Baltimore Principal Leadership Consultancy

School Year 2015-2016

Table of Contents

Executive summary ...... 3

Part I: Mentors...... 6

Part II: Participants ...... 7

Part III: Mentoring process...... 7

Part IV: Expected outcomes ...... 10

Part V: Measuring success ...... 11

Part VI: Continuous improvement ...... 11

Evidence of success in other districts ...... 12

Thinking longer term ...... 13

Conclusion ...... 15

Appendix A...... 16

Appendix B ...... 23

Executive summary

Baltimore City Public Schools recently announced its second cohort of Transformational Principals. These principals have advanced up the district pay scale and entered a new career pathway with the expectation of taking on additional leadership roles within the school system. The school system has identified peer mentoring as a potential leadership role, and MarylandCAN sees a key opportunity here.

We believe there is no better time to pilot a peer-to-peer principal mentoring program in Baltimore. Mentoring is a high-impact strategy that allows a school district to harness existing human capital to improve school leadership across the district. A wealth of research shows that in-service mentoring supplements pre-service training by providing principals opportunities to reflect upon and improve their practice while on the job (see Appendix B). Mentoring goes beyond traditional professional development by utilizing a district’s most effective sitting principals and providing individualized support to particpants. Mentor-participant relationships can also reduce principal isolation and increase camaraderie, which we believe will improve City Schools’ principal retention rates.

Below, we lay out the design forthe Baltimore Principal Leadership Consultancy (BPLC). MarylandCAN has based this proposal on best practices from high-impact mentoring programs in large urban districts across the U.S. Over the past several months, we conducted interviews with administrators that lead principal development and mentoring programs in Prince George’s County Public Schools, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Schools, Hillsborough County (FL) Public Schools and Gwinnett County (GA) Public Schools, as well as leaders of the Hamilton County (TN) Leadership Pipeline. We also reviewed published research on principal mentoring programs that have received national attention, such as the Jefferson County (KY) mentoring program and the New York City Leadership Academy. We spoke to officials at the National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP) and the New Teacher Center, both of which provide training for principal mentors. And finally, we researched Maryland’s current school leadership development programs, including the Maryland Promising Principals Academy.

The key components of our proposed mentoring program are as follows:

MarylandCAN is responsible for financing and overseeing the program, and will hire a program coordinator to manage the program’s daily operations. City Schools will bear no responsibility for housing, financing, staffing or overseeing the program.
Transformational principals whose schools exceed a minimum threshold of student performance are eligible to serve as mentors on a voluntary basis. Principals who serve as mentors fulfill their additional responsibilities as Transformational in part through this program and, pending approval by the PSASA-BCPSS Joint Governing Panel (JGP), earn leadership units for their service. Mentors receive pre-service training from a third-party provider such as NAESP and are provided periodic opportunities to gather and share their successes and challenges.
Principals on the Standard and Professional career pathways are eligible to participate and must submit an application. Pending approval by the JGP, participants receive leadership units for their participation. Mentors are matched with 1-2 participants based on the similarity of the mentor and participant’s circumstances.
Mentors are required to meet with each participant twice monthly for 90 minutes (if mentors and participants choose to meet over lunch, MarylandCAN will reimburse them for the cost of the food). The objective of the meetings isto guide the participant toward ongoing improvement and excellence on the City Schools School Leader Rubric.Mentors develop an individualized learning plan with each participant that addresses the participant’s key areas for growth within the Rubric. Although the learning plan is individualized, each 90-minute meeting follows a guided structure: a celebration of success; reviewing homework from the previous session; a new lesson delivered by the mentor that is aligned to one of the Rubric components and based on personal expertise and experience; an application of the lesson/walkthrough of the building; a debrief/question-and-answer session; and a new homework assignment that builds on the lesson.
Mentors submit a brief post-meeting report to the program coordinator via an online submission system, which the coordinator uses to track progress and troubleshoot any challenges that arise.
Mentors will have the opportunity to gather regularly with their fellow mentors (at least three times during the year) to learn from one another’s successes and challenges.
Additionally, the full cohort of mentors and participants meet for dinner (paid for with funds raised by MarylandCAN) three times during the year to share their progress and exchange ideas about what is working in their schools.
Expected program outcomes include: Participants progress toward higher levels of proficiency on the School Leader Rubric, and mentors acquire leadership development skills that allow them to become better at mentoring teachers and assistant principals, as well as new practices learned from the participants that help them improve their own schools.
Program success is measured in three ways: Participants complete a self-assessment, rating their growth on components of the School Leader Rubric and providing evidence wherever feasible; mentors and participants complete surveys and focus groups to gauge overall satisfaction with the program; and the program coordinator submits an annual report to the City Schools CAO analyzing the efficacy of the mentoring program based on quantitative and qualitative data from participants’ schools.

