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- Principals who can commit to their leadership role as well as their students, faculty, staff, parents, and supervisors are more likely to appreciate their job, strive for organizational as well as personal excellence, and reveal a high rate of productivity —all for the greater good of the learning community.
www.tepsa.org › resource › 10-guiding-principles-to-a-successful-principalship
Apr 11, 2023 · Based on the principals’ sense-making, it seems that professional learning supports the principals’ leadership development, where increased professional confidence as a leader and enhanced professionalism are two essential aspects of principal leadership.
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Sep 20, 2023 · Why is principal leadership important in schools? Answer: Principal leadership is crucial because it directly impacts student learning, teacher performance, and overall school success. A strong principal provides direction, sets high standards, and creates a positive school culture.
- In the context of schools, a principal is the head administrator responsible for managing the daily operations and providing instructional leadersh...
- Effective principal leadership embodies several qualities: Visionary - Sets a clear and compelling vision for the school's future. Collaborative -...
- While different models may offer varying frameworks, a widely recognized model highlights these four dimensions: Instructional Leadership - Focuses...
- Principal leadership is crucial because it directly impacts student learning, teacher performance, and overall school success. A strong principal p...
Nov 19, 2020 · Principals said they needed professional development in key areas dealing with student well-being, among them: 83 percent in supporting students’ social-emotional development, 82 percent in...
- Assistant Editor
“effective leadership means more than knowing what to do—it’s knowing when, how, and why to do it” (Waters et al., 2003, p. 2, emphasis added). In a recent report, the Wallace Foundation (2011) identified five key functions of principal leadership: Shaping a vision of academic success for all students, one based on high standards.
- THE PRINCIPAL AS LEADER: AN OVERVIEW
- 1. Shaping a vision of academic success for all students
- Advice to Teachers Interested in Becoming a Principal
- 2. Creating a climate hospitable to education
- Engaging parents and the community: continued interest, uncertain evidence
- Shaping a vision of academic success for all students
- Cultivating leadership in others
- Improving instruction
- Managing people, data and processes
- A pipeline for effective leadership
- LH: Is that connection generally known?
- LH: How do principals and teachers work together to create a collaborative focus on learning?
- LH: Is it your sense that most schools are operating this way or does this remain the exception?
- LH: What you’re saying, in a sense, is that a collab-orative learning environment is so important that time needs to be carved out to focus on building
- that work.
- LH: Do teachers need to understand what effective principals do?
- LH: What advice would you give teachers to become part of the process of making their schools better places?
- “There is still quite often this idea that
- LH: Sounds like a two-way street.
- Seeing the five practices at work
- The power to improve instruction: spur to a career move?
Education research shows that most school variables, considered separately, have at most small effects on learning. The real payoff comes when individual variables combine to reach critical mass. Creating the conditions under which that can occur is the job of the principal. For more than a decade, The Wallace Foundation has supported efforts to im...
Although they say it in different ways, researchers who have examined education leadership agree that effective principals are responsible for establishing a schoolwide vision of commit-ment to high standards and the success of all students. Newcomers to the education discussion might find this puzzling: Hasn’t concern with the aca-demic achievemen...
“There’s a tradition of teach- ers who are really excellent exemplars in the classroom of say-ing, ‘I don’t want to be a principal because it has nothing to do with instruction,’” says Linda Darling-Hammond, a leading authority on education policy and the teaching profession. [See q&A with her on pg 18.] “But one of the things we found in our study...
Effective principals ensure that their schools allow both adults and children to put learn-ing at the center of their daily activities. Such “a healthy school environment,” as Vanderbilt researchers call it, is characterized by basics like safety and orderliness, as well as less tangible qualities such as a “supportive, responsive” attitude toward ...
Many principals work to engage parents and others outside the immediate school community, such as local business people. But what does it take to make sure these efforts are worth the time and toil required? While there is considerable interest in this question, the evidence on how to answer it is relatively weak. For example, the Minnesota-Toronto...
His first week on the job, Hensley drew a picture of a school on poster board and asked the faculty to annotate it. “Let’s create a vision of a school that’s perfect,” he recalls telling them, adding: “When we get there, then we’ll rest.” Hensley, the first person in his extended family to graduate from high school and then college, sought to ins...
