Managing buildings and budgets,
complying with district mandates and edicts, and enforcing smooth school day
operations used to be enough for school administrators; nevertheless, the
changing needs of American students and educators demand that principals transform
from authoritarian saviors to collaborative leaders who foster a culture of
shared responsibility, professional inquiry, safe risk-taking, and democratic
norms. A decade ago, education researchers predicted that today’s educators
would not be prepared for the changing demands of modern schools (Lashway, 2003). Even though many college and university
programs are transforming their administrator training courses to ensure that
today’s principals are ready to be effective, collaborative, flexible leaders,
those already in the field may find shifting values and norms to be challenge;
however, research, guides, and information to support a culture of distributed
leadership and teacher empowerment within a school are plentiful for today’s
principals to operate under a new style.
I imagine myself becoming a
transformational leader of an under-performing school, working with my
resources, community and staff to completely revamp its overall structure and
culture and making it into one of the most highly acclaimed schools in North
Carolina. Although I naturally tend to take control,
micromanage, and lead hierarchically, my training as a young administrator is
conducive to operating as a distributive leader who follows best practices for
teacher and stakeholder empowerment. To
successfully transition my future school, I will follow that today’s and
tomorrow’s experts recommend for principals: that they work with teachers to
develop a shared vision based on school and community beliefs, organize a focus
on student and adult learning, evaluate the leadership potential of teachers,
and coach educators as they become leaders within their classrooms, school,
community, and profession.
Our school’s overarching focus will be
student success, and I believe that students learn best in a supportive,
trusting, engaging environments: those that empowers them to take control of
their own learning. Extraordinary
student success cannot happen without great teachers, and I believe that
educators thrive best in environments where they feel supported and empowered
to take ownership of their school success and professional practices. All effective educators know that the most
salient way to ensure student success is to involve families in educating a
community’s children as much as possible: “The research is abundantly clear:
nothing motivates a child more than when learning is valued by schools,
families, and communities working together in partnership…These forms of parent
involvement do not happen by accident or even by invitation. They happen by explicit strategic
intervention” (Durfour & Eaker, 1998).
The future of student learning in my
school will depend upon my ability to practice building this infrastructure,
one in which all stakeholders feel empowered to take ownership of school
improvement: “Schools cannot afford to lose promising teachers or squander
opportunities to better serve students.
It will take the effort of all educators- district administrators,
principals, teacher leaders, and teachers themselves- to redefine the norms of
teaching and support teacher leaders in their work so that every school’s
instructional capacity expands to meet its students’ needs” (Johnson,
2007). In order to meet the demanding
requirements of the principalship, I will be skilled in implementing, fostering,
and sustaining teacher leadership in her school.
I have started collecting a list of best
practices for distributing leadership and empowering the teachers in my school. Research for school principals who want to
transform their schools abounds; I plan on continuing my research as a school
administrator and adding to this list as I practice my profession and learn new
strategies from research and from personal and professional experience.
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Best Practices
for Distributing Leadership
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Best Practices
for Empowering Teachers
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|
1.
Lead
through shared vision and values rather than rules and procedures (DuFour
& Eaker, 1998).
|
1.
Facilitate school-wide professional learning
communities and involve faculty members in the school’s decision-making
processes while encouraging to teacher action (DuFour & Eaker, 1998).
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|
2.
Encourage professional inquiry and risk taking
through action research, and creating an environment where mistakes are okay
and used as learning tools (Reeves, 2010).
|
2.
Maintain a focus on people and practices, not
programs (Reeves, 2010).
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|
3.
Form leadership teams of competent people with
strong, diverse talents and expertise (Covey, Merrill & Covey, 2008).
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3.
Clearly
communicate high expectations and trusting colleagues to complete tasks
without micromanaging (Covey,
Merrill & Covey, 2008).
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4.
Meet with
teachers in one-on-one conferences to determine the professional development
(and other) needs of the faculty (Safir, 2008)
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4.
Coach teachers by giving honest, specific feedback
and asking reflective questions after formal and informal evaluations (Safir,
2008).
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5.
Balance advocacy and inquiry (Glover, 2007).
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5.
Use
dialogue and open discussions (dialogic leadership) to generate teacher
leadership (Glover, 2007).
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6.
Fight the temptation to rescue teachers from
problems immediately. Instead, prompt
them into debriefings to help them determine “what went wrong” and how to fix
it (Felder, 1993).
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6.
Provide new
teachers with more experienced mentors in their grade levels or departments
(Felder, 1993).
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7.
Operate under a sense of continuous improvement-
the opposite of complacency (Danielson, 2006).
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7.
Foster peer observations among teachers in order
to develop strong, valid, clear and unambiguous, and organized standards of
practice (Danielson, 2006).