Part I: Mentors

Mentor recruitment and selection

Recruiting highly effective principals to serve as mentors is key to establishing an impactful peer mentoring program. City Schools’ principal career pathway system has already begun to identify Baltimore’s top-performing principals. The first two cohorts of Transformational Principals will provide the initial pool of mentor candidates.

It is also important to ensure that mentors have a demonstrable track record of success at their schools. Therefore, eligibility will be limited to Transformational Principals whose schools exceed a basic threshold of student performance. Mentor principals’ schools must fall in the top third of City Schools SY 2013-2014 FARMs student proficiency ratesin the majority of tested grades in both reading and math.

When new principals are added to the Transformational or Distinguished career pathways, they will become eligible to serve as mentors provided they meet this performance threshold.[1]

Those principals who qualify and who choose to be mentors will fulfill their additional responsibilities as Transformational in part through this program. In addition, to further incentivize principals to sign up as mentors, pending approval by the JGP, principals will earn leadership units for their service (mentorship has already been approved by the Joint Oversight Committee as an activity eligible for leadership units).

Mentor training

Eligible mentor principals may excel as school leaders, but learning to effectively coach other principals can require additional training. We plan to engage a third-party organization with expertise in training principal mentors. NAESP will conduct a three-day in-district mentor training for roughly $600 per principal. Prince George’s County and Hamilton County both contract with NAESP to train mentor principals.

Mentor support

Mentors will have the opportunity to gather together during the school year to learn from one another’s successes and challenges. Gatherings will be led by the program coordinator and will be loosely structured to provide an open forum for mentors. Hillsborough County and Hamilton County provide these opportunities for mentors, and Hamilton County in particular expressed how important these gatherings are in promoting mentor investment and effectiveness.

Part II: Participants

Recruiting and selecting participants

Any City Schools principal on the Standard or Professional career pathway will be eligible for mentoring. Interested principals will submit a brief application requesting a mentor. The program coordinator will review the application for evidence that the principal is committed to the mentoring process and able to make the necessary time commitment. Pending approval by the JGP, Principals will earn leadership units for their participation as a mentee.

Matching participants with mentors

Mentors will be assigned 1-2 participants, depending on the numbers of principals who agree to serve as mentors and apply to participate. The program coordinator will match mentors and participantsusing three criteria:

the strengths and weaknesses of mentors and participants, based on self assessments on each component of the City Schools School Leader Rubric (for example, if a participant designates selecting and retaining effective teachers as a weakness, the program coordinator will work to match him or her with a mentor who lists that component as a strength);
the similarity of mentor’s and participant’s circumstances (for example, the coordinator will work to match mentors and participants with similar school profiles and personal backgrounds);
and, if applicable, the participant’s preference for a specific mentor.

Part III: Mentoring process

Most principal mentoring programs in districts we researched share several features. They train mentors; they set parameters on the frequency and length of mentor-participant meetings; they establish a core set of competencies which participants are expected to master and/or a list of topics to be covered in mentoring sessions; they allow flexibility for mentors to individualize their relationships to best meet participants’ needs; and they require mentors to submit reports to the district (see Appendix A for details).

Frequency and length of meetings

Mentors will be required to meet one-on-one or one-on-two with each participant twice monthly for 90 minutes. Meetings can take place during the school day or outside school hours, depending on the mentor’s preference, and alternate between the mentor’s and participants’ schools. Mentors and participants will also be encouraged to talk outside of these structured meetings. For example, in Prince George’s County, mentor and participant principals often set up informal Skype sessions between formal meetings to discuss successes and challenges that arise in the course of the participant’s daily work.

Meeting topics and format

Mentoring sessions will be rooted in City Schools’ School Leader Rubric. Mentors will help participantswork toward mastery of the four core values and ten sub-values of the Rubric:

Highly effective instruction (Instructional leadership)

1.1. School leadership supports highly effective instruction.

1.2. School leadership plans, assesses, and adjusts to ensure highly effective instruction.

Talented people (Capacity building)

2.1. School leadership implements systems to select and retain effective teachers and staff whose skills and beliefs meet those needs.

