We often describe instructional leadership by listing what principals do: visit classrooms, lead professional learning, analyze data, or facilitate conversations with teachers. But a recent walk through two third-grade classrooms raised a different question: What does a school community gain when its principal is genuinely engaged as an instructional leader?
The answer was visible in only twenty minutes. It appeared in where the principal chose to sit, what she listened for, how she supported a student, and what teachers did after she left.
Entering as a learner
The principal, a coach, and I (Jody) entered two classrooms during the third-grade mathematics block. We spent about ten minutes in each room. Rather than standing at the back of the room with clipboards, we sat on the carpet among the students.
That small choice communicated something important. We were not there only to inspect the lesson from a distance. We were joining the learning community. We wanted to hear what students were thinking and understand what the teacher was working to make possible.
This stance matters. In an earlier post, Curiosity, Reflection, and Growth: The Principal as Lead Learner in Problem-Based Math, Dr. Kristy Andre writes, “I don’t need to be the expert in the room. I need to be the lead learner.” A principal’s presence can create the feeling of evaluative pressure, or it can create the conditions for collective learning. The difference lies in how the principal enters and interacts.
Listening for the mathematics
In the first classroom, students studied pairs of arrays: 6 × 2 and 2 × 6, then 5 × 3 and 3 × 5. The teacher asked, “What conjecture can you make about multiplication using these arrays?” Students turned and talked with partners while the teacher, principal, and coach intentionally positioned themselves to hear different pairs discuss their conjectures.
The teacher then invited the adults into the instructional work: “Did anyone hear something that feels important to bring to the group?” The coach shared that she had noticed a student use the word “organization”. The teacher invited the pair to share and then pressed the class: “What might Jenna mean when she says organization?” This question gave students an opportunity to make sense of Jenna’s idea while also implicitly communicating that their role was not simply to listen to ideas being shared, but to think about, interpret, and build on them.
In that exchange, the adults were not looking only for engagement or a correct answer. They were listening for language and ideas that could move the class toward an important mathematical relationship. As we argued in our prior post, What Math Knowledge Do Elementary Principals Need?, what principals know shapes what they notice, and what they notice shapes the conversations they lead. A principal does not need to be the mathematics expert in the room. But the principal needs enough knowledge, and enough curiosity, to recognize student thinking worth pursuing to achieve the learning goal.
Seeing belonging as part of instruction
At the same time, another form of instructional leadership was unfolding. One student was still becoming acquainted with the classroom community and needed a partner. The principal asked whom she would like to work with and helped her join a pair, forming a triad. As the principal left, she whispered to the teacher about the interaction she had, so the teacher could continue supporting the student’s comfort and belonging.The principal noticed both the intellectual work and the relational conditions that made access to that work possible.
What the teachers did next
We visited the second third-grade classroom, where students were engaged in the same lesson. Again, the adults sat among students, listened to their ideas, and attended to how the teacher elicited and used their thinking. As they listened, they also attended to how students were grappling with the commutative property of multiplication as they analyzed a set of arrays.
About twenty minutes later, after the principal and coach left the classroom, each teacher independently texted the principal a photograph of the chart her class had created. Their messages conveyed excitement about what students had said and done and appreciation for having other adults in the room learning alongside them. The principal was happy to receive the texts and learn what happened after she left the room.
That response is worth noticing. The teachers did not experience the visits as an interruption or an evaluation. They experienced them as shared investment in their students and their practice. They wanted to continue the conversation. This is what trust can look like in an instructional culture: the belief that classroom visits are part of learning together.
What instructional leadership offers
For teachers, this kind of leadership offers professional partnership, which is motivating and creates a sense of belonging. Their work is seen closely from a stance of collective consideration for how to support students. The students’ ideas become a shared source of curiosity. The principal’s presence communicates to teachers: the work you are doing matters, and you do not have to learn how to do it alone.
For students, it offers a wider circle of adults who are paying close attention to their thinking and their participation. It also strengthens the chances that the adults around them will make coherent instructional decisions, such as which ideas to highlight and how to represent those ideas, based on what students are doing and saying.
For the principal, these visits offer something that “look for” lists and spreadsheets cannot: direct insight into student thinking, teacher decision making, and the lived experience of the school’s instructional vision. As the post What Makes a High-Quality Interaction Between a Principal and Teacher argues, the most useful instructional conversations connect pedagogy, students’ reasoning, and the content. Sitting among students positions principals to engage in instructional decision making with the teacher in-the-moment, and gives a principal fodder for those conversations and the chance to learn before deciding what support for teachers is needed.
For the school community, the visits create a common story about their efforts for improvement. Weekly PLCs, coaching conversations, classroom visits, and informal exchanges begin to reinforce one another. Instructional leadership becomes transforms the way the community learns.
Presence is not the same as instructional leadership
Simply entering classrooms is not enough. Instructional leadership requires a particular kind of presence: close to students, curious about their reasoning, attentive to belonging, knowledgeable enough to recognize consequential moments, and willing to learn with teachers rather than only judge them.
Research conducted by Grissom and colleagues has found that principals are the second-most-important in-school influence on student learning, behind classroom instruction, and that their effects may have been underestimated. The classroom visits described here suggest one way that influence travels: through what leaders make visible, the relationships they build, and the learning they help sustain.
Twenty minutes did not transform instruction on its own. But those twenty minutes strengthened trust, generated insight, supported a student’s belonging, affirmed teachers’ learning, and opened the door to the next conversation. That is what a principal as instructional leader can offer, a school in which adults and students experience themselves as part of the same learning community.
The ideas in this post are influenced by learning alongside instructional leader Michelle Ciecek.
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