Lead Like a Teacher with Miriam Plotinsky

0:00 So teachers want leaders who support them and value them and empower them. And leaders set out to value and support and empower their teachers. So why can't that always happen? In this episode, I'm talking to Miriam Platynsky, author of Lead Like a Teacher, Stick Around. Welcome to the Leader of Learning podcast. I'm your host, doctor Dan Crinis, and this is where I help educators grow their impact as instructional leaders because my research and leadership experiences have led me to understand that someone like you, regardless of your role or your title, can have a tremendous impact on your organization. I chat with inspiring guests who are truly making an impact as instructional leaders. Whether this is your first time listening or you come back for more, I hope you've subscribed to this show on your preferred podcast apps so you don't miss any of the great episodes, topics, or guests. Anyway, I'm so glad you've tuned in.

1:00 Now let's get started, all right, Leader of Learning, Welcome to episode one sixty. If you're just joining us here for the first time, thank you so much. If you're coming back for more, well thank you too. I really appreciate everyone listening, and I know that you're gonna love this episode. I'll get to it in just a minute before I do just some housekeeping first and foremost. We're getting close to the end of the school year, and I think my listeners in the western and southern parts of the country are really wrapping up their school year right around now. If you're listening to this in the end of May, I have a few more weeks here where I am. We end up in the middle of June, but I just want to wish everyone a very successful and healthy and hopefully happy end of their school year. It's been kind of a wild ride this year, but we made it and we're just about there. We see the light at the end of the tunnelso congratulations for that. If you're one of my educator friends that are listening right now, I also just want to remind you, and I know I said this in the last episode, but again, if you're just joining us, I, in addition to this podcast, do like to create a lot of other content, whether it's YouTube videos or I've been trying to be better at blogging lately. But everything that we do here, including

2:32 some products and services that are for sale, let's say, like some publications and online courses and even some coaching services that I'm starting to offer. You can find all that information in my newsletter. So I would encourage you and invite you to please go ahead and sign up for my newsletter. I don't send it all the time, but I promise you I won't spam you or anything like that, and be valuable content that will come to you about every week or so. To sign up, head to Leader of Learning dot com slash subscribe or Leader of Learning dot com slash news. As always, those links are in the show notes, So on any podcast app that you're listening on right now, just head over to the show notes and click the link to join my email newsletter. Now onto this episode. When Miriam Platynsky reached out to me for an interview opportunity, I definitely said yes pretty quickly because her book is called Lead Like a Teacher, and I feel like that speaks to me and my mission here at Leader of Learning very much, and I was really excited to talk to her, and I loved her sharing some of her ideas about how leaders school leaders can really bring their staffs and their organizations together and truly value and empower the voices of all stakeholders, but especially those

4:02 teachers and staff members who have a lot to offer and bring a lot to the table. I can't wait for you to listen. Coming up after these messages is my interview with Miriam Platynsky. All right, welcome back, Leader of Learning. I'm excited to bring on Miriam Platynsky, who is an instructional specialist with Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland, where she has taught and led for more than twenty years. She is a National Board Certified teacher and certified administrator, and the author of a few different books. Here we have writing their future selves, Teach More, Hoverless, and one that I think is most recent and one that I'm looking forward to talking to her about lead like a teacher. So Miriam, welcome to the show. And if there's anything that you can offer the listeners in the way of more about who you are and where you are and what you do, please go for it. Hi, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Yeah, so everything you said it's correct. I have I've been working in many different sort of job roles and positions and lenses in a school dress in a school district for a while. And the thing about where where I sit is that I sit from sort of in a strange middle ground between teaching and leading. So I've been in classrooms, I've been on administration teams, and where I wound up is in more of a coaching role where I work with leaders and teachers to try to help them figure out anything from instructional ideas to professional development to school improvement within curriculum instruction. So it's wearing a lot of hats on a different basis.

5:34 And then what I call my side hustle as the writing thing with the books and the articles. That's great. I mean, I've definitely been in that middle level and not quite admin, but in leadership roles for a while myself. I've I've dabbled in administration, but at this point I'm a coach as well, and I don't know that I do too much coaching of administrators, but I know certainly how you feel about how important it is, and I do. I like the title and I like the concept of this book, so lead like a teacher, and I was kind of reading up on it a little bit before we started recording here a few minutes ago, and it says in the description here, it says, far too often teachers and administrators are adversaries within a school or a district and display a mutual distrust and disrespect for others perspectives. And I guess that's kind of where I wanted to start, is if you could, of course talk about the book, but let's start with that distrust that happens between teachers and administrators. You know, my audience is filled with both teachers and administrators. But I do like and it's it's right above me here if you're watching on video, you know I do like saying that I enjoy helping educators grow their impact as instructional leaders.

