet because they were getting so much out of it. And it's very supportive with one another and they learn so much from one another that they continue on. There is never before had I heard of somebody saying, Hey, this evaluation process is so great.

Let's continue this four more times this year. So I think the proof is just that, that people wanted to be in it and they saw a great value in

sharing

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Interesting . When I think about the day to day of an administrator, a building leader, an educator, there's never enough any enough [00:14:00] time in the day. And one of the arguments that I would expect is.

Hey, Paul, this is great, but nobody's got time for all this stuff. We don't have time to spend on 50 different, Colab sessions. When you encountered that objection, did you get around that or get buy in on shifting the process? Because when you look at the comparison, It's a lot easier to just go through the motions and do an annual review or whatever and be done with it.

So what was your business case or what was your case for switching, switching to this new process?

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I want you to videotape 15 minutes of your lesson. That's it. Then when that's done, we have four questions we want you to answer. They don't have to be complete sentences. You can write them in bullets. I just [00:15:00] basically want to know what skill you were looking at what you learned what your observations from, and basically what are you going to do with that information?

They're a little bit more refined than that, but that's it. So from, for me to video, I have to set up a videotape, I video it. And then I answer some questions. That's it. 15 extra minutes for me in week one. In week two, we ask you to go to somebody's classroom and we ask you again, 10, 15 minutes, watch what's going on.

And then the thing, a couple of things I want to point out about this real quick is I think anytime you're going to do something like this structure with freedom is the key. So if I'm a teacher of photography and I tell a kid, Hey, we're going to go do we're going to do pictures of flowers today.

pieces for them, it's a big [: 00:16:00

People have taken videos of themselves before. That's not something new, but we gave them a couple of questions to think about. People have always said yeah, go down the hall and go visit Joe. Cause he's a master teacher and see what you get out of it. If I'm a teacher and walk in and you don't box that in and give me a framework and give me some structure to look at, it almost becomes too overwhelming and I don't see what I'm supposed to see.

So again, those questions are, and then the other thing that happens when I go visit somebody else, usually it's like. In this process, it's to get your own feedback. What can I learn about my teaching by watching Jim teach? So I go into that classroom, I focus on my two or three skills that I have. Ideally, I'm going to get one of those things.

Sometimes it doesn't work out perfect that way. I still learn something out of it. I walk out of that classroom. So I'm in the classroom for 15 minutes. I go back to my room, I answer my four questions again, 20 minutes, I'm done. I go to the collab, select, I go to collaboration session in week three. I get together and do that with a, say I'm a group of five.

re it when I was a principal [: 00:17:00

I'm listening to trends. Now I basically, you multiplied the time that I just got out of that because I don't necessarily have to be in 25 classrooms to get a whole bunch of information to hear things that are going on. And then we repeat that process. So while it is more involved, it's not like it's a hundred hours.

Versus a couple hours that they have, the reflections are shorter, they're more meaningful and people get a lot out of it.

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Have you seen this be a lever [00:18:00] that you've been using to develop the next generation of leaders within your district? Is that a viable use case for putting this into place?

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Nobody can say anything until they hear everything. And then you just have to listen. Ask clarifying questions and then you give some input, right? So we have a whole structure and framework around it. What that does is that everybody has the domineering, I should say, teacher or somebody who always likes to talk loudest or have the most input.

k into a meeting because the [: 00:19:00

And then I will, I'll never forget it. I was a middle school. And there's just one teacher who rarely said anything and it got to her turn to talk. I was listening to it. She shared out what she was doing for a practice and the whole table stopped and said, you're doing what, how are you doing that?

And then everybody was asking her all these questions about these things that were going on. And it ended up being a tremendous game for us for that department. And. I, to this day, I think she would have stayed in her shell. She would have been quiet. She wouldn't have shared out anything if she went to have that opportunity.

So there's things like that happen. And then we also see again, that the people you just. Everybody just gets better. And actually the people who benefit from this the most are your rockstar teachers. And I would, that I would argue that typical evaluation systems do nothing to help those people.

They're going to get better [: 00:20:00

And when you think about development of expertise, that's what happens that they hone in on something. They continually practice it and get better and better. Most people. It's called the rest of the development. When they get into their teacher practice, a lot of times you hear that saying they, they've been a first year teacher for 20 years because they've never gotten any better.

You get good enough where the parents leave you alone. The kids are doing okay. And you don't do anything illegal. So you get to keep your job, right? But the team, the people who are really good, they become experts. They find there was a couple of things every year. They keep getting better. And better.

And finally, that's how they become the expert teachers. And this process will take your best people to the next level

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So tell us a little bit more about how this continuous improvement coaching and feedback culture levels up even your best teachers and gets them to the next level.

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And she was literally, she heard one time that proximity to kids is good. So she would literally walk to the table, walk and see a kid, talk to them, then go to the next one, go to the next. Literally when you watch her, she was moving all over the place like this. Like she said, she was watching the video with her with her daughter at home.

much. And she's wow. So then [: 00:22:00

The level of the room just dropped and kids were on task more and they did more and she was getting better results. Now let's think that if I would walk, if I would have walked in, watched her teach, had the very same observation, just like her, her teenage daughter did, had the very same thought and my feedback would have been, what I want you to do is go to the front of the room, stand there, grab the chair, not move around, not react.

