Zak Cohen, a highly experienced school leader with a strong belief in “leading by example,” shares his process for collecting feedback from teachers regarding his leadership competency and supportiveness. He turns that feedback into a hypothesis for improvement and requests feedback on his hypothesis. In this process Zak models the curiosity and vulnerability that teachers need as they look to grow from student feedback.
Read Zak’s article, “Leading By Example as a School Leader” here.
Find Zak on Twitter & LinkedIn.
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Podcast Transcript:
[00:00:00.000] – Steve [Intro]
Welcome to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast. As instructional coaches and school leaders, you are tasked with guiding continuous teacher growth to create student success. This podcast looks to support you with strategies from experienced guests, as well as my own insights that I’ve gathered over the years. I’m thrilled to have you with us. Thanks for tuning in.
[00:00:29.670] – Steve
Leaders Others Modeling the Use of Feedback. Joining our podcast today is Zak Cohen. I invited him to the podcast when I read his article that appeared in Edutopia titled, “Leading by Example as a School Administrator.” Zak is an educator, school leader, consultant, and author specializing in personalized learning, student engagement, middle school culture, and mistake literacy. Zak has extensive teaching and administrative experience in independent and international schools across North America, Asia, Africa, and now India, where he has recently taken on the role of Director of K12 Strategy and Alignment at the American International School, Chennai. Zak holds a doctorate in Educational Leadership and Innovation from Drexel University, and his work has been published and featured outlets such as Edutopia, The American Educational Research Association, The Guardian, Business Insider, The Chronicle, Educational Leadership, and Independent School Magazine.
[00:01:44.150] – Steve
He is currently writing his first book with ASCD, set to be released in the fall of 2025. Welcome, Zak.
[00:01:53.950] – Zak
Thank you for the warm welcome, Steve. I’m excited to be here and looking forward discussion about the power, the practice, the purpose of exhibiting vulnerability as a school leader. But Steve, honestly, most of all, I’m just glad to know that somebody read and connected with the article. You write these things and you publish these things, and you send these things out into the ether and you really don’t know whether or not your experience resonates with anyone until you hear from somebody like yourself. So thanks for reaching out.
[00:02:29.750] – Steve
Sure. Trust me, you’re talking to a guy who puts that blog out every Sunday for 12 years now and I’m so delighted when I’m at a conference or something and somebody comes up and mentions it. I know exactly where you’re coming from. In your article, you describe the design of an assessment tool that you use to gain feedback on your leadership. It followed the school’s use of the Wellington Engagement Index with staff. So first tell us about the Wellington Index and how your school implemented its use.
[00:03:05.810] – Zak
Sure. I think first, I think where we want to start is that teaching is a uniquely and singularly complex profession. I think that’s illustrated by Danielson’s research, which, amongst other things, found that teachers make more than 6,000 non-trivial decisions every single day, and that the only profession that even comparable to that degree of complexity is that of a neurosurgeon. So when we’re talking about teaching, one thing that we always have to remember and keep in the back of our minds, is it undercurrent for any of these conversations is that there really is no perfect way to teach. There is no perfect pedagogy. There is no panacea. Every student is different. Every teacher is different. And so the idea here, when we talk about things like feedback, for example, when we talk about leading with vulnerability, we’re not talking about trying to get every teacher to do the same thing in compliance or uniformity. Rather, we’re trying to focus on progress over this false notion of perfection. When we think about that, there are so many valid data points in a classroom for us to be able to wrap our arms around and make determinations about what is working or what is not working.
[00:04:26.440] – Zak
We have things like self-reflection, peer observations, admin pop-ins, and then we also have student-teacher feedback. And the Wellington Engagement Index focuses strictly on student-teacher feedback. Now, when it comes to student-teacher feedback, the typical model is at the end of the year, you have students complete a questionnaire. And then over the summer or perhaps as part of an end-of-year evaluation, teachers will then review what students have said. But the thing is, Steve, I’m a big believer that we don’t teach a curriculum, we teach kids. We don’t teach subjects, we teach students. And thus, the half life of a student teacher evaluation, if it’s completed at the end of the year, the half life is almost nonexistent because they’re already done, right? Like post hoc information, whereas really what you want is information for the kids in front of you. And that’s where the Wellington Engagement Index comes in. For the WEI, you are administering it six to eight times a year, it’s longitudinal. The way that I like to think of it is it converts student-teacher feedback into a flipbook rather as a final analysis. Now, the way it works is that students, six to eight times a year, are presented with this digital grid on the right side of a screen, and to the left side of the screen, a list of all of their classes.