6:56 And so's it'll be an interesting discussion here because of the way my audience is split between teachers and administrators. But what would you say about that distrust? So what I call it, and I started using this phrase when I was writing this book, I call it the empathy gap. And essentially, we're all in schools doing jobs that look like one thing on the surface, but are really something else. So if I'm a teacher looking an administrator, I assume they're doing a bunch of things, or maybe not doing a bunch of things. The administrator might be making the same assumptions about teachers. The issue is that in this is you know, this is the way I see it. The longer a time and administrators out of the classroom, the less they really have that same empathy for what it's like to be a classroom teacher. Especially, things have really been escalating and changing a lot more quickly in the past three to five years for teachers. And the person who wrote one of the four words this book, Damon Montelione, he taught a class when he was a principal. He did this in twenty nineteen high school principle and one thing he writes about is how he walked into a classroom everything was different, and not just the technology, but the way the kids were interacting. And now pandemic that's really what we're calling it. I don't know if for a post pandemic or not, but you know, kids are different, and we keep talking about that and how we access learning and how we access the engagement.

8:11 So that's the teaching side of it, and then on the leading side of it, people also have misconceptions. I remember one of the most hurtful things that someone once said to me was when I went into more of a leadership role. They said, we've lost you to an office. And I remember thinking, that's not what I'm doing at all, Like I'm that's not my job and that's not how I work. But that's the perception. So we have this thing where we wind up being set up in a very adversarial way when there's really just a lack of understanding and empathy about what the other person might be doing. In more functional school spaces, that doesn't happen as much, but a lot of the time it becomes a default. Like I said, I have dabbled in a couple of administrative roles. Neither of them lasted very long. And you know, I've shared the story with the listeners of You Know my Audi in the podcast before, but I'll tell you so much of that personally for me was because I really enjoy being that instructional leader that unfortunately I don't think school based, you know, school level administrators really get to do at this point as often as they would like. And it's interesting, I don't know about you. Well, I read your bio.

9:24 It says you've been teaching twenty plus years. I'm in year seventeen right now. And I really think that around the time that I started teaching was when people started hoping anyway or looking to school leaders to be more instructional leaders. I don't know about you. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I feel like we're starting to go in the other direction again, where at least in my experience, and this is very quickly, you know, not quickly, but when we were as we were returning to school I won't say coming out of the pen demic like you were saying, but returning to schools full time in person, there was a lot of behaviors that we needed to deal with. So in my experience as a school administrator in that era, it was very difficult to get into classrooms to be an instructional leader, to really be present and visible. I don't want to say I was holding up in my office. It was actually the opposite. I felt like I was running around the school like crazy all day long. All of this to say, how what are you seeing? And if you're seeing the same thing where school administrators are having a hard time carrying that torch of being an instructional leader, is that part of what you're suggesting when you say, lead like a teacher. So, first of all, guests with the behaviors, we don't really know why yet. I feel like we're assigning a lot of

10:54 faulty causation or correlation. We're trying to figure out why kids are acting out so much more than they used to, and we all theories about why that might be, but we don't know for sure, and we probably won't know for another twenty years or so. We've gathered more data and when we had more perspective with what's happened for administrators, you know, and this is this is really, as you say, what teachers misunderstand. Administrators want to go into classrooms, they want to observe instruction, they want to help with instruction. This is what you know ideally what to do either day. That's it's it's the most empowering and the most enriching thing and the most rewarding. The problem is you're so busy playing triage and putting out fire after fire. You might have an observation schedule and then a fight breaks out in the hallway and you're done. So what I propose in this book is to figure out ways to create different systems around some of the structures that get taken away when administrators are overburdened. So you know, you mentioned getting into classrooms. So with observation or with coaching, or with co teaching, how can the administrator move into a space and a teacher move out of it, or how can people in the building support each other. I talked to a really amazing principle a couple of years ago, and she takes every teacher in the building who's trying to become the ministry, who's learning to be a leader, and she uses them to do things because they're interning or they're also in a space where they want to learn and do more on the leadership side, while she goes into the classroom and teachers for two classes. So you just have to think a little bit more creatively about how people are being allocated and how their expertise is being elevated. And that's really what this book is about. Can you find

12:26 ways to use teachers more than you're using them, Because nine times out of ten, you walk into a conference room where leaders are talking about instruction and there aren't teachers there. That's a great point in one of the things that I was reading about the book, I'm going to see if I can find it again, was that you have nine key aspects of leadership that where you offer some creative solutions to some of these challenges. I don't know that we'll be able to get into all nine, but what does that mean? What are some of those solutions that we have up our sleeve? So what I did was I spent half of the book talking about what I call micro elements of leadership and the other half our macro. So if we think about the really age old analogy of forest for trees, generally speaking in again I'm generalizing, teachers are more details oriented because they are in classrooms where they are working on these very specific moves for specific kids all day long. And so that's the part of the school that they see. They see their classrooms, makes sense. Sometimes they see their teams, but that's usually where it stops.

