Group items tagged

Successful principals identify schoolwide needs and plan professional learning to develop collective expertise.

This sounds simple, but it means that educators must see that student failure requires a change in their practice. It takes leadership to help teachers take on the burden of student failure, look it squarely in the eye, and ask, “What can we do differently?” rather than declare, “These students are helpless” or think quietly to themselves, “I am a bad teacher.” For teachers to be able to do this, they need clear expectations from their principal and the opportunity to develop a professional practice through collaboration with colleagues.

Good principals understand that no individual teacher can possibly have all the necessary content knowledge, pedagogical skill, and familiarity with his or her students to be successful 100 percent of the time with all of those students. Good principals know that it is only by pooling the knowledge and skills of their teachers, encouraging collaboration, and focusing on continual improvement that students and their teachers will have the opportunity to be successful.

For that reason, successful principals take very concrete steps to support teachers: • They build schoolwide master schedules carefully to make sure that instructional time is not interrupted and that teachers have time to work and plan together during the school day. • They ensure that such collaboration time is spent in ways that will have the biggest instructional payoff:

They establish schoolwide routines and discipline processes so that time is not squandered on behavioral problems

They model what they want to see.

They monitor the work of everyone in the school to ensure that no teacher or staff member shirks responsibility while others are working their hearts out.

Above all, they help teachers step back from the “daily-ness of teaching” by providing the evaluative eye that allows teachers to think deeply about whether they are getting the most effect for their efforts.

This kind of leadership is a long way from the traditional model of the principal as a building manager, and few principals have been trained this way. But if we want schools that prepare all children for productive citizenship, this is the leadership we need.