[00:05:54.300] – Zak
Students simply click on a class, and then they place a dot along this grid. Now, this grid is all about distilling student-teacher feedback into one single variable and one single idea, which is the most powerful of all, which is student engagement. The Wellington Engagement Index decided that student engagement can really be considered into two different variables, those being “love it” and “challenge.” I think about this in terms of the spectrums of unchallenged to challenge, hate it to love it. If you love something and you feel challenged by it, that’s your zone of proximal development, that zone of proximal discomfort. You are being stretched in your learning and you want to show up for class and you want to learn. I think a lot about my high school poetry seminars as being an example of when I felt like I loved something and where I felt especially challenged by it. Then when I think about something where I was unchallenged, or I should say, where I was challenged it, but I really did not love it, that’s something where I think like seventh-grade Latin class for me. That’s a place that I showed up every day and it was really hard and I hated it.
[00:07:12.230] – Zak
So that’s where the WEI is really effective as well, because the quadrants along this grid, love it and challenge, that’s considered engaged. Challenged but hate it is considered grind, like that seventh-grade latin class. Unchallenged and hate it is considered bored, and then love it and unchallenged is considered entertained. We began to adopt the WEI during COVID because we were wandering without signposts, and we needed to make real-time adjustments. We, as an admin team, were making decisions and determinations about what learning should look like. Teachers were then operationalizing some of those decisions in their classrooms and tweaking and changing and iterating those things. But at the end of the day, we really didn’t know exactly what we were doing. We were groping in the dark. And so we needed to be able to solicit student feedback to know what was and was not working for them. And so in adopting the Wellington Engagement Index, we were able to get started on that. But that’s where my story really begins. The fact is that a two-dimensional dot against a grid doesn’t really mean anything without a narrative associated with it, and the dots don’t provide one on their own.
[00:08:31.920] – Zak
I was asking my teachers to get really curious, to be really vulnerable, to begin to formulate and conjure hypotheses around why their dots maybe were bunched in the engage quadrant. How could they maybe formulate an asset-based hypothesis around that, something to maybe continue to do? But the fact is that those hypotheses actually needed to be met with student feedback. But of course, teaching is a very vulnerable art. It’s not a science. It is a craft. It’s something that I often associate as being somewhat synonymous in terms of the vulnerability with writing. It feels like when you are trying to solicit feedback about your teaching, that you are ultimately soliciting feedback about yourself. And it is a really hard thing to separate.
[00:09:24.100] – Steve
Putting yourself out there.
[00:09:25.630] – Zak
You really are. And so I was asking teachers who are who are dedicated, who are hardened to do exactly that. But I also recognize that our teachers were in the arena without me. As Teddy Roosevelt would say, I was not there with them. And I needed to start to model the model. And this led me to work in tandem with the WEI and with my faculty to begin to develop a grid for administrators so that I could begin to model that that vulnerability and that solicitation of feedback to be able to create that narrative around the dots and to lend them greater meaning.
[00:10:08.640] – Steve
What did it look like for the staff to give you that feedback?
[00:10:14.590] – Zak
I wanted to make sure that the staff felt ownership over that and that they ultimately made the determinations around what makes for a strong administrator. We had students providing faculty with feedback around engagement. What we decided from the faculty was the faculty wanted to make determinations around the variables about what made a strong administrator. The faculty ultimately landed on two variables, one being supportive and the other being competent. These were the ideas. We created some definitional anchors for each. Just a small sampling of some of those for competency. The faculty described a competent leader as having strong communication skills, a lead learner, that they have a vision, and that they have the skill set to actually realize that vision. In terms of supportive, it was things like, treats me like a professional, supports me when conflicts arise with parents, feel comfortable going to my administrator with concerns. As we began to articulate these and flesh these out, we also thought about the fact that for the WEI, for the Wellington Engagement Index, that they had created these shorthands, these shortcuts, these labels for each of the quadrants, engage, board, grind, entertain. We thought that we wanted to do the same thing for the faculty.
[00:11:42.230] – Zak
We thought about who are leaders in popular culture, and we began to assign different ones to different quadrants. For that uppermost supportive and competent, we decided that that would be the Ted Lasso quadrant. Then we moved over and we thought, okay, well, what is going to be supportive but incompetent? For that, we decided that was Michael Scott. Then we decided for who is competent but unsupportive, and we decided that was Mr. Burns from the Simpsons. Then for unsupportive and incompetent, we decided that was going to be Principal Rooney from Farris Buhler’s day off. And so from there, that became our grid, and that became the admin grid and the Wellington Engagement Index. Again, we worked in tandem with them, and they created that on their end.