2.2. School leadership develops its own capacity and that of faculty and staff by engaging in school-wide reflection and professional development.

2.3. School leadership makes full use of the evaluation system to both develop faculty and staff capacity and to hold them accountable for performance.

Vision and engagement

3.1. The school leadership provides a clear vision and mission that promotes a welcoming and supportive learning environment for students, families, staff and all other stakeholders.

3.2. The school leadership cultivates and sustains open communication and decisionmaking opportunities with families.

3.3. The culture of the school reflects and embraces student, staff, and community diversity.

Strategic leadership

4.1. The school leadership manages progress towards clear goals through a cycle of planning, action, assessment, and adjustment.

4.2. The school leadership allocates and deploys the resources of time, human capital, and funding to address the priority growth goals for student achievement.

Before the first mentoring session, participants will have assessed their strengths and weaknesses on each sub-value of the Rubric. During the first meeting, mentors andparticipants will review this self-assessment and develop an individualized learning plan based on the participant’s needs and focusing on Rubric areas in which the participant has assessed himself or herself as a Level 1 or 2. This learning plan will evolve throughout the year as mentors and participants continually work to identify and address areas for improvement.

Although the order of topics addressed and the topics emphasized will vary among participants based on individual learning plans, each mentor-participant meeting will follow a basic structure:

Each meeting will start with a celebration of success (5 minutes).
Next, the mentor and participant will review the participant’s homework, which focused on an area for improvement identified in the previous session (5 minutes).
The mentor will then deliver a new lesson that focuses on improving professional practice in one of the components of the School Leader Rubric. The lesson should utilize the mentor principal’s personal expertise and experience (15 minutes).
Next, the mentor and participant will do a building walkthrough/application of the lesson. For example, if the lesson is on delivering feedback to teachers, the mentor may watch the participant observe and provide feedback to a teacher. Or, if the session is taking place at the mentor’s school, the participant will watch the mentor observe and provide feedback to a teacher (40 minutes).
Afterward, the pair will debrief on the lesson. The mentor will offer feedback to the participant, and the participant will have the floor to ask questions (20 minutes).
Lastly, the mentor will assign the participant homework that builds on the lesson taught during the session and requires the participant to work on areas for improvement (5 minutes).

Although this individualized structure is common throughout the mentoring programs we studied, one district, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Schools, adds slightly more structure than the others. Instead of asking mentors to choose which topic focus on during a given session, the district requires that the sessions progress through each leadership standard one by one. For example, in week one, all first-year participants receive a lesson on building school/staff relationships (see Appendix A for a full list of topics). This approach ensures all principals learn the basics, although it prohibits a deeper dive into specific principals’ targeted needs.

Submitting meeting reports

At the conclusion of each session, the mentor will submit a brief report to the program coordinator (via an online portal) describing the meeting: the celebration of success, the day’s lesson, the homework assignment, plans for the next lesson and any ongoing challenges. This reporting process will provide a measure of accountability to ensure mentors are meeting with participants and providing thoughtful lessons, and it will also allow the program coordinator to monitor the program for red flags in case troubleshooting is necessary. In four out of five districts with whom we spoke, mentors are required to submit post-meeting reports.

Cohort dinners

Three times during the year, the program coordinator will organize a dinner for the full cohort of mentors and mentees. In addition to bolstering camaraderie, the dinner will serve as a forum for exchanging lessons about what is working in each principal’s school. These success stories will allow participants to share their progress and to hear good ideas from other principals, both mentees and participants, from whom they do not normally hear.

Part IV: Expected outcomes

Through the mentoring process, we expect both participants and mentors to develop new skill sets and become more effective school leaders. For participants, the immediate measure of success will be progress toward higher levels of proficiency on the School Leader Rubric. For example, we expect a participant who starts the year at Level 2 on the “supporting highly effective instruction” component of the Rubric, and who works on this component through the mentoring process, to advance to Level 3 or 4. We also expect mentors to improve on Rubric components as they reflect on their own practice. For example, a mentor who instructs participants on improving selection and retention of effective teachers will be prompted to reflect on his or her own strategies and use that reflective process to make positive changes in his or her school.

Furthermore, we expect mentors to learn leadership development skills through the mentoring process. As principals learn how to be effective mentors (both through the formal training and through daily application of those skills), we expect them to become better at mentoring their teachers and assistant principals and more adept at cultivating talent under their own roofs.