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8.
Facilitate broad-based participation, which
invites all stakeholders into conversations about school needs and
improvements (Lambert, 2003).
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8.
Support teachers in developing short and
long-range plans through a combination of one-on-one conversations,
inquiring, partnering, and sustaining success (Lambert, 2003).
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9.
Create a school data team to determine staff and
professional development needs (Hooker, 2008).
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9.
Differentiate professional development trainings
by providing a wide variety of need-based topics through a combination of
standardized, site-based, in-house, and self-directed workshops (Hooker,
2008).
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10.
Ensure that each new endeavor breeds the qualities
of the highest level of intrinsic motivation: success, volition, value, and
enjoyment (Wlodkowski, 1999).
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10.
Provide opportunities to inspire and deepen each staff
member’s intrinsic motivation and knowledge base (Wlodkowski, 1999).
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Practicing these strategies through
times of both great achievement and extreme difficulty can help transition any
school from failure to prosperity, and once the transition is complete, the
ultimate task for schools becomes maintaining the high achievement and
continuing to improve. Research on
sustaining school improvement and prosperity proliferates in the world of
education. Linda Lambert, an expert in
developing teacher leaders and sustaining school improvement maintains that
building a new, positive school culture requires these twenty practices:
principals must engage in discussion with others about leadership, asking
others to take on leadership roles and responsibilities, and helping others
become successful in leadership roles.
During transition, a school leader must progress by giving others
opportunities to be leaders through encouragement, support, and involvement,
recognizing the leadership efforts of others, modeling and teaching leadership
skills, and building relationships that encourage leadership. Once a school realizes its objectives, the
administration must work hard to keep the structures in place that foster
leadership. These include showcasing
leaders in leadership roles, promoting leadership with and among others,
providing time, training, and resources for new teachers and staff to be
leaders, constantly restate the mission and goal for the school, and providing
encouragement through celebrations and fun activities (Lambert, 2003).
Sustaining high achievement once the
school’s goals are met can present new difficulties, and school leaders must
continually ask very specific, hard questions about what works, and evaluate
the feedback. With help from my peers, I
have developed a list of questions that will guide my school’s improvement
sustainment:
- How are we monitoring and adjusting the effectiveness of the
school improvement team?
- What methods of accountability are being used for the school
improvement team?
- How are we facilitating collaboration during the school day?
- What does our typical school improvement team meeting look like,
and how does it reflect the overall culture of our school?
- What role does data play in our school improvement process?
- When and how do we celebrate our accomplishments?
Once I become a
principal of a school in need of positive transitions, I will use these
researched best practices to drive my leadership methods through
transformation, distribution, and empowerment.
I will surround myself with brilliant, competent, talented individuals
who will help guide our journey to becoming a model school of excellence where
teachers, parents, students, and the community thrives, and I will continue to
learn and add to my list of best practices.
References
Covey, S. M. R., Merrill, R. R., & Covey, S. R. (2008). The speed of trust, the one thing
that changes everything. New York: Free Press.
Danielson, C. (2006). Teacher
leadership that strengthens professional practice. ASCD.
DuFour, R., & Eaker, R. E. (1998). Professional learning communities
at work, best practices for enhancing student achievement. Solution Tree.
Felder, Richard (1993).
Teaching teachers to teach: The
case for mentoring. Chemical
Engineering Education, 27(3), 176-177.
Retrieved from http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Columns/Mentoring.html
Glover, E (2007). Real Principals Listen. Educational Leadership, 65 (1), 60-64.
Hooker, M. (2008). Models
and best practices in teacher professional development. Retrieved from http://www.gesci.org/old/files/docman/Teacher_Professional_Development_Models.pdf
Johnson,
S., & Donaldson, M. (2007). Overcoming the Obstacles to Leadership.
Educational Leadership, 65(1), 8-13.
Lambert, L. (2003). Leadership
capacity for lasting school improvement. Alexandria, VA: Association for
Supervision & Curriculum Development.
Lashway, L. (2003). Transforming principal preparation.
Retrieved from https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/jspui/bitstream/1794/3395/1/digest165.pdf
Reeves, D. B. (2010). Transforming
professional development into student results. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Smith, S. C., & Piele, P. K. (2006). School leadership, handbook for
excellence in student learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Pr.
Safir, S. (2008, July 30). Teaching
how to teach: Coaching tips from a former principal. Retrieved from
http://www.edutopia.org/how-to-instructional-coaching-tips
Wlodkowski, R. (1999). Motivating
adult learners: Learner motivation and principals of motivating instruction.
Informally published manuscript, The Distance Education Instructional Design
Project, University of Florida, Retrieved from http://www.umsl.edu/services/ctl/DEID/destination2adultlearning/motivate.pdf
