Take Care of Your Teachers, Especially the Best Ones!
June 15, 2026
From Ingredients to Impact: The Recipe for Great Leadership
June 15, 2026
Rabbi Dr. Hillel Broder
At our school, over the last two years, we have administered the Faculty Survey by ISM (Independent School Management) to all four of our divisions—preschool, lower school, middle school, and upper school. ISM surveys both student and faculty culture through the lenses of predictability and support. ISM’s own framing of the survey states as much: “ISM believes that the primary responsibility of an academic administrator is to support faculty. Just as students require predictability and support from their teachers, faculty need these same reinforcements from their administrators to achieve maximum performance.”
The opening questions in the Faculty Culture section of the survey mirror this rubric: do teachers understand how they are evaluated; are evaluation procedures consistent, supportive, and helpful; are expectations for performance clear; and does the administrator support faculty in meeting expectations? These questions speak directly to the role of the school administrator: to support and coach, to serve as an instructional leader, and to couple any evaluative metric with a supportive understanding, championing growth and success, and leading by also teaching teachers how to teach.
Of course, the best practice for all schools is to evaluate teachers on metrics shared in advance, and those metrics should represent the best of teaching and learning practices and methods. Even more, those metrics should be used to support the growth of teaching practice. The question then becomes: what systems work for instructional leaders in schools that are not beholden to any particular evaluation model or metric of teacher performance?
I’ve been a new teacher, mentor teacher, principal, and now head of school, and I’ve gone through the feedback and evaluation process at four different schools. I’ve experienced and administered observations tied to rubrics such as Danielson’s Framework, and I’ve also been evaluated based on a supervisor’s (often) subjective impressions. If anything, my experience of being evaluated has been inconsistent, ranging from “keep doing what you’re doing” to feedback on metrics I never considered central to student learning.
As a new principal, I had the privilege of learning from Kim Marshall, retired Boston principal, published scholar and author, and distributor of the Marshall Memo, a weekly digest of the latest research on teaching and learning culled from the field. I read his book, Rethinking Teacher Supervision and Evaluation, and accessed a copy of his slides that he presented on this topic at a conference. Along with my colleagues at the various HALB schools, we embarked on a new experiment and method: utilizing Marshall’s system of frequent, brief, informal, and unannounced classroom visits for teacher mentoring and coaching, and employing his six-domain, simplified rubric for teacher self-assessment, growth, and evaluation.
In implementing Marshall’s method, we learned that sharing a language for excellent teaching and adapting a schoolwide system empowered teachers and administrators and helped build a more predictable and supportive professional culture. Now that I’ve brought Marshall’s methods to another school and across multiple divisions, I’ve learned again about the power of his system and the possibilities for its use and adaptation in different settings and educational environments. In what follows, I outline his method for use and implementation, the identifiable challenges encountered when using his model, and some innovative adaptations we’ve made to the model.
Goals
As he’s shared in his book and in his various public presentations, Kim’s model shifts teacher evaluation away from one or two high-stakes, full-period observations to more frequent, brief, informal, and unannounced observations. His goal for both teachers and administrators is to get a fairer sampling of a teacher’s performance over time. This benefits teachers who don’t wish to be caught on a “bad day” (every teacher has those!), and it serves administrators who wish not only to evaluate teachers but also to support them, as instructional leaders, throughout the year.
It also shifts the time balance and focus of the school administrator. Instead of spending up to four hours on very few high-stakes observations, along with their accompanying pre- and post-observation meetings for the sake of compliance, administrators engage in low- to medium-stakes observations throughout the year that should generally be supportive in nature. In brief, as a coaching model for supervision, the administrator becomes a supportive and predictable instructional leader.
Methods
At the start of the year, teachers assess themselves using the Kim Marshall rubric, with six domains covering all aspects of a teacher’s performance: planning and preparation for learning; classroom management; delivery of instruction; monitoring, assessment, and follow-up; family and community outreach; and professional responsibilities. Teachers rate and score themselves using this rubric, then participate in a goal-setting meeting with their supervising administrators.
