School leaders are relied on as chief problem solvers.  Their willingness and capacity to take on this challenging role is essential to school success.  Traditional leadership training, however, often falls short in providing the requisite skills to support leaders in maximizing their potential impact on school growth, and particularly on the development of teaching capacity:

As I work with schools across the country, I notice three areas of need as they return to school face-to-face instruction after the pandemic. There is a need to RESTORE - Restore relationships, restore community and restore instruction. Many have not taken the time to address these areas and find themselves asking “Is it June yet?” It is important for schools to realize that they cannot return to “school as normal”; they must do things differently. They must take the best of the lessons learned from the wake of Covid 19 and embed them in the “new way” of doing things differently.

As US education gains momentum towards getting young people back into classrooms in-person, we note that districts at least, are really prioritizing learning recovery (for lack of a better term) right now. Although it’s encouraging to see things heading in the right direction, there's still a lot of unknowns.

Schools are adapting quickly to embrace new approaches to observation cycles that improve their effectiveness, whilst also aligning with their current remote or hybrid delivery.