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October 2009
| Volume 67 | Number 2
Developing School Leaders
The Leadership Picture
Marge Scherer
What Makes or Breaks a Principal?
Gordon Donaldson, George Marnik, Sarah Mackenzie and Richard Ackerman
This article asserts that relational skills are essential to strong school leadership. Such skills, however, are typically not taught well in principal certification courses and professional development workshops. From their work in the University of Maine's Educational Leadership doctoral program, the authors have learned how leaders develop three key clusters of relational skills. Effective school leaders, they write, must know how to consult with others to translate pedagogical knowledge into practice, mediate conflict and reach consensus, and make relationships a priority. Leaders can best learn these skills by using them in practice and then systematically reflecting on them with the help of trusted colleagues.
The Outside-Inside Connection
Thomas Hatch
To be successful in their school improvement efforts, school leaders need the connections, support, and expertise that come from interacting with a host of people, organizations, and institutions in the surrounding community. Leaders that share the work of managing the environment, are alert to important emerging issues, put advocates into external positions of influence, and cultivate networks of allies put themselves in a strong position to deal with changing conditions in the external environment. To successfully manage the external environment, school leaders need to draw in parents, community members, district administrators, and other educators to develop a larger school community; improve the external environment; capitalize on the fact that success breeds success; and remember to look beyond the individual school and take into account the larger purposes of schooling.
Tough Questions for Tough Times
William Parrett and Kathleen Budge
Six high-performing/high-poverty schools provide insights into what it takes to make a dramatic turnaround. School leaders had to make tough calls—and many of those decisions were about how to use resources. The budget in a high-performing, high-poverty school is a moral document, reflective of the school's beliefs about the conditions necessary to sustain success for all students and the adults who serve them. As budgets constrict, school leaders maintain their success by working collaboratively with staff to stay focused on the priorities that guide their work. Leaders in these schools begin by asking themselves questions that deal with three areas: (1) building the necessary leadership capacity; (2) focusing the staff's everyday core work on student, professional, and system learning; and (3) creating and fostering a safe, healthy, and supportive learning environment for all.
Cages of Their Own Design
Frederick M. Hess
Principals and superintendents frequently lament that their hands are tied by contracts, policies, and regulations—especially when it comes to hiring and firing staff, assigning employees to schools or classrooms, designing programs, or allocating resources. But it is also the case that educational leadership is marked by a debilitating timidity and that reform-minded administrators could make much better use of their existing authority. Familiar excuses for tepid leadership include restrictive collective bargaining agreements, the heavy hand of state and federal regulations, and lack of money. Aggravating these constraints, however, is the K-12 environment, which trains educational leaders to operate with a defensive posture. Five strategies can help school leaders break out of this cage.
Fearless Leading
Yvette Jackson and Veronica McDermott
Even the best teachers need support from their leaders, but a conception of the leader as the lone go-to person consumed by management concerns only serves to isolate leaders. Jackson and McDermott encourage leaders to use different metaphors to define themselves and their roles. Leaders who fulfill the roles of architect, minister, soul friend, and muse are fearless leaders who help the teachers and students in their schools to become the best they can be. In this article, Jackson and McDermott share stories of leaders who fulfilled each of these roles and saw achievement rise in their schools.
Back to Square One
Wellford W. Wilms
A newly hired high school principal creates a leadership team of teachers who work with her to transform the school from an academic failure to a great success. Although the school soon ranks among the top schools in California for its meteoric rise in student test scores, drop in student disciplinary cases, and increase in teacher satisfaction, the school board and the superintendent nevertheless decide to replace the principal with one who recentralizes decision-making authority in his office, reversing these achievements. A close examination of events at this California high school reveals a fundamental obstacle to school reform: an adherence to the belief that power can only flow from the top to the bottom. We need a new model of leadership in which superintendents, principals, and teachers share power to protect school reforms that work. But we also need a force to drive this model—and that force is the parents. Reform-minded educators should work to recast parents' roles so parents become an allied force that presses for effective school reform.
Leadership Development: The Larger Context
Michael Fullan
The author argues that effective leadership development needs to be job-embedded, organization-embedded, and system-embedded. He describes each of these concepts, but adds that even leadership development that meets all three criteria is not sufficient to effect meaningful improvement in student achievement. Leadership development is "certainly part of school improvement, and a crucial part at that," he writes—but it is incomplete if it is not part of more comprehensive organizational and system reform.
Lessons from the World
Andreas Schleicher
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) surveyed more than 70,000 middle school teachers and their principals in 23 countries to provide comparative insights on the conditions of teaching and learning, leadership, preparation and professional development, and feedback and appraisal in their schools. Comparative results from the first Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) show that education systems can best support teachers by shifting public and governmental concern away from the mere control over the resources and content of education toward a focus on outcomes, by moving from hit-and-miss policies to targeted interventions, and by moving from a bureaucratic approach to education to devolving responsibilities and effective school leadership that supports teachers through targeted professional development, appraisal, and feedback.
Sharing Hats
Reginald Landeau Jr., Daphne VanDorn and Mary Ellen Freeley
When Reginald Landreau became principal of Ryan Middle School in Queens, New York, he dreamed of making the school, then reputed to be the worst school in the city's best district, into a top middle school. To do so, he had to learn to share responsibilities with his teaching staff. In this article, Freeley, Landeau, and VanDorn explain how the administrative staff and teachers came together to develop a teacher-driven approach to professional development and instructional improvement. They also discuss some of the pitfalls of teacher leadership and describe how they have dealt with some of the unforeseen problems that arose from giving teachers leadership positions.
