Principles of good principals
Effective leadership brings a board’s vision to the school site level
By:
Pamela Martineau
Published: November 15, 2011
Imagine answering a job ad that reads like this: Wanted—A “visionary leader” who can oversee a staff of about 100, handle multimillion-dollar budgets, design curriculum for numerous subject areas, effectively mete out discipline to employees and minors, develop professional learning communities, maintain a safe working environment, build rapport with parents and children and lift test scores of underperforming students. Oh, and if test scores don’t rise high enough or fast enough—you’re fired.
That’s the job description for today’s principal in this era of education reform, where, increasingly, school site leaders are required to act as change agents—or are told to find a new job.
The importance of effective school principals to school reform is well-documented. Indeed, replacing the school principal is required in two of the four reform models laid out by the U.S. Department of Education. But just what makes a school principal an effective change agent, and how can a school board and district administrators assist in pushing their top site leaders to excellence? Many district and board leaders say it’s all about vision, building trust with staff and developing programs using a strong understanding of best practices in curriculum and instruction. If a principal develops these three areas of leadership, positive changes on campus should follow, they say.
And school boards need to develop the vision for the school with the help of the community, say school leaders. “You need to develop a really clear vision of what you want the school to be,” says Kathy Kinley, a former board member of the Chaffey Joint Union High School District east of Los Angeles who’s also a retired middle school principal and a former president of CSBA. “And you need to listen to the community, before you formulate the vision.”
Adds Jan Christensen, superintendent of Redwood City School District in the San Francisco Bay Area: “You have to be well-versed in curriculum and instruction practices and know what good practices and good student engagement look like—and model it,” says Christensen. “Go into classrooms and perhaps demonstrate strategies yourself.”
In schools throughout California, effective principals are implementing those practical approaches and more, as the examples that follow illustrate.
‘Rowing together’ in Ramona
Across the state, there are school principals garnering accolades and attention for driving up student test scores and transforming educational life on campuses. One of them is Linda Solis, who is in her 18th year at Olive Peirce Middle School in San Diego County’s Ramona Unified School District. Her school of about 850 students, which is recognized as a National Blue Ribbon and California Distinguished School, scored an 835 on its 2010 Academic Performance Index and has enjoyed nine years of continued growth in its ranking—despite having roughly 30 percent of its students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, a sign of socioeconomic stress. Earlier this fall, 40 principals from throughout the United States toured Olive Peirce to view its fruitful learning environment firsthand.
Talk to Solis about school reform and her response most likely will include a reference to “re-culturing” a school campus from a traditional model to one of professional learning communities. She says “Professional Learning Communities at Work: Best Practices for Enhancing Student Achievement,” the book by Richard DuFour and Robert Eaker, became her “road map.”
“I used to be principal of 45 CEOs,” Solis says of how teachers used to act at her school. “They had their own parking spaces, their own vision, their own rules. The only thing they had in common was their textbooks.”
Now at Olive Peirce, teachers in common subject areas are required to work together on lesson plans. Every teacher in the same content area has the same prep period to do this. Lesson plans are created by teacher teams on a template. When finished, the plans are emailed out to the principal, teachers and students every Friday afternoon. Every department and teacher has a Web page. Lesson plans must include learning targets and learning standards written in “kid-friendly” language so students clearly know what is required of them.
“It’s like having their own target GPS,” Solis says of students’ understanding of their learning process. “It tells them where they are going and how they are going to get there.”
Solis says the strict structure she’s helped to create at the school is a key factor in helping to lead students and teachers to success. “I believe structure wins every time,” she says. Teachers at Olive Peirce are required to attend two meetings a month after school for teacher collaboration, where teachers talk about classroom best practices and model them.
“We don’t have faculty meetings and I don’t do memos,” says Solis.
Solis says that part of “re-culturing” the school was changing its language. She avoids saying “my school” or “my staff” and instead uses the words “team” or “we” as much as possible. They don’t use the term “homework,” but instead say “practice opportunities.” Instead of “substitute teacher,” the school uses “guest teacher.” The school uses symbolic language to describe its subject matter teams. They have names such as “dolphins,” “oceans,” “waves” and “swells,” to maintain the metaphor of “rowing together.”
Solis says she also works to create a sense of safety among staff.
“Our teachers sit and look at their scores together,” says Solis. “There is no fear, no sense of, ‘I’m in trouble.’ ”
Getting ‘buy-in’ in Calaveras
Building a sense of “buy-in” for school change among teachers is critical to success, several principals and superintendents report.
