Matt Hendricks, the principal of Atwater Bay Elementary, has been out of the classroom for 12 years. But during a recent principals meeting, he was holding a foam sphere on a pencil to help demonstrate a lesson on moon phases.

To make sure principals’ skills stay fresh, OCPS has them practice planning lessons, delivering them, and providing feedback. 

“We are doing this so we can better support teachers,” said Julie Helton, Senior Director of Elementary Curriculum & Instruction. Helton is a former teacher and principal herself.

At this recent training in the Riverside Elementary media center, school leaders considered data on a sample set of students, chose a state benchmark to reteach, then planned a lesson and presented it to a small group. The participants were from elementary cadres 6 and 11.

“It gives us a reminder of what we should look for when we go into a classroom,” said Hendricks, who was a fifth-grade teacher before becoming a curriculum resource teacher, then math coach, assistant principal, then principal.

Lanee Wilcox, senior administrator for elementary mathematics, worked with the principals, reminding them that lesson planning can be kept simple.  “In math, you could do number lines for a week, making the numbers harder each time,” she said. And small areas of weakness found in student data could be addressed with a warm-up exercise, she said.

Rachel Mott, principal of Sadler Elementary, said a key takeaway is that principals have access to district staff who can help them coach teachers all school year, not just during the training. “I don’t have to wait for a principals’ meeting to talk to trainers,” she said. “It is useful for us to go back to common planning and see it.”

During the training, the principals worked with math manipulatives, such as base-ten blocks, to help envision how students would approach a task.They then worked on how to teach the concept to help students move from the representational to the abstract. 

Latricia Pinder, principal of Andover Elementary, said the session was particularly helpful because it gave her concrete steps she could share with teachers. “I was able to get techniques on how to look at data to build small groups based on what students need,” she said, “and design a lesson to intentionally address misconceptions about lessons previously taught.” 

Hendricks’ group was tackling a lesson on moon phases. Science Program Specialist Matthew Timm demonstrated ways to model moon phases with the foam ball and flashlight. Hendricks also used a slide presentation and had the “students” draw the moon so they would think about the concept in a variety of ways. 

Opal Leighvard, principal at Dr. Phillips Elementary, praised Hendricks for making the concept so visual that everyone could learn something new. “Now, all of a sudden, I understand the moon,” she said