Hensley set up a leadership structure with two notable characteristics. First, it was simple, comprising only three committees: culture, climate, and community; instructional leadership; and student support. Second, it made leadership a shared enterprise. The committees were populated and headed by teachers, with every faculty mem-ber assigned to ...
Hensley did a lot of first-hand observation in classrooms, leaving behind detailed notes for teachers, sharing “gold nuggets” of exemplary practices, things to think about and next steps for improvement. He also introduced cutting-edge professional development, obtaining a grant to set up the ideal classroom in the building, full of tech-nology and...
Data use figured prominently in Hensley’s turnaround efforts. “We test them once, we see where they are,” science teacher Lynd says of the students. “If they’re not proficient, we re-teach and test again.” To track progress across the school, Atkinson used a data board that lined one wall in the school’s curriculum center. Under photos of each tea...
Wallace’s work over the last decade suggests such a pipeline would have four necessary and interlocking parts: Defining the job of the principal and assistant principal. Districts create clear, rigorous job requirements that detail what principals and assistant principals must know and do, and that emerge from what research tells us are the know...
LDH: You would think it would be obvious. But in schools where there has not been much cultivation of leaders, there is often a hunkering down and just saying, “Well, there’s leadership over [t]here and there’s teaching over here.” That misses the boat in terms of creating ef-fective learning organizations.
LDH: In thriving schools you have a professional learning community. If there isn’t one, it’s something that teach-ers and leaders have to build together, getting past the closed-door culture which is often inherited in schools: “We’re all doing our own thing in our own classroom.” Leaders who are effective often have a distributed lead- ership a...
LDH: More and more teachers are willing and eager to collaborate with one another. More and more leaders are becoming aware of how important that is. But it is certainly not everywhere. There [was] an interesting survey not long ago, The Schools and Stafing Survey, which the federal government does. It asked teachers, “How many of you have the oppo...
One reason for that is that we design our schools in most cases still in the United States based on the fac-tory model of 100 years ago, where the idea was that teachers are only working when they’re in classrooms instructing children. If you look at schools in many countries in Europe and Asia, teachers have about 15 hours a week or more where the...
LDH: That’s right – and being sure that whenever some-body is doing something right, it’s getting shared, and whenever somebody has a problem, they have people to go to to help them solve their problem. [There are] very interesting studies about gains in student achievement LGH: I think so for many reasons. One is so that [they] know what to expect...
said, “Yes, I have that opportunity.” But [when the sur-vey] asked how many would strongly agree or would agree that there is a collaborative culture in their schools where people collaborate frequently, only 15 percent said that. What it says to me is that we have a little bit of collaboration going around everywhere, but we have a lot of collabor...
LDH: Obviously everyone works in their own vine-yard, in their own classroom. Beyond that, it’s impor-tant for teachers to learn from the beginning of their LH: Let’s talk about some of the features that distin-guish high-performing schools from low-performing schools. LDH: One of the features that we’ve talked about is lots of collaboration around...
and shared – and as profession-als who want to continue to grow. Finding ways each teacher is a lone agent and the for the perspectives of teachers and other members of the principal is a lone agent.” careers – and throughout their careers – how to be good collaborators and community members, how to reach out to others (both to offer to share ideas...
LDH: Absolutely. There actually is a lot to learn about how to be a good collaborator, how to manage differ-ences of opinion, how to talk to each other in ways that will be productive and then get to a place where the conversations can be better and richer. In our efforts to school community to be shared – as a basis for problem solving, as a ba-si...
The five practices associated with effective leadership are on full display at these schools, in Bonti’s experience. Take, for example, the first practice, knowing how to implant the notion that all students can learn and achieve. “I can tell by how I’m greeted at the school ofice how well a vision of student success has been communicated,” Bonti ...
Finally, there is the effective leader’s fierce focus on improving instruction. That was Bonti’s inspiration for taking on a three-year assignment as a full-time “peer evaluator” in the dis-trict’s recently introduced teacher evaluation program. As part of the program, every teacher is observed at least three times a year by the school principal an...
Effective principals know that these priorities must be reflected in every one of their leadership practices and decisions if they are to ensure that their schools are welcoming and inclusive—and capable of providing equitable educational and professional opportunities for all students and adults.
Learn about 5 practices that characterize the effective leadership of principals who can make a difference in teaching and learning in our free online report.