What an Award-Winning School Leader Has Learned From Shadowing His Students

At least a handful of times every school year, Matthew Sloane puts on a hoodie, a baseball cap, and a pair of jeans, and heads to his first-period class.

Sloane, the principal of Middleburgh Junior/Senior High School—which has about 400 students and is located in the town of Middleburgh, just west of Albany, New York—isn’t aiming for a cheeky re-creation of Steve Buscemi’s “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme, born out of a 30 Rock episode. His getup is in service of a longstanding goal: immersing himself in students’ day-to-day experiences so he can better identify ways to improve their learning environment and school culture.

Sloane’s shadowing practice, which he formalized after tinkering with it as a school leader at other stops, began when he took over as principal of Middleburgh Jr./Sr. in 2018. It’s proven to be such a success that it was recently adopted by teachers at the school, too. And it was one of the reasons he was honored as New York’s 2024 principal of the year by the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP).

“Any administrator, at least for a half-day, can shadow a student,” Sloane told me. “If you trust your administrative team, if you trust your support staff, then you can make that happen.”

Sloane told me how he’s rolled out and maintained the student shadowing practice, as well as the schoolwide changes it has inspired, and what he recommends for school leaders and/or teachers who might be interested in giving it a try.

How Student Shadowing Works

Sloane has always been “fascinated by the student experience,” he said, which “shapes how students learn, how students feel in a classroom, how the teacher presents materials.” Through a number of leadership roles over the years, Sloane has come to believe that it’s only truly possible to glean how students experience school by spending some time in their shoes. He’s especially interested in how students “transition from one class to the next, go from one teacher to the next, hear vocabulary from one class to the next,” he said.

The student shadowing system has evolved over the years. Sloane used to give teachers and students lots of advance notice about his plans; he’s on a shorter timeline nowadays, largely because staff and students have become comfortable with the arrangement. Sloane checks his calendar for a relatively open day and then includes an update in his weekly email bulletin to staff that he’ll be shadowing a student, who’s selected at random. He gives that student roughly the same amount of heads-up.

When it’s shadowing time, Sloane simply follows the student around to all of their classes. He sits next to them, takes notes like they do, and walks with them from classroom to classroom. “It becomes fun because they don’t see me as a principal anymore,” Sloane said. “They see me as someone who’s really in it with them. I even joke around, like, ‘What’d you get for answer number one?’ I try to embody the role of a student.”

Sloane sometimes accompanies the student to lunch, too, though if he’s having a particularly busy workweek or something comes up, he might briefly return to his office. He’s dealt with interruptions and emergencies before, but said those are just normal parts of being a principal, and they haven’t prevented him from shadowing a student (even if a session occasionally has to get rescheduled).

In the fall, Sloane tries to shadow a student at least once a month. The idea, he said, is to gather as much information as he can early in the year. In the springtime, assessments and end-of-year activities make it harder to plan, and Sloane likes to use that time to take the information he’s gathered and use it to “guide teachers and guide our professional learning,” he said.

Why Student Shadowing Is Effective

Sloane believes that if “you really want to impact the culture of your building, you have to immerse yourself in it,” he said. Through that immersion, he’s come to embrace a number of fixes and tweaks to Middleburgh Jr./Sr.’s physical environment. Almost all of the chairs in the school have been replaced with more ergonomic options, after Sloane felt for himself how uncomfortable the previous chairs were.

Sloane also realized that he—like the students he shadowed—got hungry during the school day, and there were sometimes long stretches when students didn’t have time to eat. So he worked with the school’s cafeteria to provide more snacks for students and to keep the cafeteria open longer in the mornings.

Student shadowing isn’t just about identifying problems: It reveals what’s working, too. Sloane’s district superintendent has been pushing for more experiential learning via field trips, and Sloane has noticed the benefits for his students, who take two to three trips per school year—some local and some to other cities and states. “I found that in shadowing students, these ideas that they were hearing about, these ideas that they were learning, needed to be connected to something much more tangible,” Sloane said. “The field trips allow us to get them out of the building, get them moving, get them to see where they’re living in the world and connect those dots.”

And Sloane is especially attuned to the “decoding” that students have to do between classrooms. He pointed out that students are going from one personality and communication style to another within a few minutes’ time—an ask that’s not often required of adults as part of their professions. “One teacher uses one type of vocabulary in one class, and then you have to adjust to a new set of vocabulary, a new set of instructions. We’ve focused a lot on minimizing that,” he said, by working with teachers to ensure that they’re using common language in their lessons and that there is a “continuity of expectations” around student absences, assignment lengths, and disciplinary and behavioral expectations.

Getting Buy-in From Students and Staff

Sloane still remembers the first student he shadowed at Middleburgh Jr./Sr., a middle school boy named Cody. Sloane made sure to contact Cody’s parents to ask for their sign-off on the idea. He did the same with teachers and staff. He wanted to reassure them that this wasn’t an evaluation of any sort.

“There was a lot of skepticism,” Sloane said. “That first shadowing, a lot of it was very similar to formal observations of teachers. They were concerned that I was there, but they put on a good show.” To offset that understandable skepticism and concern, Sloane emphasized transparency. After finishing the day, Sloane shared his findings with staff, with “no discussion about what teachers were teaching or how they were teaching,” Sloane said. He also made a point of personally thanking each teacher who hosted him during the school day.

A few weeks later, Sloane ran into Cody’s parents, who told him that Cody had had a great time being shadowed, because “he’d never had a principal be concerned about his learning experience.” It had taken only until the second period for Cody to feel at ease, his parents relayed. “He enjoyed me asking him questions. From the start, it was very positive,” Sloane said.

Expanding the Practice to Teachers

Sloane told me that in the years since he started this practice, teachers have become much less leery that they’re being judged or evaluated. Recently, when Sloane negotiated with the teachers’ union, they agreed to do one half or full day of shadowing per school year, beginning in 2024–25.

Teachers are required to shadow a random student in a grade they don’t teach; a substitute fills in for them. The parameters are the same as Sloane’s: Teachers aren’t evaluating other teachers; they’re sitting with a student and observing how that student makes their way through the school day. Teachers are also able to reflect on their own practices by seeing how their peers operate in the classroom.

Sloane said the feedback from teachers who’ve done their shadowing day has “been tremendous.” He noted that he’s had a few teachers who’ve been hesitant to give it a shot, but said he’s going to keep pushing for them to do it, and he believes it will ultimately be a positive development they’ll come to embrace.

“I don’t think I could offer a better professional development to a teacher,” Sloane said. “Not only does it give them the same experiences I got, where they’re physically sitting in the class and connecting with students, but they’re also learning different pedagogical techniques, different skill-building techniques, from their colleagues.”