I’m sure you’ve heard the saying, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there.”
A related version for education leaders is, “If you don’t know your biggest problem, you’ll never solve it.”
When I ask leaders “What’s the biggest problem you’re facing?” I see two clear patterns in the responses:
Group 1 Responses
- We want to improve engagement for high-ability learners across diverse settings.
- We need to align our teaching strategies with the needs of gifted learners.
- We’re working on developing project-based, open-ended activities that will challenge all students.
Group 2 Responses
- Teachers aren’t waiting long enough after they ask a question. They often wait one second and then answer their own question.
- Many teachers are not asking questions at the “Analyze” and “Evaluate” level of Bloom’s. Everything is low-level or they jump straight to a creative task.
- Teachers do not pre-assess because they do not know how to run multiple groups in their classroom.
The difference is clear, right? Group 2 problems come from direct classroom observations. They are hyper-specific.
The Group 1 responses are buzzword soup. They are not clear enough to actually solve. No one walks out of a classroom and says:
“Hmm, looks like we need to
align teaching strategies with the needs of gifted learners
.”If you’re a leader and you find yourself struggling to identify the main problem you’re trying to solve, get into classrooms. You will not find your teachers’ biggest problem at a conference, on Twitter, in a spreadsheet, etc.
When leaders spend time in classrooms, they naturally have a very clear picture of what individual teachers need to work on. AND they know which classrooms to send those teachers to! When I struggled with handling multiple groups at once, my principal sent me to Diane’s classroom. Diane showed me how she does it. Then I could do it! I wrote more about this here.