Over the course of the year, teachers are observed as frequently as possible. Given the average number of teachers per administrator and the assumption that an administrator can observe 1-2 classes daily, Marshall recommends at least 10 mini-observations per teacher per year. He shows that, in general, administrators can form meaningful impressions of a class in 10-15 minutes of observation. His model calls for a follow-up, in-person conversation about the class, with some form of documentation of the lesson either prior to or ideally following the conversation.
Mid-year check-in meetings provide an opportunity to reflect on goals, progress, and the rubric. The year should end with a more formal observation, review of the teacher’s growth through the lens of the rubric, documented observations, and any other inputs (e.g., lesson plans), culminating in a final evaluation of the teacher through both a rubric and a narrative performance review.
Challenges
There are several challenges to this model. The primary one, on the principal side, is time. Principals may struggle to find the time and the availability to get out of the office and into classrooms. Teacher observations must become prioritized and part of the school culture. An additional challenge is finding time for the follow-up conversation following the brief visit. Perhaps they’ve found a way into the teacher’s classroom, but when the teacher is left wondering what the principal saw or thought, the purpose of the visit as supportive might backfire.
Equity of focus is central, both across the entire faculty and throughout the school year, and this presents another challenge. It’s too easy to ignore the best teachers and focus only on those instructors struggling in their classrooms. The master teachers can grow, too, especially when they have a shared language of instructional excellence in the Marshall rubric.
On the teacher’s side, the main challenge is adaptability. If they’re not used to it, teachers might not feel psychologically prepared for unannounced observations, and without fair—and immediate—follow-up to a classroom visit, they might feel even more vulnerable or anxious about what could be a very supportive form of instructional leadership.
Opportunities and Adaptations
Ideally, the Marshall method is one that leads through a shared language of excellence, that is implemented across departments and teacher experience, and that feels both supportive in its coaching model and predictable in its measures. Here are some ways it’s been adapted as an instructional model, helping to shape or reshape the professional culture in a school.
First, the Marshall system needs a “system”: for example, for tracking and storing all of the data and for visualizing faculty performance. Some schools use the “T-Eval” system (t-eval.com), a customizable teacher evaluation system now used by school districts across the country, including in Tennessee, and which anchors its process in the Marshall method. Using the T-Eval platform, teachers create their own accounts, self-assess, and receive copies of observation writeups. Administrators can view and access observations across the school system, and as a live archive, administrators in multiple schools can track progress and build a healthy sense of “competition.” Such a platform keeps the Marshall system working and effective.
The Marshall rubric wasn’t really designed for the early childhood setting. Along with Kim’s guidance and mentorship, our school’s preschool director, along with her faculty, modified the rubric to better reflect the sorts of “classroom management” and “assessments” that might emerge in early childhood. As a collaborative effort, faculty members were even more “bought-in” to a rubric that they had helped create.
Interestingly, our lower-school leaders used similar ratings and growth areas to group teachers into Professional Learning Communities (PLCs). With a focus on specific goals that emerged from their self-assessments, teachers shared problems and solutions in practice during faculty meetings, supporting one another through shared goals. This was an additional form of professional learning and development that emerged from a more standardized supervision and evaluation process.
Conclusion
School administrators and principals play many roles and serve their communities in so many ways. A central way they can best serve their faculty is through instructional leadership that builds a faculty culture that is supported and predictable. Kim Marshall’s rubric can easily serve as a predictable, sensible, shared language for instructional excellence, and Marshall’s system for coaching teachers through frequent, brief, and unannounced visits, if done even approximately well, can build a supportive and professional culture among faculty and administration.
Rabbi Dr. Hillel Broder currently serves as the head of school at the Melvin J. Berman Hebrew Academy located in Rockville, MD. He previously served as principal of DRS Yeshiva High School for Boys of the Hebrew Academy of Long Beach, and he has taught at SAR High School, Yeshiva University High School for Boys, and Fordham University. He earned a PhD in English at the CUNY Graduate Center and semichah from Rabbi Ari Enkin. He recently completed an MA in Jewish Philosophy at Yeshiva University. He is the author of two books of poetry, and he has published in various academic and popular venues.