I am not the first to point out that, as teachers gain promotion, they tend to move further and further away from the classroom. If the promotion is the result of being an excellent teacher then reducing the amount of teaching the person does seems perverse. Mind you, that ‘if’ is doing a lot of work.
The UK Advanced Skills Teacher programme was explained to me as a way to tackle this perversity when it was first introduced. By creating a grade of super teachers, we could promote teachers without taking them away from the classroom. The trouble is, as a profession, we do not have an agreed set of standards around what excellent teaching looks like. Worse still, teaching practices that are heralded as being high quality are often the opposite of what is effective, a phenomenon starkly illustrated by the difference between what the OECD define as effective teaching and what their own data demonstrates is effective teaching.
In my experience, Advanced Skills Teachers tended to be called upon to perform for the other staff as a way of justifying their status. Therefore, the most visible results of the programme were whole-staff training sessions where the Advanced Skills Teacher would suggest to the rest of the staff that they should tape envelopes under the students’ chairs or something like that.
And yet the traditional route to advancement for teachers has other attendant dangers. I remember being advised that at interviews for a deputy principal position, I should be able to discuss an initiative that I had introduced, led and saw to fruition. If you can’t see the problem with that, then imagine the 15 most ambitious members of your teaching staff all thinking they have to introduce some initiative or other. Soon, you have mindfulness in Year 8 form time, a creative writing intervention in Year 9, a healthy eating project, a new staff development approach…
I am pretty sure this is how we were saddled with learning styles and brain gym in the first place.
With all these different initiatives being launched, the school soon lacks any coherence. The agenda will resemble a box of frogs, leaping about all over the place. As the initiators move on to pastures new, those who are left behind will need to find a way of orchestrating some order out of the chaos.
So how can we build a better model of teacher advancement?
Filling the pail 
The Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System uses end-of-year tests to determine how much pupils have learned. Although the system has been around for over 20 years, the take-up is somewhat uneven. I haven’t looked at this for quite a while, but I’m pretty sure that results aren’t directly related to pay. However, it would be very surprising if they weren’t taken into account.
Obviously, initiating such a system isn’t going to be easy, since progressive educators know perfectly well that their pupils aren’t going to shine. Perhaps a step in the right direction would be to reduce the number of deputy and assistant heads, which would at least reduce the box-of-frogs problem and free up money for working teachers. Mind, this isn’t going to be easy, either–too many piggies at the trough, and boy can they squeal.
This is not meant to disparage SLT who have scars on their backs from fighting the system–I’ve met quite a few. On the other hand, Sue Lloyd–one of the major figures in the development of synthetic phonics–never had any management responsibilities whatever. She was amply rewarded by the sales of her Jolly Phonics material, though!
The only person I’ve ever known who was universally respected as a principal had the following characteristics, all of them very telling:
– he was an absolute expert in his subject area and retained an interest in it even when higher up the ladder,
– he did not introduce a single fad in his period as principal (more than a decade),
– he held staff meetings as two-way rather than one-way affairs,
– he got out of his office to interact with students and staff at every opportunity,
– he filed most of the emails/letters from head office in the bin,
and most crucially of all:
– he actually missed teaching and went back to do some part-time teaching in his subject area once he’d retired.
A practically extinct species these days.
My current principal is very much like the one you describe. Except that he still teaches.
Every year he has a class. And not a soft one either — a standard junior class.
Our deputies each teach a class too.