A School for Leadership
Stephen R. Covey
Covey describes the evolution of a leadership-themed magnet school, A.B. Combs Elementary in Raleigh, North Carolina, which has built a school culture around the 7 Habits of Highly Successful People: be proactive; begin with the end in mind; put first things first; think win-win; seek first to understand, then to be understood; synergize; and sharpen the saw. Since adopting the leadership theme in 1999, the school has more than doubled its enrollment, raised test scores, and won numerous awards. But what parents speak of the most is the improvement in students' self-confidence.
Creating Collaborative Cultures
Barbara Kohm and Beverly Nance
Teachers in schools with strong collaborative cultures—as opposed to top-down or individualistic cultures—are more likely to exercise creative leadership together and assume responsibility for student success or failure. Principals who want to see student achievement and test scores increase should adopt practices that nurture collaboration. They should regularly share responsibility with teachers and help teachers develop skills that foster collaborative problem solving. Kohm and Nance share examples—from their own practice as principals and their years mentoring administrators—of times when principals contributed to or eroded a sense of collaboration among teachers. They discuss tools and approaches they have seen enhance collaboration in schools, such as Garmston and Wellman's Focusing Four model and protocols to facilitate professional conversation promoted by Peter Senge.
The Spirit of Leadership
Gabriel Rshaid
The author asserts that the most effective means of revitalizing schools is nurturing the personal and spiritual development of individual educators. At St. Andrew's Scots School in Buenos Aires, Argentina, he and his staff have made personal and spiritual development the cornerstone of their professional development efforts for the last four years. At annual residential retreats, educators reconnect with their calling to teach, share their feelings, and form deeper relationships. The result has been improved school climate and a stronger learning community.
The Power of Two
William L. Sterrett and Matthew Haas
Although professional learning communities have gained wide acceptance as a way for teachers to support one another's learning, there is less attention paid to the need for principals to meet together to enhance learning and leadership. Three years ago Sterrett (an elementary school principal) and Haas (a high school principal in the same district) realized that they needed a nonthreatening place to share frustrations and exchange strategies. They began meeting together at each other's schools for an hour or two once a month to air problems, brainstorm solutions, and share their latest learning about education issues. Some of their best ideas for improving instruction came out of these monthly tete-a-tetes. The authors share six norms they follow to ensure their monthly mini-learning community remains fruitful: honoring each other's time; moving from complaining to problem solving; focusing on improving instruction; being honest and noncompetitive; including time to observe instruction; and spurring each other's professional growth.
Insights from Leaders
Helping Students Process Information
Robert J. Marzano
Learning Communities for Administrators
Jane L. David
How to Become a Digital Leader
Bill Ferriter
Can Leaders be Popular?
Thomas R. Hoerr
ASCD Community in Action
Overheard
Journal Staff
Staying Positive in Negative Times
Jerry L. Patterson and Janice H. Patterson
Effective, resilient school leaders learn to nurture positive energy in themselves and others when they face a crisis. Patterson and Patterson describe how, in times of adversity, leaders adjust their attitude to identify the problem as "how can I generate enough energy to move ahead?" rather than focus on the adverse event itself as the problem. Four sources of strength help resilient leaders convert negative energy to positive: personal values, personal efficacy, a sense of personal well-being, and a base of supportive relationships. The authors give examples of how principals in crises tapped into each source of strength and point readers to an online self-reflection tool (the Leader Resilience Profile) that can help readers do the same.
Increasing the Ranks of Minority Principals
Jafeth E. Sanchez, Bill Thornton and Janet Usinger
The population of U.S. public schools has become increasingly diverse in terms of students' racial and cultural backgrounds, but the large majority of school principals are still white. This mismatch is problem, the authors contend. Having leadership that represents the cultural and ethnic groups in U.S. society is important for all students because students will be graduating into a diverse world. In addition, minority principals can make unique contributions to students' levels of comfort, motivation, and achievement in schools with high populations of minorities. The authors call on school leaders to take action toward making the pool of principals more diverse. They detail four suggestions: (1) tap National Board certified teachers, (2) target paraeducators, (3) recruit and mentor diverse teacher leaders, and (4) attract high school students to education careers.
Postcards from the Leading Edge
Catherine McGregor
University professor Catherine McGregor spent nine days traveling through British Columbia to observe graduates of the University of Victoria's leadership program at work. Her intention was to determine whether program graduates were applying the things they learned about distributed leadership in their schools. At each school she visited, she met teachers and principals who enthusiastically embraced teacher leadership, professional learning communities, coaching, and teamwork among faculty and staff.
Taking Your Leadership Pulse
Kathryn A. Riley
How can school leaders generate change when realities like gang shootings and racial strife threaten to keep schools in crisis mode? Riley—a central investigator in the Leadership on the Front-Line study that followed leaders in urban schools in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and France—explains a tool her team developed to help urban leaders "take the pulse" of significant elements and actors involved in their immediate school contexts. Understanding these elements, which Riley conceptualizes as four realities (the physical reality, social/political reality, emotional reality, and spiritual/ethical reality), prepares principals to lead so that deep change becomes possible in urban environments. She describes challenges faced by four urban leaders that illustrate how exploring each of these realities led to stronger leadership.
More Insights from Leaders
EL Study Guide
Teresa Preston
Copyright © 2004 by Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development
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