Episode Details

This week Jen Schwanke hosts guest educator Justin Baeder, author and veteran instructional leader, and takeaways from his newest book Mapping Professional Practice: How to Develop Instructional Frameworks to Support Teacher Growth (2022), a book co-authored with Heather Bell-Williams. 

Justin shares his practical takes on accountability and the careful dance of driving school improvement. Discover the practical applications you can use, and check out Justin’s amazing resources from the Principal Center. 

Justin is also a repeat guest on the show. You can hear his 2017 interview on his first book Now We’re Talking! 21 Days to High-Performance Instructional Leadership (2017) here.

Thank you for listening and for doing what matters! – Will Parker

In this week’s podcast:

Dr. Jen Schwanke discusses leadership, instruction, and accountability with Dr. Justin Baeder. Baeder is the Director of The Principal Center, a comprehensive resource for principals. Baeder is also the author of two books:  Now We’re Talking! 21 Days to High-Performance Instructional Leadership (2017) and Mapping Professional Practice: How to Develop Instructional Frameworks to Support Teacher Growth (2022), a book co-authored with Heather Bell-Williams. 

Two areas of specific interest and expertise for Justin are classroom walkthroughs and instructional framing. In our conversation, he explains how classroom walkthroughs have transformative power— not necessarily because of the specific things that are seen during a walkthrough, but because they directly connect the principal to the teacher and student experience. Further, standardized evaluation frameworks have value, but only if we consider the parts of teaching that are not visible as a way to understand the true experience of being a teacher.

This same thinking is what drives Justin Baeder’s work with instructional framing. Comparing teaching to an iceberg, in which we only see a portion of the evidence and outcomes, Baeder encourages principals to look deeper to get to the rest of the iceberg.  It can happen by following a process of developing instructional frameworks and articulating what the invisible dimensions of the practice should be. 

Justin expands this thinking to the practice of peer observations. Having a teacher observe another teacher is meaningless unless everyone—the observing teacher, the t