April 2021 | Volume 78 | Number 7

The Empowered Principal

A Time for Principal Empowerment

Anthony Rebora

Part of a theme issue on "The Empowered Principal."

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The Most Powerful Tool in a Principal's Arsenal

Robyn Jackson

While schools' official vision statements—statements school leaders write telling their own deep vision for what they want their school to be—generally aren't empowering, they could be. A well-crafted vision statement is a powerful tool because it articulates the promise a leader and school staff make to students and provides focus. Drawing on her work with principals, Jackson shows how to write a statement with three essential aspects: passion, specifics for actions, and a commitment to 100% of learners.

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What Great Principals Really Do

Jason A. Grissom, Anna J. Egalite and Constance A. Lindsay

The golden-age question: What do effective principals know and do differently? A new research study synthesizes a bulk of research on school leaders to answer this question, looking at the combination of actions and traits that make the best principals.

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Constructive Conflict

Robert Feirsen and Seth Weitzman

Leaders have three classic responses to discord. Authors Robert Feirsen and Seth Weitzman call them the 3 "A's"—avoidance, attack, and addressing. They make the case that the third one—addressing conflict—is the healthiest way for leaders to solve problems and promote a positive school culture.

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Why Every Principal Should Write a Racial Autobiography

Mark Anthony Gooden

Examining your own racial history is an empowering exercise of antiracist leadership, writes Mark Anthony Gooden, director of the Endeavor Antiracist & Restorative Leadership Initiative at Teachers College, Columbia University. The racial autobiography—a narrative written to explore how race has manifested in one's life—can help principals surface unexamined meanings of race personally and in their leadership practice.

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Rethinking the "Superhero" Principal Narrative

Soraya Sablo Sutton and Nate Gong

School leaders' resilience is best built as a collective effort, write Soraya Sablo Sutton and Nate Gong. The "Change Makers" program at UC Berkeley's Principal Leadership Institute gave school leaders across California the opportunity to work together to solve problems of practice and build their collective resilience—a key to sustaining the work.

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Growing Principals into Strategic Talent Leaders

Amy Holcombe, Shannon Brown Peeples and Tina Johnson

Principal preparation programs devote very little time to showing future principals how to recruit, hire, support, and retain solid teachers. Yet school staff are a major part of every school budget and have one of the biggest impacts on student achievement, so hiring and retaining talent is key. The authors give specific actions and approaches for how to strategically manage teacher talent to reach your school goals.

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The Best-Laid Plans Can Succeed

Coby V. Meyers and Bryan A. VanGronigen

School leaders often neglect a key mechanism for empowerment: The school-improvement plan. In this article, researchers Coby Meyers and Bryan VanGronigen discuss five fundamentals of improvement planning that school leaders can use to ensure their plans are useful, effective, and on-track.

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Making Classroom Observations Matter

Lynda Tredway, Matt Militello and Ken Simon

Through Project I4 (which aims to lift academic discourse in STEM classes), principals and other school leaders who observe faculty use tools to identify, through evidence and clear criteria, what teachers are doing well and less well. The project's tools, including a post-observation Effective Conversation Guide, address aspects of equity (such as whether all students get a chance to speak) and rigor in lessons observed by leaders.

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Follow the Instructional Leader

Candice McQueen

If ever there was a year to prioritize and lean in on principal support to lead learning, this is it. Candice McQueen, CEO for the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching, shares three actions principals and their supervisors can take to strengthen instructional leadership.

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Empowered Leaders Soar with Feedback

Sanée Bell

Learning to process feedback wisely is essential to school improvement—and personal growth, writes school principal Sanée Bell. Here, Bell shares hard-won tips for soliciting authentic feedback from staff and, even more important, for organizing, acting on, and reflecting on that feedback.

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What Kind of Leader Are You?

Bryan Goodwin and Kent Davis

In this column, Bryan Goodwin and Kent Davis look at research on different styles of leadership. In uncertain times, leaders often need to take on a different, more empowering style of leadership—a paradigm shift for many leaders, one that may require them to reflect on not only what they must do, but more deeply, who they must be as leaders.

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Retellings as Formative Assessment

Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey

Oral retellings—in which a student reads a text then retells what the text said in their own words while the teacher assesses their summary—are a good way to gauge a student's language ability and reading comprehension. With distance learning, students can record their retellings to send to the teacher, meaning teachers can do more of these informal retelling assessments.

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Power to the People

Jill Harrison Berg and Monakatellia Ford Walker

True empowerment comes from helping others tap the power in themselves, write Jill Harrison Berg and Monakatellia Ford Walker. These key leadership moves, they explain, can help school leaders create the conditions for "teachers' superpowers to activate and align."

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Getting the Endings Right

Matthew R. Kay

A psychological study on the power of endings in experiences and interactions offers lessons for educators, especially this year.

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What to Watch for as Biden's Term Begins

David Griffith

Just as Obama's first presidential term was defined by how his Administration dealt with the country's economic crisis during its early months, the Biden Administration gets underway facing an emergency created by the coronavirus pandemic. Griffith explains how revisiting the history of 12 years ago can help us understand current realities and draw lessons about education policy/funding that might help us avoid previous mistakes.

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Whole Child Spotlight: "Trickle-Down" Leadership

Sean Slade

Part of a theme issue on "The Empowered Principal."

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Readers React

Part of a theme issue on "The Empowered Principal."

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ASCD Community in Action

Part of a theme issue on "The Empowered Principal."

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Tell Us About

Part of a theme issue on "The Empowered Principal."

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EL Takeaways

Part of a theme issue on "The Empowered Principal."

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Index to Advertisers

Part of a theme issue on "The Empowered Principal."

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Nation's Top Principal on Developing Our Greatness

Part of a theme issue on "The Empowered Principal."

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Who Gets Promoted to Principal—and When?

Part of a theme issue on "The Empowered Principal."

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Make Up Your Mind!

Part of a theme issue on "The Empowered Principal."

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Degrees of Influence

Part of a theme issue on "The Empowered Principal."

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A Matter of Principles

Part of a theme issue on "The Empowered Principal."

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