[00:12:35.710] – Steve
So I guess there’s an environment that’s necessary for you to get more information, then, again, then it’s just the dot on the grid. It’s your ability to explore it with staff, explore their responses with you.
[00:12:51.130] – Zak
Yeah. I think that’s a great question, Steve. So we now had, every 6-8 weeks, we now had students doing the dots as it’s colloquially known. So they’re doing the dots for the faculty. And as the students are doing the dots during advisory, and the faculty is sitting there overseeing this, the faculty is then opening their computers and they’re doing the dots for me. So at the same time that faculty is getting the feedback, they also are giving feedback. But as you said, collecting feedback is really only the first step. Everyone in the building is now receiving feedback. But I think as we spoke about earlier, numbers, dots, they really only begin to matter when we connect them to a story. I liken that to the back of a baseball card. Steve, I’m a big baseball fan. And if I said to you just a random set of nine digits, I said, 3, 6, 2, 6, 0, 9, 8, 1, 2, you might say to yourself, Zak, how do you know those nine digits? And the answer is pretty simple. That’s Barry Bonds’ bad and average percentage and slug and percentage from that legendary 2004 season.
[00:14:08.320] – Zak
We can remember strings of numbers so long as there is a meaning or story connected to it. So for me, It was a lot about how can I model for the faculty creating that story. And so what I started to do was I would collect the data from the dots, I would review my grid, and then in an unmediated in an unedited way, I would email the grid, just a screenshot of the grid, to my faculty. And in that email, I would also write down some of the hypotheses and some of my thinking around why my dots maybe fell or why they climbed or why they held steady. Then based on that hypothesis, I would then also send an anonymous Google form to the faculty to ask them to give me the thumbs up or the thumbs down. A really simple binary – is my hypothesis on the right track? Yes or no? Because again, you want to create somewhat of a frictionless experience, and you don’t want to overburden the people who have already given you feedback. They’ve already done a lot of their job. So I simply did that. Just a very quick, here’s an email.
[00:15:19.240] – Zak
Now please give me some anonymous feedback around whether or not you think I’m on the right track. So then I was modeling a couple of things. I was modeling that raw transparency easy and vulnerability. Here are my unedited dots so you can see what every faculty member here thinks about my leadership. Second, it models for the faculty this reminder that we are not our dots. This is not a judgment of Zak. This is a judgment of Zak’s leadership in this particular snapshot of time. Then third, it models curiosity. We cannot have incurious educators for the reason that I shared with you earlier, that there is no right way to teach. We are constantly in pursuit of something that is just slightly better than what we did yesterday. If we are curious, we will ultimately arrive to that and be able potentially to even attain it. I wanted to model that curiosity around, here are ways that I am thinking I need to improve based on the movement of these dots. And you’ll tell me whether or not that’s right or that’s wrong. And then I get to go back to the drawing board myself.
[00:16:29.960] – Steve
The curiosity is the piece that’s really hitting me. It’s the ability to look at feedback and be curious enough to turn the feedback into a question. I’m going to try my thinking – it’s striking me that the feedback really doesn’t tell you what to do. Your curiosity with the feedback causes you come up with a hypothesis about an action to take. So then what you were looking for is feedback from the staff around your hypothesis, then that’s the same way that the teacher, in my head, needs to be looking at student engagement. Because actually, I did this activity last year and the kids were highly engaged. And I did it this year and they weren’t. So how do I turn that into a hypothesis?
[00:17:17.680] – Zak
I think that’s exactly right. I think that we talk a lot in education about goals. And I think that goals insinuate a measure of certainty about the direction that you need to go in, whereas curiosity or a hypothesis actually assumes curiosity, which I think is a little bit more fluid and a little bit more adaptive and a little bit more responsive. I think ultimately, that’s really who we want to be in education. When we ask students to do the dots, they’re fine to do it because it takes 90 seconds, it takes two minutes. It’s a really quick process. However, students do begrudge the fact that they are given feedback. It is not their favorite activity by any means. However, do you know what is their favorite activity, Steve? Talking to teachers about the dots. They absolutely love being impacted power to say, hey, sixth grade class, here are my dots. Here is my belief about why my dots migrated, let’s say, down this month from, let’s say, the engage quadrant to slightly below the engage quadrant And I now want you to tell me whether or not that’s correct.