And I'll see how it goes. I guarantee that the next conversation she would have had would have been in the teacher's lounge saying the principal's crazy. This doesn't even make any sense. Why would I do some of those things? So that's one case where some, they come up with a great plan that they follow through and if it's their own idea, people will make it work.

The second thing I had a, [: 00:23:00

It's something I really need to work on. Imagine me going in and talking to a colds winner and saying, I don't like your body language. I don't know if it's gonna, you need to fix that. She would've been like, what? Why are you telling me this on it? Instead, she saw that thing, she made the change. And we actually had some of the kids commented who in middle of the year, they weren't getting along.

All of a sudden she had zero problems with that kid about a week after she started doing some of those things. Cause the kid was picking up on body language. Like the, those are things that happen that there's no way. Or I would say no way it'd be very difficult for an evaluator to come in and give that feedback to an award winning teacher and have them get better.

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Hey, what are the opportunities that you could have done differently on that particular call or on that particular interview or whatever. So that's a really great couple of use cases. So that's really good stuff. Now, when I think about this conversation, it makes sense for midsize It seems to make sense for midsize schools and in larger schools. How can you apply this? I'm struggling to connect it to how you would execute this in a small school environment. So what are some of the things that a small school leader can do to apply this same concept within their organization and still get the same similar type of results?

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[00:25:01] Paul Mielke: yeah, I've actually got two, two different answers for that. Number one when I was actually doing the pilot program for this, I had an AP award winning high school teacher and I had a small pilot group. I had 10 total, 12 total people. He got placed in a group with a kindergarten teacher. And he had to go do a classroom visit and I said, just trust me, you're going to get something out of it.

Go look. So he went and he did the classroom observation, the peer visit. And again, when they do the peer visit, it wasn't to get to give that person feedback. It was to see what I can learn about my own teaching. He came back with a whole structure for about how being more explicit in instructions and how the teacher set up the start of the lesson that he immediately put into place.

And he came down to me and he said, This is unbelievable. I didn't think there'd be anything that I could learn from a kindergarten teacher, and I came back and I put stuff in place immediately. So if you're in a smaller school, it doesn't have to be locked in to a grade specific. It can go across the continuum.

The second thing that [: 00:26:00

To do that part of it. And then with the power of zoom now, you can simply get in a room like that and sit and either go across district or across schools or across, your county for things that are going on. So it's easily with a couple of modifications with technology, you totally can do those things.

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Of a feedback without having to leave your building and go drive an hour and a half to some other district. So I think that makes sense. [00:27:00] So that's good stuff. This has been a really great conversation. And I think one of the things that would be helpful. Is that, because this seems like such a new way of thinking, what are the things that other leaders need to think about so that they're oriented the right way when they try to put this into place?

Because you're going from an old mindset of, hey, valuation is just a point in time thing, and you get it done and it's over with to this continuous coaching culture that you're building. What are the things that leaders need to think about so that they're doing this properly?

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So that's something that's done to teachers. You don't have an option. Supervision is something where it's a growth opportunity with it. And you try to focus [00:28:00] teachers efforts and empower them to improve. That's something that's done with teachers. And then the reflection it's not just go reflect again.

If you have a process. that you have in place that's structured that allows them to create meaning and purpose out of their work. That's something that's done by them. If you think about those things and put your own definition to one of those and be very purposeful with them, it has a huge impact and you start to look at things much differently.

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[00:28:51] Paul Mielke: The easy answer is I actually wrote a book on this called Making Teachers Better, Not Bitter. There's a whole That, that whole book is about the research behind it and [00:29:00] why this makes sense. And then there's 40 different protocols. I talked about three of them and then there's about another 30 of them that you can use that makes sense that way.

But I think when you sit down and talk about this, it's like how do our teachers best learn? How can we make sure that they're on a continuous improvement process and what structures can we put in place To help them achieve that. And if people are interested in the exact model we're doing, I'd be more than happy to, to share our implementation maps and resources and things like that.

I've been doing this model for going on 15 years already, since when I first developed it,

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[00:29:38] Paul Mielke: you can just send me an email.

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This is one of those conversations where I wish we had 45 to 60 minutes [00:30:00] to dig into it because it's really interesting, but like one of the major things that comes out of this conversation for me is how this shifting process. How this change in process in how you tackle evaluations can really help cultivate a leadership pipeline for your organization.

And the reason why that stands out to me is you're in a lot of ways relying on your existing educators or your team to do a certain amount of self evaluation and also observation of other folks that are in the space and drawing lessons from all of that. Now, when you think about the application of leadership competencies and developing others on your team, this builds that leadership muscle.

cts are faced with is how do [: 00:31:00

And this seems to build that muscle within the educator population that exists within your district. So I really appreciate you sharing that. With us, for those of you who have been listening to this conversation, if you liked what you heard, make sure you leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform.

If you haven't already done so make sure you join the community. You can find that at www. engagerocket. co slash HR impact, and then tune in every week where we'll have another leader joining us and sharing with us the game changing insights that help them build a high performing team.