You are standing on the shoreline watching a rowboat trying to navigate challenging and shifting waters. The boat seems to be struggling. Some rowers are faster than others. One appears to be rowing backward. Yet another is burned out and has withdrawn their oar from the water. The captain is shouting directions, which some seem to hear while others strain to make out the words. At least a few hear the directions, exchange glances, and continue to row counter to the captain’s orders. The ship begins taking on water, slowly sinking.
How could a boat like this ever successfully reach its destination? How would the experience feel for the rowers? For the passengers?
Management author Patrick Lencioni hypothesized, “If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry in any market against any competition at any time” (2022). So how does a school leader pilot their rowboat to the shore and align their team? No work could be more impactful for creating an instructional culture that is coherent and effective. As we found at our district of Glen Cove City School District in Long Island, New York, a well-organized and inclusive leadership retreat may be the best way to energize and align a leadership team—the rowers—and ensure a comprehensive plan for achieving a school and district’s vision.
Taking Stock of Our Progress
Our district had been “rowing” for many years without taking enough stock of our path or progress. Dr. Alexa Doeschner, assistant superintendent of curriculum, instruction, and technology, has served the district for a decade, previously serving as assistant principal, district coordinator, and principal. Principal Bryce Klatsky had also been a content coordinator in the district for two years. When several new administrators—including district-level coordinators Victoria Curtis and Kristen Schaefer—joined our team, we had the unique opportunity to see our leadership practices from fresh perspectives with the benefit of a variety of prior experiences. It’s worth emphasizing the importance of learning from new team members even as you are working to acclimate them to a new district or school. Questions such as, “How did you do things differently in your past district?” or “Can you think of a different way of approaching this problem?” may break administrators out of staid approaches and illuminate new possibilities. For us, these types of questions brought to light several issues:
Inconsistent Practices: New administrators noticed that existing administrators did not share consistent practices. Some emailed positive feedback while some left sticky notes on teachers’ desks (and others did not offer positive feedback at all). Some scheduled time to walk through classrooms daily while others did not include this in their duties.
Unwieldy Observation Process: New administrators were tasked with using an unwieldy 49-point rubric for teacher evaluations. Additionally, some came from districts where a “highly effective” rating was routine while others had only ever known of a handful of “highly effectives” in their time. Our inconsistent frame of reference led to frustration on all sides.
One-Off Professional Learning: An objective assessment of our professional learning plan showed that we offered appropriate but sporadic learning opportunities for teachers, rarely affording practitioners the opportunity to bridge their growth from one professional learning session to another.
No Shared Vision: Perhaps most concerning, we were unable to ground our decision-making in a clear and concise shared vision. To be clear, our district had an official mission statement, but it was vague and largely unknown to staff. In fact, not even our most senior administrators could recall who had originally crafted it!
In many districts and schools, talented educators show up daily to support students and sustain learning, but without a clear instructional vision, they can become frustrated and lose trust in initiatives that lack purpose and alignment. Richard DuFour describes a “tight and loose” continuum for leadership designed to help balance a need for consistency with the flexibility to adapt and innovate (2007). We hypothesized that we could only be “loose” about some instructional choices if we also tightened up our organizational plan and vision for instructional support.
Without a clear instructional vision, talented educators can become frustrated and lose trust in initiatives that lack purpose and alignment.
A Five-Day Blueprint to Unify Leadership
Facing inconsistent practices, unwieldy observation processes, one-off professional learning, and a lack of shared vision, we recognized the need for a cohesive strategy to get our leadership team rowing in the same direction. After researching ways other districts facilitated and supported their leadership teams, and adapting publicly available protocols from the School Reform Initiative (now the Center for Leadership and Educational Equity), we crafted a transformative five-day experience designed to unify our district’s administrators and establish a shared instructional vision for the upcoming school year. Here’s how it worked.
Day One: Defining a vision for high-quality instruction
Our first goal was to establish a common understanding of why a district vision is important and what high-quality instruction looks like in our school district. To do this, we leveraged an adaptation of CLEE’s Affinity Mapping protocol, taking a strengths-based approach to our work. In this protocol, administrators recorded on sticky notes what they have seen in their building that represents high-quality instruction. They then placed their sticky notes on chart paper as a group and worked together to organize, categorize, label, and discuss. As groups shared, common themes began to emerge, such as student-centered lessons, student engagement, inquiry-focused lessons, intentional planning, and data-driven instruction with clear and measurable outcomes, all of which set us up for our conversations in subsequent days.
Day Two: Unpacking elements of high-quality instruction
In day two, we prioritized and determined the elements of high-quality instruction that we wanted to focus on, which would drive our instructional vision. Teams of administrators ranked components from the Danielson Rubric, a tool for assessing and strengthening teacher effectiveness, and engaged in a collaborative conversation to determine our focus. On large chart paper, teams evaluated rubric elements, ranked them by order of importance, and discussed the thinking that helped them prioritize certain elements. As teams explored one another’s charts in a gallery walk, trends emerged, and a vision for high-quality instruction came into focus. In a collaborative conversation, the group came to consensus with a focus on active student engagement.
Day Three: Setting a vision for intentional instruction
With our focus established, the goal of day three was to solidify what we wanted to see in our practices and articulate how to get there. To do this, we used a version of CLEE’s Back-to-the-Future protocol to imagine what classrooms would look like in June 2024 after a year of focus on active student engagement. This protocol focuses first on the projected future. During it, we spoke as if we had already accomplished our goals, which allowed our administrative team to imagine these shifts as being possible. Teams worked together to outline the future, how we got there, and challenges we overcame.