13:30 For administrators or leaders, they're looking at a whole school picture. So it's more that they're looking at the whole forest, not just the trees. So that's the micro to the macro. So in the micro chapters, and you know, I'm looking at the headings right now hiring for success, So how do you get the team that you want. Instructional coaching, observing evaluations. Those are some of the things that are much more micro intensive and that teachers can have a much more active role. And then for leadership, how to prevent fires, collaborative communication, two way listening, leading by exam. So these are bigger ideas, bigger picture things. But again, how do you pull that perspective in even when you think that the focus is too broad, because it's not so. If you're thinking of an overall professional development initiative for your school and you're busy bringing in experts, or maybe you the leaders, are the experts giving the training, wouldn't it be possibly better to have teachers who work in whatever it is you're doing the pdon help to develop and deliver a lot of this training, and that way their colleagues will appreciate it more, it will be more inclusive of everybody's perspectives, those kinds of thoughts.

14:33 You know, I've thought that for a while that and I think it's I want to say it's Brian Aspinall, who I'm connected with through Codebreaker and follow him on social media. I think one of the things he says more famously than others is some of the best professional development happens by the teacher down the hall, and I agree with that, and throughout career I have tried to lead learning walks and get teachers out of the classroom to visit other teachers because I think it really it really lets you see what other people are doing, and it gives you kind of that broader perspective of you know, there are more things happening out there than just what's happening in your classroom. So I guess what I'm I was thinking about this the other day too, as I'm starting to I think, grow more as what they call an entrepreneur, I was thinking like if and I'm not really one, like a consultant to try and offer up my services to go speak and provide PD and other districts.

15:39 But I was thinking, like, it's got to be way cheaper, a lot less expensive for districts to have their own staff, their own teachers lead in ways that you know, they they things that they know about, tool technology, tools that they know, instructional methods that they do really well. And I think that's what you're getting at here, But like, how can we how can school leaders do that? You know, I think what you said was they don't necessarily think specific enough or small enough. They're kind of going broad and they think, oh, we got to bring in an expert. But it's like, how do we recognize and value and then use the talent that we have already on the staff. I think a lot of it does have to do with finding ways to get into classrooms so you know what people are doing, because if you don't know what teachers in your school are doing, you can't possibly proceed to the next step of having them become part of the leadership. But you know, I'll just give an example. Schools have asked me in the past to come in and do things like discourse walk throughs. Let's go through and see how much kids are talking to each other, how much language they're producing, And we go in for a day and we observe and fill out a sheet, and then you know, maybe the staff receives a follow up training base and what the findings were. All this is very familiar methodology, and to me, my thing is, let's let's go into classrooms for gathering data to see who's doing really effective student to student discourse and who is elevating conversation and questioning and critical thinking in their classrooms.

17:10 And then let's have the teachers who are doing that work with the rest of the staff to develop ideas. Because if you walk through a building and most people are sitting there quietly, but you have people who are finding ways to make it work, they should be sharing their strategies at that point. As an instructional coach or a specialist or whatever it is that I do, I can't have as much power in presenting strategies as someone who's been doing it. You can go in and you can fill them doing it. They can say, hey, I did this yesterday and it was great. That has so much more power than I did this however many years ago when it was great or in theory, this is supposed to work. And I'm not saying that it's always like that with leaders. Some leaders are really good, and I think a lot of them do this at modeling what it is they want staff to do. So if you're having a training on a specific topic, if you're training on station rotations, maybe the meeting is set up as stating verstation rotations, and that's fantastic. I think just a lot of the time we have a standard deliver model that isn't really inspiring anybody. I hear that a lot, like, you know, a lot of teachers out there say, hey, my admin, especially in teacher evaluations, want us to be engaging and you know student center. But yet we go to these faculty meetings and professional development sessions and we're just it's just all lecture and you know, PowerPoint slides. This podcast is a proud member of the Teach Better podcast Network, Better Today, Better Tomorrow, and the podcast to get you there. Explore more podcasts at www dot Teach Better podcast network dot com. Now let's get back to the episode. One of the things that I really do enjoy doing,

