● About this interview

○ This interview was with DPS Principal Benjamin Cooper of Lowry Elementary. Lowry has
approximately 475 students from pre-K through 5th grade that are 52% students of color and
48% white students, making Lowry one of the most racially diverse schools in DPS. Lowry is
about 47% free-and-reduced lunch, and 10% students with disabilities. Lowry has the largest
homeless population of any school in the district, about 20% of the student body, and they are
additionally supported by the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless.

1. How do you distribute leadership to your administrators and your teachers? Why?
a. We specifically have something called Distributed Leadership. We have what are called Senior
Team Leads. Each one has a caseload of teachers that they provide coaching and feedback to.
one of them reports to me, one of them reports to the assistant principal. My assistant principal
is in something called Learn to Lead: I'm her mentor for the year. The model that we're
developing is what we see as the new role of the principalship, which is more as a strategic
manager. After the five-year roll-out, I won't provide much direct feedback to teachers; I'll
manage Senior Team Leads. [Tom Boasberg, Superintendent] was brilliant in pointing out that
senior managers in nonprofit or the private sector never have twenty-five direct reports which is
what I used to have. He says they never have more than eight, and that’s why we’re building
towards this new principal model.
b. I have one assistant principal, and she manages our Instructional Leadership Team, completely.
See updates the data, she sets the agenda, and she runs the meetings.
c. I’m a school leader mentor this year, and we have a strategy that we use where we judge
someone’s ability to lead on an initiative by their level of commitment and their level of
competence on a combined rubric, and that gives us perspective on whether to go into the
initiative with that leader in a way that is Directive, Supportive, Autonomous, or Collaborative. I
typically use that rubric when deciding what role my assistant principal will have on a task or a
project.
d. We have an additional full-time counselor that is funded by the Colorado Coalition for the
Homeless that coordinates wrap-around services for our homeless students.
e. Another way that we distribute leadership to our teachers is that each teacher serves on one of
six committees which are responsible for the results for a program called Whole Child. The
committees developed the outcomes they wanted to see and the road map to get there. The
members of the committees love the autonomy and ownership that they have.
2. What do you look for when hiring a new member of your leadership team or sitting on the interview
committee for another school’s leadership interview?
a. I have occasionally sat on the hiring committee for other assistant principals, but, as a matter of
fact, just next week I am going to be added to a district-wide committee for hiring principals for
the first time.
b. When I hire, I tend to focus most on value set. Most of my questions are designed to reveal the
applicant’s value set. What are their values around how they engage with teachers? What are
their values regarding students? Also, since I get one assistant principal, and, because I'm not
much of a detail-person, it's important that my assistant principal is.
c. If someone comes in and is focused on students-first, they have a collaborative mindset, they
hold themselves accountable to things, and they have a good understanding about how to
achieve equity and they believe it’s essential, I’m going to hire them even if they tell me they’ve
never handled student discipline before. I can train them on that.
3. Would you consider a hypothetical, please? Let's say you had two candidates for an assistant
principal's job: one of them had some limitations around their fit with your school's values, but had
 substantive experience and a lot to offer in terms of operational skills and, therefore, was ready to hit
the ground running in the job; the other was a homerun on values but not only lacked for experience but
had one or two red flags that concerned you. Which one would you hire?
a. Hands down, I would hire the person with the right values because anything about the
day-to-day skills for being an assistant principal, I can coach, but changing someone's values is
very difficult.
4. What have been reasons that have caused you not to renew a teacher’s contract? Can you recount an
example of how you handled the process?
a. I’ve never non-renewed a leader.
b. Regarding a teacher, the reason for the non-renewal was that, in spite of having a wonderful
value set around putting children first and relating to her students and going above-and-beyond
to support their learning, in terms of her regular observation and feedback, she was getting for
her bite-sized action steps but never putting them into practice. Ultimately, this woman just
wasn't cut out to be a teacher in a regular classroom, but she called me for a reference when
applying for a job in special education dealing exclusively with small groups, and I gave her a
ringing endorsement because that will be the perfect fit for her skills.
c. Regarding non-renewal of teachers with tenure, I don’t to the “dance of the lemons.” If I believe
a teacher is not good for kid, I am committed to doing the things that are necessary to ensure
that that teacher won’t be passed off to another school to become another principal’s problem. I
will stick with the process, give that person a good-faith chance to improve, and, if they don’t,
follow through so that they aren’t just migrating to another school in DPS.
5. Describe the nuts-and-bolts of your school’s observation-and-feedback cycle.
a. My assistant principal has two 5th grade teachers, and she has the intervention teacher, the GT
teacher, the ELD teacher, and one specials teacher. I have all of kindergarten and ECE, and art,
PE, and STEM lab. Senior Team Leads, one of them has 1st and 2nd grade, the other has 3rd
and 4th and the remaining 5th grade teacher. We have a six-week cycle of
observation-and-feedback. Between myself, my assistant principal, and the two Senior Team
Leads who spend half of their day doing observation-and-feedback, we are able to get into
teacher’s classrooms weekly. The first week is traditional observation-and-feedback on the five
domains coming from the district teacher evaluation instrument. After that observation, we meet
face-to-face with the teacher, discuss the feedback, and come up with one bite-sized action
step, and the second week is called a Coaching Week where we sit down and assist the teacher
with any planning and implementation needs he or she might have to get that action step
accomplished. We believe that too many actions just overwhelms teachers, and giving them one
high-leverage move is how to improve instruction. So, the six-week cycle is
observation-and-feedback, Coaching Week, observation-and-feedback, Coaching Week,
observation-and-feedback, and then a data week, and what we’re doing this year during that
sixth week of the cycle is meeting with a narrow set of student data collected by the teacher -
specifically literacy data coming from a school-wide formative assessment called iStation and
running record data - for just two students in their class that we think we can move from behind
to on-grade-level during this school year. At first, I questioned whether focusing on two students
in each classroom was an ambitious goal, but my principal manager made a good point which is
to be successful with two before jumping to five. Once we have an initiative within our
observation-and-feedback cycle that can move two students per class to equity with their peers,
then we’ll increase to five students. At the meeting for data week, we take a deep dive into the
data for those two students and determine action steps.
b. Most of our observation-and-feedback system is derived from the Uncommon Schools
approach, and it is very efficient. Efficiency is important. The Uncommon Schools method can
 get you through a whole observation in twenty minutes, and that is critical to sustainably being
in teacher’s classrooms on a weekly basis.
6. Why do you do things that way? What is your philosophy of instructional coaching?
a. I have a counseling background, and I was a therapist working with adults and with children for
many years before starting my education career, and I leverage that when coaching teachers
and teaching my Senior Team Leads how to coach because I want teachers to feel optimistic
and fired up as a result of feedback meetings. At Lowry, we’ve have all-but-eliminated the
feeling of “gotcha.” We’ve instilled a sense of trust and positivity into our school’s culture
regarding feedback. I say to my teachers, if you don’t leave a meeting feeling optimistic and
genuinely excited about your ability to make progress for your students, I haven’t done my job. I
want them to walk out thinking, “I’m excited to try that tomorrow because I know I can do it, and
it’s going to help my students.”
b. We don’t utilize the Uncommon Schools model whole-cloth because I feel that some of the
Uncommon Schools methods make things too robotic, and, although they work well to achieve
equity with subpopulations, once they send them off to college, they’re not persisting because
they have had so much scaffolding that they don’t have the learning autonomy to do it on their
own.
c. We believe providing teachers with on-going, consistent feedback is the best way to impact
teacher moves and thereby to impact student outcomes.
7. Describe your efforts to develop your people regarding special populations (language, homelessness,
learning differences).
a. The area we need more growth in is staff development about special education because we rely
on our special ed team to provide it, and they're just too busy.
b. The counselor does trainings on Wednesdays. She does training on poverty. She calls it
Poverty 101. She offers trainings on bias to help staff notice and overcome implicit biases about
the subpopulations at Lowry. Our GT specialist, counselor, and ELD person - about four times a
year - attend their own professional development and bring back what they have learned to the
staff to share on Wednesday afternoons.
c. We are about to have a student with Down Syndrome for the first time in our history, so I'm
hiring a trainer to train the kindergarten and first grade teams. Limitations in our funding will
determine whether it's a one-off training or ongoing.
d. At the district level, DPS has created an Equity Index, and it has exposed the unevenness of
some of the “blue” schools that have traditionally held a distinguished rating from the district.
Now that the Equity Index counts in school evaluations, some blue schools are having to
respond because their blue rating was based on the performance of their white population
covering over the equity gap for their students of color, ELL’s, and special education students.

