Dr. Peter DeWitt
Instructional leadership is one of the most researched forms of leadership, but very little practical insight into how to implement it exists, and many leaders struggle to put it into practice. DeWitt, Ed.D. will take the research behind instructional leadership, as well as the research he did with hundreds of teacher and students during the pandemic, and dive deeper into six areas that he found is crucial to practices that lead to instructional leadership.
That deeper dive involves breaking instructional leadership into six distinct parts, which are implementation, focus 4 learning, instructional strategies, student engagement, efficacy, and evaluation of impact. Leaders need to understand these six areas of instructional leadership, but also need to be provided with time to consider practical ways to implement each one, which also includes understanding implementation science, regardless of whether people are in-person, hybrid or remote. These sessions will help meet that need.
Participants will learn:
• About the research supporting instructional leadership which will help them think differently about the way they approach faculty meetings, PLC’s and learning walks
• Why credibility plays an important part in our ability to be instructional leaders
• The importance of implementation using a program logic model
• Where to focus their attention when it comes to learning using knowledge dimension research
• The research around student engagement that leads to alienation, and what we can do about it. Research shows that students feel alienated from school based on two factors, which are a lack of connection to their school community and a lack of a voice in their own learning. We will focus on how to hear students, and use that to guide our leadership practices
• How to lead through discussions that focus on high leverage instructional strategies, and use those strategies to model instruction during staff meetings
• The role of efficacy in leadership practices. Whether it’s self-efficacy, leader self-efficacy or collective leader efficacy, we will focus on using the research to guide our discussions of learning, race and student engagement to help defy the myths behind them
• How to collect evidence of impact
• How to engage in reflective practices to help them understand how instructional leadership plays a part in their roles in school by using a framework for learning which will be provided to them during the session