As a principal, you spend a significant portion of your week talking with teachers, before school, after observations, in the hallway. But here’s a question worth sitting with: are those conversations actually making teaching better? Research on effective school leadership helps us understand that the quality of the instructional conversations they have with teachers matters. And quality, it turns out, has a specific meaning.
Instructionally-focused Conversations: Enter The Instructional Triangle
To understand what makes a conversation instructionally focused, it helps to start with a framework called the instructional triangle, developed by researchers David Cohen and colleagues, which describes the three elements that shape every learning experience: the teacher, the students, and the content. See part 1 of this three-part post for a longer description.
Most post-observation conversations tend to collapse into one vertex of this triangle. We talk about what the teacher did (or didn’t do). Or we note concerns about student behavior. Or we discuss whether the content was appropriately rigorous. Each of those conversations has some value. But none of them alone gets at what teaching is actually about, which is the interaction between all three.
Think about it this way: a teacher can deliver a strong explanation of a mathematical concept and still leave students not making important mathematical connections — because they didn’t anticipate how students were likely to think about the idea, or didn’t adjust their moves when confusion surfaced. While the explanation was clear, the teacher did not engage with students’ reasoning about the mathematical idea. A conversation that only evaluates what the teacher did will miss this entirely. Instead, researchers have found that rather than addressing teacher, student, and content separately in sequence, the most powerful conversations held all three in view simultaneously.
What This Means for You as a Principal
Teachers learn through conversation. When you observe a classroom and then sit down with a teacher, you’re not just completing an evaluation cycle, you are participating in that teacher’s professional learning. The question is whether the conversation you’re having is the kind that moves the needle in order to impact that teacher’s practice.
That means resisting the pull toward the familiar. It’s easier to offer general praise or flag a management issue than to ask: What were you hoping students would understand by the end of that lesson, and how do you think they got there? It’s more comfortable to stay at the surface than to dig into the specifics of how particular students reasoned through a task.
It also means expanding what you listen for during observations. Rather than just noting what the teacher is doing, pay attention to the interaction: How is the teacher responding to student thinking? What opportunities for deeper understanding are opening up or getting closed off? Those observations give you the material for a truly instructional conversation afterward.
An Example from a Third Grade Math Observation
Before stepping into a third grade classroom, the principal, Meridith, had already communicated her focus for the month. Her “Parkwood Math Moves” newsletter, distributed two weeks earlier, had named her look-fors explicitly: she wanted to see evidence of student strategy use during math work time, not just whether students were on task, but how they were thinking through problems. Teachers knew she would be looking for this. When Meridith enters the room, students are seated in small groups working independently on a multiplication task. She notes that the atmosphere is calm and appears to be productive, students are on task, pencils moving, and the noise level is appropriate.
Meridith scans the room for general engagement, she pulls a chair up next to a student at the nearest table and looks directly at the paper. The student has drawn 6 rows of 7 circles and is counting each one individually. Meridith moves to the next table. Same picture: arrays of dots, careful one-by-one counting, some students using tally marks. She works her way around the room methodically, spending thirty to forty-five seconds with many students, watching how they are doing it and asking them questions to add to her understanding of what strategy they are using. By the time she reaches the far side of the room, a pattern has become unmistakable: every student in the class is direct modeling. No student is using skip counting, repeated addition, partial products or any strategy that suggests they have moved toward more efficient or abstract reasoning. At this point in the year, the students should be moving toward using partial products. The teacher, meanwhile, is circulating and offering encouraging feedback — “good job,” “keep going,” “yes, that’s right” — without probing into student thinking or nudging any student toward a different approach.
After the lesson, Meridith sits down with the teacher for a debrief. She opens not with what she saw in the classroom environment, but with a question about the math: “When you look at where your students are in their strategy use, what do you notice?” The teacher describes her class as engaged and hardworking, which Meridith affirms. But then Meridith names what she observed directly: every student she visited was direct modeling–drawing out each object and counting from one. She is careful to distinguish this from a behavioral problem; the students were not off task. The issue was instructional: students were not progressing toward the more sophisticated strategies the standards expect at this point in third grade, and the feedback they were receiving during work time was not moving their thinking forward. Meridith asks the teacher what she knows about why students stay using direct modeling, and what kinds of teacher moves typically create the conditions for students to take risks with new strategies. Later, Meridith will meet with the school-based math coach to see how she can support the teacher’s understanding of the progressions. In the meantime, Meridith’s comments aim to get the teacher to reflect on students’ strategy use (how they are making sense of the mathematics) and what teaching moves she can make to help students try more sophisticated strategies–the three vertices of the instructional triangle are used here to support a robust, instructionally focused.
A Simple Test
Before your next post-observation conversation, ask yourself: does this conversation touch all three vertices of the triangle? Are we going deep on the substance of the teaching, not just the logistics? Are we specific enough that a stranger listening in would know which students, which content, and which instructional moves we’re talking about?
If the answer to any of those is no, you have an opportunity to push further. An important stance that will help you push forward is curiosity. The goal in these conversations goes beyond evaluation toward a stance of learning together. That kind of conversation is among the most powerful tools a principal has.
The Evolving Educator: 
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