● Reflection
○ This interview provided a lot of insight into the structure DPS is utilizing, and that’s pertinent for
me because I am definitely going to be looking for a job in DPS in a couple of months. I learned
that DPS is utilizing the vision of the current superintendent to restructure leadership so that the
principal is a decision-making and vision-holding manager - something more like an executive -
rather than a manager who carries out the day-to-day instructional or operational work. The
principal’s role in DPS ultimately is meant to be supervising one or more assistant principals,
and the Senior Team Leads, as they carry out the initiatives the principal is leading. One
specific purpose for this restructuring is to reduce the number of direct reports to the principal.
According to the superintendent, one of the factors working against effectiveness in education is
the number of individuals directly reporting to the principal. He half-jokingly asserts that it may
 be twenty-five or more, since so many teachers come directly to the principal for solutions to
their problems. He says an appropriate number is no more than eight: in other words, the Senior
Team Leads, who are classroom teachers acting as instructional coaches and providing
instructional leadership in that capacity; plus, the assistant principals will be the only direct
reports to the principal. I couldn’t help notice a parallel with the article that we just read
regarding the management structure in Ontario, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai: this is
restructuring to allow the principal to be a specialist in management of a learning organization,
rather than instructional leadership. I wonder whether the pivotal issue with the value of this
reform will be building the capacity in principals to do that work? The present generation of
principals has been trained to focus on instructional leadership.
○ One of the unique challenges and opportunities of Lowry Elementary is to serve homeless
students. They have 20% of their student body homeless. They have an outside agency
focused on homelessness issues who finances a special councilor for this population, and while
I believe this individual, as a coordinator of wrap-around services, probably increases the
capacity of the school to meet the needs of this population, I wonder whether this is enough.
Twenty percent of the student body is roughly 100 students. Is one additional staff member
adequate for this level of need?