The energy during this exercise was palpable: We envisioned teachers facilitating rigorous discussions, students proposing projects aligned with their personal passions, lessons constructed around open-ended questions, professional learning that met teachers’ needs and interests, and much more. By the close of the day, we had a clear vision and began imagining subset areas to strategically focus our change efforts.
Credit: Photo Courtesy of Glen Cove City School District
Leadership retreat team members from New York’s Glen Cove City School District engage in a rubric ranking activity, assessing high, medium, and low priorities.
Day Four: Planning for implementation
On day four, we examined our cumbersome teacher observation rubric to select components that would best align with our new focus on active student engagement. In groups, our leaders selected priority elements for each of the rubric standards, breaking down the elements to include questions for consideration and look fors. We began to think about possible feedback to align the observation process across the district. The administrative team then broke into smaller groups to evaluate systems that were currently in place, such as walkthroughs, professional learning plans, observations, and the Superintendent’s Conference Day, for ways to improve those to align more with our instructional vision.
Day Five: Crafting a mission and next steps
The final day of the retreat was dedicated to synthesizing the work of the previous days into a cohesive instructional vision. Through a collaborative conversation, we created an improved, concise mission statement emphasizing active student engagement, along with our district’s core values and instructional objectives. We created an action plan to outline existing systems to support our vision and established delimiters to ensure new programs would support our instructional focus. This was a shared document that allowed each team member to contribute, capturing our vision and next steps.
In the past, our professional learning felt one-off; now, we had a regular structure.
Actualizing the Vision
As a result of our efforts, we began the school year with a clear mission statement to guide our team and a variety of plans from our retreat workgroups to help us actualize our vision. We started our school year with our Superintendent’s Conference Day, in which our central district leadership outlined for staff our newly developed instructional focus and shared expectations. The district-wide presentation introduced our focus on active student engagement and highlighted how the leadership retreat started work that would continue throughout the year. Here are some specific strategies we implemented:
Walkthroughs: Our leadership team (district and school leaders) implemented monthly walkthroughs, ensuring each building and teacher was visited approximately eight times per year. This structure provided multiple opportunities for insight into teacher practice, allowing us to celebrate how staff were engaging students and aligning with our instructional vision. Each building principal crafted a walkthrough schedule and, as we continued to refine this practice throughout the year, we developed a Google Form to collect anonymous data from our visits, enabling us to reflect on best practices and see areas for continued growth. This informed our professional development and planning for the coming school year.
Observation Process: Our leadership team selected specific rubric elements that would be common for all teacher observations, ensuring all aligned with our instructional focus. We developed common processes for pre/post observations and streamlined feedback mechanisms to provide a more cohesive experience for educators as they were observed by building and district staff. Teachers knew what to expect in the observation process and were able to discuss student learning, bring student work to post-observation conferences, and have richer conversations with administrators in which instruction and student learning were the primary focus.
Professional Learning: In the past, our professional learning felt one-off; now, we had a regular structure for PLCs to meet twice a month, giving teachers ownership as they collaborated to research, design, and implement strategies to support student engagement and learning. This allowed teachers to try out different strategies to support student engagement and worked to shift the mindset around professional learning from a “training” to a culture of learning.
Having had the sustained five-day leadership retreat, we were now “rowing” together, and revisiting our goals at all school and district-level meetings allowed us to “course correct” as we implemented changes. As we maintained consistency and held true to our opening Superintendent’s Conference Day vision, we saw subtle shifts in both instructional practice and institutional culture. These shifts were not without resistance, and we would be remiss if we led our readers to believe that it was all smooth sailing. However, as we all continued to row in the same direction, we were able to navigate challenges as a team and move our district forward.
Professional Learning: In the past, our professional learning felt one-off; now, we had a regular structure for PLCs to meet twice a month, giving teachers ownership as they collaborated to research, design, and implement strategies to support student engagement and learning. This allowed teachers to try out different strategies to support student engagement and worked to shift the mindset around professional learning from a “training” to a culture of learning.
Having had the sustained five-day leadership retreat, we were now “rowing” together, and revisiting our goals at all school and district-level meetings allowed us to “course correct” as we implemented changes. As we maintained consistency and held true to our opening Superintendent’s Conference Day vision, we saw subtle shifts in both instructional practice and institutional culture. These shifts were not without resistance, and we would be remiss if we led our readers to believe that it was all smooth sailing. However, as we all continued to row in the same direction, we were able to navigate challenges as a team and move our district forward.
Rowing Forward
As we conclude this journey and reflect on our experience, it’s clear that our district’s efforts to realign and unify leadership practices have set us on a promising path forward. The challenges we uncovered—like a lack of shared vision and inconsistent practices—are common obstacles that can hinder any school’s progress. By embracing the perspectives of visionary team members and dedicating time to collaboratively craft a focused instructional vision, we have begun to steer our district toward greater cohesion and effectiveness.
Our work is far from finished, but the strides we’ve made this year are a testament to the power of collective leadership and a shared commitment to student engagement. By rowing together, we’ve outlined the path forward for lasting improvements in both instructional practices and student outcomes. The future may hold more challenges, but with our newly aligned vision and the continued dedication of our educators, we are confident in our ability to helm them successfully and continue advancing the learning experiences of our students.
Our work is far from finished, but the strides we’ve made this year are a testament to the power of collective leadership and a shared commitment to student engagement. By rowing together, we’ve outlined the path forward for lasting improvements in both instructional practices and student outcomes. The future may hold more challenges, but with our newly aligned vision and the continued dedication of our educators, we are confident in our ability to helm them successfully and continue advancing the learning experiences of our students.