[00:18:34.870] – Zak
And so we had teachers who set up several things. We had teachers who created anonymous Google forms because that’s what made the most sense in their classroom. We had teachers who created focus groups where they pulled students out of each grade level, brought pizza in one day, and had just a really earnest and honest private conversation with a group of about 8-10 students around a table about what is going on with the dots. We had other students or teachers who created Socratic seminars around it and Harkness discussions, where they would pose to the class their hypothesis, and then the class would sit in an oval and discuss their beliefs as to whether or not that hypothesis is or is not on the right track. This can become extraordinarily powerful once we begin to get past the dot collection and get into the dot meeting making.
[00:19:25.990] – Steve
So my interpretation of that is that it tells the student that you are very important to the teacher. Actually, it triggers an activity that I took part in a whole lot of years ago. My company was designing a tool for teachers to gather input about students learning style preferences. And in the very first attempt, our tool was not accurate at all. But the teachers were giving us rave reviews that they were getting from the kids. So just the fact that the teacher went to the kids and said, I want to find out about how you learn, even though the data the teacher got in the first cuts wasn’t that valuable, it had that impact on the kids. That’s being triggered by what you’ve just said.
[00:20:19.630] – Zak
And I think there’s always… Whenever we talk about student to teacher feedback, we know that there are going to be implicit, unavoidable bias agencies that are a part of this. I think it’s also understandable that anyone listening to this might be somewhat trepidacious in the face of just being very vulnerable and open and transparent with their students or in necessarily placing too much weight on student-teacher feedback. I think it’s really important to remember, it is only a single data point. At our school, we made it formative and non-evaluative. So while admin could see the dots, they were not a part of end-of-year faculty evaluations. It really was the faculty who owned their dots. But more than anything, when we solicit feedback from students, we are still the adults in the room, and we still get to make decisions and determinations about whether or not we feel as though students are on the right track. What I have discovered often with students… Well, let me start here. I had a first-year teacher, and this was a a much more robust, longer questionnaire that we had previously had. She was a math teacher. She was teaching geometry, algebra, the high-level math classes for the middle school.
[00:21:42.880] – Zak
Some of the feedback she got from kids was that they felt like it was too much homework. And so the teacher comes to me and goes, hey, so the kids are saying that it’s too much homework. So do I need to stop giving homework? I was like, No, that’s not.
[00:22:00.050] – Zak
The key is not for you to just listen blindly to what they’re saying. It’s to now formulate a response to what they are saying. It’s about pulling back the curtains and explaining the purpose, the point, the why behind your assignment homework. If you have kids who are saying that you’re assigning too much, perhaps you have not stopped and taken the time to actually explain to them why you are assigning them algebra homework in the first place. That’s where you need to begin. When we solicit feedback with the dots, when we then solicit it further qualitative feedback from students, the idea is not that we are just going to listen and do anything that they say. They are ultimately not direct in and steering the ship. It’s more that we get to hear them, we get to internalize it, we get to process it, and we then also share back with students, hey, I heard you say this. I’m going to really take this under consideration. I’m going to take this under consideration, but I also need you to understand why we’re not going to go outside every class. There are those things that we also need to balance and just provide that further explanation for.
[00:23:06.070] – Steve
So I’m wondering if you could take everything you just shared with me now and move it to the teachers giving leadership feedback and how leaders look at that feedback and have a similar set of questions or understandings to not put too much into the feedback? Is my question fair?
[00:23:30.930] – Zak
Yeah. I think one of the things that I tried to do, I think most of all, especially when we’re talking about adult to adult feedback, especially on such a frequent, regular, recurring basis, is I wanted to make sure that the faculty, more than anything, knew that their data was not being dismissed, but that it was being seriously considered and contemplated and cogitated on. And so for that to happen, I would really think about what what they were saying. Then within the next few weeks, I would try to make sure that in my weekly note or during one of our faculty meetings, I would just add a quick little qualifier to something that I was saying or something that I was right in, which was, as based on your WEI feedback, and then share the next piece. And that way they saw that these micro-tweaks, these small changes, these tiny iterations, were all things that were being done and were the byproduct of all their feedback. So what I found, at least from the adult to adult side, was that it wasn’t about telling people what I wasn’t going to listen to or what I wasn’t going to do.
[00:24:39.880] – Zak
It was a lot more about telling them how I was interpreting and actually applying what it was that they were sharing so they could see it in practice.
