In this article, Kim Marshall writes that as she has worked with numerous principals and faculties over her career, she is disheartened to see administrators spending most of their contact time with teachers on cumbersome bureaucratic processes. She believes the result of this is that teachers begin to shift to a defensive mode--worrying constantly about their status and looking for ways to game "the system." Marshall senses that new methods may be making things worse. So in answering the question: "How do schools improve subpar teaching?" this article details five key elements for success. They are: (1) Professional working conditions; (2) Teacher teamwork; (3) Coaching teachers; (4) Student surveys; and (5) Hiring and firing well. Marshall believes that principals who do these five things well will bend the teaching quality curve in the right direction. She closes the article by suggesting that when difficult employment decisions have to be made, principals need to have the courage and backup to make them stick, but most of the work of improving teaching is changing workplace dynamics so that ordinary people can do extraordinary things.