18:41 and again it kind of goes back to my why of helping educators grow as instructional leaders is aiding. I guess in that transition from teacher to school leader, and I guess school leader can mean many different things, like I think you and I are school leaders, but we are not administered traders were coaches of sorts. But so I do I guess when I ask you this question, I do really mean administrators, people who actually are aspiring to be school administrators right as they come out of the classroom. What do you think is most important for them to remember? Because I think in a lot of ways, it would be very easy for someone to think that your book is written for people who have been an administrator for a while. Like you said, you know, the longer they're in it, the further the more distanced they are from being in the classroom. What about someone who's like pretty fresh out of the classroom. It's the big, biggest to remember that we're all there for the same reason, which is to have a positive impact on student growth. Everyone the building should want that, and we're all trying to achieve it from different vantage points and with different areas, not different levels, different areas of expertise. So nobody in that building is more important than anybody else.

19:51 And I think I would I would definitely remind newer leaders of that because sometimes you get really excited to relave beast, like, oh look at me, now here I am, and you forget very quickly that people are watching you, somewhat warily to see what you're going to do and to see what you can fix and how you're going to serve. And you know, leadership is a service position. It's it's how can we provision help support partner with teachers to make sure that students are getting what they need. And that's again toward that student achievements. So you just keep your focus on what's best for the kids and really be transparent about that, then you're going to be okay. It's when we start using phrases like oh, I've taught so I know or you know. You're trying to display that you have something and really it's a lot of talking and not a lot of listening. So instead of explaining yourself to people or explaining who you are or what your position is, just listen to them more. That's probably a good place to start. Can you expand on that a little bit? When you say listen to them more?

20:52 How do school leaders do that? Because I think, again, you know, when you're putting out fires all day and maybe you're not getting into classrooms as much, they might wonder when can I or how can I really listen more and hear from teachers more. So I've put a lot of ideas and strategies, some of which I glean from the wisdom of others, into the book, and one really simple thing to do. Maybe it's not so simple, but it is just in terms of its execution, is instead of working in an office, to move your workstation into a teacher team room or a department room some space like that where you're sitting among teachers, and to do it often enough that people aren't like, oh, here there comes the principle.

21:34 If it becomes a normal thing, you can normalize being among teachers or standing in the hallway more having more casual conversations but very scheduled and intentional conversations in your mind with people about what are you doing today? Oh, I'd really like to see that. So just the visibility really helps too with creating that. I think a lot of the time there's just no access. I mean, some principles offices, it's like you're trying to get into see the president, you're making up ointments, and you're you know, going through assistance and so forth, and you can't really have that access. So if you open that up, it makes a huge difference. And if you're willing to listen to people as well. I think also from elementary to secondary, secondary schools are so much bigger that administrators become less accessible. So again figuring out how to put yourself back in there and then you'll hear things, and people will get more comfortable the more they see you expressing themselves. And the other thing is, you know, and this is again oversimplifying something that goes on much longer in the book, but we tend to surround ourselves with people who agree with us. And we do that because we do a lot of talking and not a whole lot of So when someone expresses something that a leader doesn't like, very often, it becomes an unsafe thing to do. So not saying a whole lot is talking less, and it's the same. It's the same strategy I recommend for teaching talk less. I like that a lot.

22:51 One of the things that I was thinking, especially earlier in our conversation when you were talking about sort of those negative leadership traits. And I may or may not be asking for a friend when I ask you this, do you have I'm sure you do. Do you have thoughts around leaders micromanaging too much? I mean, it's you know, listening more and talking less is great, but what about the ones who seem to just want to kind of have their hand and everything and leave very little room for teachers to kind of step up in that leadership way or kind. It's so funny that you say that, because I've I've had By the way, can you still hear me?

23:34 Yeah, just cut out for a second. Okay, Um, we have leaders who too that I've always wondered if it comes to a place of sort of deep more deeper, deeper seated insecurity, like if I don't, if I don't manage and control every aspect of what's happening in this school or with this teacher, then it's all going to fall apart. So very much like we would say, if we want a student centered or learning center environment our classrooms, we also want that have more autonomy within the school. And the way to do that is to really, you know, what's the priority. What are we trying to achieve? Set goals, set outcomes that everyone agrees on and that are clear, and then see if they can meet them, show them how to meet them, and then step back and if people are not doing what they said they could do or would do when some time has gone by, I understand stepping in, but the content micromanagement drives almost everybody out of the job because all it conveys really is a lack of trust.

