Improving Instructional Quality in Jewish Day Schools and Yeshivot ...

teacher behaviors and skills, not helping teachers discover and constructprofessional knowledge and skills through instructional dialogue andreflection. Teachers and supervisors are viewed as bureaucratic functionaries,isolated and independent rather than collegial team members. Finally,schools are viewed as bureaucracies rather than democratic learningcommunities (Pajak, 2008).4. My guess is that most readers, reading this last sentence did not react tothe choice of words I employed, but I will not use the word “trained” againin this monograph because as one of my mentors, O.L. Davis, Jr., (cited inSpearman, 2009) states “you train dogs, you educate teachers.” Avoidance ofthe word “trained” is not simply an exercise in semantics, but rather indicatesthe true nature and power of education. Professional development, forinstance, is not training, but rather stimulating and developing the minds ofthose who work with our children. Education, as opposed to training, is anintellectually challenging, creative, and collaborative process. In the field ofeducation, we do not “train,” we educate (see, e.g., Holcomb, 1994).5. The principal must play an active, ongoing role in instructional leadership.Notwithstanding the comprehensive study,”Making Sense of LeadingSchools: A Study of the School Principalship” (www.Crpe.org) that indicatedthat principals do not necessarily have to have expertise in all areas (e.g.instructional, cultural, managerial, human resources, strategic, externaldevelopment, micro political leadership), they must be master“diagnosticians,” able to provide the school what it needs at the right timeand in the right context. I maintain that instructional leadership isqualitatively different from other forms of leadership. Although it is difficultto separate one form of leadership from another, since they all form anundifferentiated whole, instructional leadership cannot be delegated toothers.6. What is the relationship among instructional leadership, supervision, andprofessional development, three concepts I have alluded to thus far in themonograph? Briefly, instructional leadership is a generic term used in theliterature to indicate a school leader’s responsibility to lead instructionalimprovement in a school. To achieve instructional improvement one mustutilize the tools or approaches of instructional leadership that include, amongothers to be discussed in this monograph, supervision, professionaldevelopment, induction, mentoring, action research, peer coaching, etc.However, some in the field consider supervision a subset of professionaldevelopment. Given the sometimes negative connotations associated with theterm “supervision,” I, too, subsume supervision under the more palatable87