[00:24:49.490] – Steve
So, Zak, a good number of the listeners to this podcast have roles in middle-level teacher leadership and in being instructional coaches. And I’m wondering if you got some thoughts or guidelines to share for people in that position about getting feedback from staff for their leadership.
[00:25:13.490] – Zak
Yeah, I think there’s probably two things that I think of. I think the first is, there’s the old adage in education, do as I say, not as I do. Do the opposite of that. You have to follow your own lead. You have to do what you ask others to do, and you have to be a willing victim to your own device. You have to be willing to be in the arena alongside anyone that you are given feedback to. And then the second piece is an act of soliciting and gathering feedback requires vulnerability. And I would make the argument that the more radical, the more transparent, the more unedited that feedback is, the greater its relationship is going be to garner in further trust with your direct reports. The more that you gather feedback and then try to edit it or try to make yourself look good or only give them a slice of it, that’s only going to have the opposite effect of what’s intended.
[00:26:16.240] – Steve
So there’s an openness to the vulnerability. You got to put it all out there.
[00:26:23.580] – Zak
Yeah. And I think that there were times, for example, where I would have all of my dots just clumped in a high section of the Ted Lasso quadrant. And then I would have a one outlier dot that would be in the Michael Scott or the Rooney or the Burns. And a lot of my feedback was… My writing that month was never about the clump in the Lasso. It was always about recognizing the outlier. And I would always start by saying, the outlier is often going to be a bellwether for maybe things to come. It could be the canary in the coal mine. It this is something I really want to hop on, focus on, and think about. And so this is where I want to focus my attention this week in this musing, in this writing, rather than the clump in the lasso. So that’s what I was looking for. And so, again, that takes a measure of willingness to put yourself out there and be open. But what I would argue is that the more open you are, the greater the relationship is to people feeling like you actually are a relatively strong leader because you have that thick skin and that ability to be able to distinguish between what is professional and constructive help versus personal criticism.
[00:27:37.160] – Steve
Well, Zak, you started our conversation talking about the complexity of teaching and the degree to which it’s an art. And I’m wondering the connections you’d make to looking at school leadership through a similar lens of complexity in art.
[00:27:57.790] – Zak
Yeah. I think there is no doubt there have been many pieces written by people far more qualified than I to say exactly that, that leadership is an art, that we are ever growing, and that the very landscape itself is ever changing. But I think more than anything, what I would circle back to is that as an educational leader, the most important thing to remember is exactly where I started, which is that our jobs are not nearly as challenging as that of a classroom teacher. And when we’re able to bear that in mind and we’re able to operate with that in the front of our minds, that’s, I think, when we make our best decisions. And I think that’s ultimately when our leadership thrives and we remember that we are acting in service to those who are doing so much for so many students.
[00:28:50.250] – Steve
Powerful. Zak, what’s a good way for our listeners to be able to follow up with you with questions that they might have to have or also to hear about the book that you’re working on?
[00:29:04.720] – Zak
Yeah. So on Twitter, I can be found @cohen_zak, and on my website at zakcoheneducation – either of those two places.
[00:29:20.630] – Steve
Alright. We’ll stick both of those into the podcast lead-in, make it easy for folks to find you. I want to say I just I really enjoyed the conversation with you. I enjoyed reading your piece and then being able to follow up and connect with you. I know from our earlier conversations that you looked at the idea of teachers and students partnering in student engagement. And I’d love to look at scheduling a future podcast where you come back and explore that more directly with with a teacher audience of mine.
[00:30:02.400] – Zak
Yeah. I’d love to leave your listeners hanging, give them a little cliffhanger. And so something that I wrote to maybe preview that next episode is we were talking a lot about engagement right now, but this is something that I wrote to faculty several months ago, which is when it comes to student engagement, it’s important to remember that the research tells us that there’s little we can do to engage students. Rather, our goal should be to create the conditions where students can take ownership for monitoring and evaluate in their own engagement and identify resources and strategies that will enable them to be more engaged the next class. And for our next podcast, Steve, that’s exactly where we’ll get things up.
[00:30:42.600] – Steve
That’ll be our lead-in. I look forward to it.
[00:30:45.820] – Zak
I look forward to it as well. Thanks so much.
[00:30:47.840] – Steve
Thanks a lot.
[00:30:47.840] – Steve
Take care.
[00:30:48.073] – Zak
Bye.
[00:30:48.460] – Steve [Outro]
Thanks for listening, folks. I’d love to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn at Steve Barkley, or send me your questions and find my and blogs at barkleypd.com.