24:27 Yeah, that's a great point. No, I was just I was just saying, back to your point on trust, I really do think that that is everything basically, or at least it's the foundational I've talked about this, I have a whole online course about it. It's the foundation right of school culture. I guess I would say, because to your point in leadership, without it, you might have those those settings where there's a lot of micro management, you might have those settings where there's that and you know we set it before in the description of your book, there's that distrust, that that kind of tainted relationship between teacher and administrator that is frankly, for lack of better term, kind of poisonous to the school. I guess as we start to wrap up here, UM, we've talked a little bit about having administrators and leaders be more visible, UM, try to be better at at listening and speaking less and try to involve teachers more. Is there anything else that, let me ask it this way, Let's say there is already kind of a culture of that distrust, and are there are there band aids or are there like bandages that we could put on, Like, what are some ways that maybe can help turnaround situations where it's already really strained, like strained relationships.

25:55 Yeah, So usually I go behind, you know, start with the technical fix, which is the band, and then do the adaptive change. But in a case like this, I feel like you kind of need to start with adaptive change because anything that surface levels teachers are going to see and not be okay with. So to that end, I'm a big believer in what I call feedback on feedback, which is you ask people for their thoughts, you genuinely want to know, it's not a rid game, and then you respond within days and let them know what the result of their feedback was. So you said you wanted this more so we had a staff meeting and you said we needed more time to have training on this platform. So next month, as a result, we're going to have someone come in or we're not. But here's why. So either you know, you communicate that an email, you can communicate that verbal, You follow up with the people who you need to follow up with, and you close what I call the feedback hole. You actually create a system that works and transparently is addressing what people need. Because if you're not doing that, and we collect so many surveys in education, like endless, endless Google forms, and they can be a wonderful tool, but they're not a great tool if they wind up in somebody's drive somewhere and never get looked at again. And I feel like that's what usually happens. So one thing you can do really quickly is start getting honest feedback for things you can change, not things are trying to pretend you can't but can't, and then go from there and work with people's That's just one strategy. I really like, that's great before we do, and I wanted

27:26 to make sure that my listeners know how to find your publications and find you and reach out to you if necessary. I think this is a great conversation, and I really do you know. This is kind of again like because I think the positions that you and I are in and have been throughout our careers. But I really do think the concept of leading like a teacher is really important. That's why I was excited to talk to you tonight. I'm excited to read the book. I haven't yet, but I'm I'm thinking I'm going to go out and get a copy. So where can my listeners get their copies and where can they find you? So the books are available everywhere books are sold, so you know Amazon Prime is fantastic. But there's also my publisher's page. I'm published with ww Nortin, so my books aren't there.

28:07 I have two out which I teach more horver lesson this one, Lead like a Teacher and then Writing their Future Selves is coming out on the fall, and anyone can find me in two places. My website is my first and last name dot com, so that's Miriam Plotynski dot com. And the only social I'm really good at is by good I mean I check it is Twitter, which is at mirplo mcps, so that's a good one too. So through my contact page on the website or through Twitter, I will get back to you, I promise. I'm very good about that. Excellent And for the listeners out there, you can always check the show notes for each of my episodes two where I will have links to the books and especially Lead Like a Teacher, so that'll be a Leader of Learning dot com slash episode one sixty Leader of Learning dot Com Slash episode one sixty will be information about this episode Miriam and the book books. Mariam, thank you so much for your time and really appreciate connecting like this and keep up the great work.

29:04 Like I said, I really dig this topic of lead like a teacher, so thanks, thank you. I appreciate a chance to talk about it more. Well that's it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you haven't done so yet, don't forget to subscribe to this show on your favorite podcast app. If you enjoy the content covered on this show, I want to ask you to do this one thing for me. Please share it. The biggest favor you could ever do for me is to please let others know about what I'm doing and how I'm helping educators grow their impact as instructional leaders. I hope you can share this podcast with other educators, leaders, friends, or anyone you think would love listening and learning. If you're interested in leaving a positive rating and review of this show, links to do so or always in the show notes for every episode. For more information about me or this show, and to access the great content that I share, please visit my website at Leader of Learning dot com. That's where you can find my online courses, YouTube channel, blog, how to connect with me on social media, and even ways that you can support the show. Like donating or purchasing Leader of Learning merchandise. Thanks again, and remember no matter who you are or where you are, you are a leader of learning.