Christine Linder, principal at Avery Middle School in the Vallecito Union School District in Calaveras County, says she would have been “run out of town” by her staff “if I had come in and said ‘you’re going to do it my way.’ ”
“I went slowly and talked to them,” says Linder. “I think you have to build relationships and you have to build credibility. … You need to develop a sense of trust. I didn’t come in here and say, ‘I have the recipe and the formula and you all have to get on board.’ ”
Avery Middle School is recognized by Apple Inc. as an Apple Distinguished School, in part because of its embrace of technology. Linder was instrumental in the decision to buy iPads for the entire school. The tablets are used extensively throughout the school day. The shift to computers required retooling of instructional strategies by the staff, but Linder she says she got the buy-in by engaging the teachers in the process of revamping curriculum and goals.
“I said, ‘Let’s forget the federal targets and growth API. Let’s just have a conversation and decide what is a reasonable amount of kids [for our school] to have at grade level and above,’” says Linder. Teachers and administrators decided that seven or eight kids out of 10 should be at grade level or above in math. About 55 percent of the school’s kids had been at grade level or above in that subject area. Under the new approach, it made its target within two years.
Linder credits modeling and guided instruction—to teachers—in best practices of standards-based learning and assessment. That’s something that she thinks does not happen enough on other school campuses.
“There’s no modeling,” Linder says of those other schools. “We never go through the five-step lesson plan with the adults we want to do this.”
Professional development on the peninsula
Michelle Griffith, principal at Garfield Elementary in the Redwood City School District on the San Francisco Peninsula, also is a firm believer in modeling good instruction for her staff. Griffith pulled the district’s Taft Community School (the last elementary school she headed) out of Program Improvement under the federal No Child Left Behind Act and is now in her second year of revamping Garfield, which was a charter school and now is back in the fold of the district.
“My role as the principal is I’m the curriculum and instructional leader, first and foremost,” says Griffith. “I have a vision where the school is going, and I’m guiding that vision.”
Griffith says she works to build an educational environment where staff are “learners improving their craft.” To that end, she brings professional development to the school site. She even went so far as to become certified in the proprietary Cord Applied Mathematics program and led professional development seminars at the school site. She says she offers Saturday trainings for educators, and most of the staff meetings are devoted to professional development in one area or another. Her school specifically focuses on another proprietary pedagogical program, Explicit Direct Instruction, but Griffith emphasizes that, whatever academic approach is used, success comes from modeling desirable methods and developing and adhering to expectations.
“You have to know what effective instruction looks like and be willing to do whatever it takes to get your staff there,” says Griffith. “And you have to be in classrooms all of the time to make a determination on staff development; otherwise, it’s a shot in the dark as to what you’re doing.”
All good principals know that running an effective school sometimes means letting teachers go when they aren’t living up to standards. It’s a tough call, but an important one, most principals report.
“I look for teachers who are willing to come for support,” says Griffith. “When I’m not seeing that kind of movement, I have no problem not keeping someone if they’re not tenured. … My students don’t have time to wait.”
Implementing the board’s vision
Students also don’t have time to wait if a principal is not moving their school forward or is not fitting in well with the community. Kinley, the retired principal and former school board member, says it’s important that a school board stand back and let its district administrators handle personnel problems involving principals. However, she cautions school boards that the vetting and selection process for hiring principals is a critically important role for the board; the process should be rigorous, she says, since the stakes are so high.
“The high school principalship especially is a highly visible role in the community,” Kinley stresses, “so it’s important who gets selected in a principal role in the first place.”
Kinley embraces the leadership model of the principal as coach, someone who is a firm but caring leader willing to take the time to guide teachers and others to achieve their best.
“You need to be perceived as someone who is really trying to help, not someone who is feared,” she says.
Too often, principals get into trouble when they come in as newcomers, implement a vision without buy-in or input from their staff, and move too quickly to change things.
“Every school community has a unique set of teachers, staff and families,” says Frank Porter, superintendent of Twin Rivers Unified School District near Sacramento. “You have to start by knowing what’s in place and working. You have to build rapport and trust with the team you’re working with. Sometimes principals rush in too quickly to make changes, and they haven’t built enough understanding and support with teachers and families to build commitment.
“To have transformational change, you have to take time to build on what’s going well.” Porter adds. “Otherwise people are going to respond with opposition or tacit compliance, rather than transformational change.”
Kinley also stresses that ultimately, it is the school board that sets the vision for the district—and individual schools—and a principal’s role is to implement a vision at school sites that reflects the board’s position.
“The board establishes the overall parameters, then the principal moves the school toward the district’s vision,” says Kinley. “The principal needs to understand where the board is coming from.”
Good leadership takes time
And, increasingly, principals—and educators and local governance teams—need to understand where policymakers and education researchers are headed when it comes to evaluation systems. Much the same way that teacher evaluations are garnering greater attention nationally, principal evaluations are coming under a similar spotlight. Better standards for principal evaluation, after all, can help district administrators help principals grow as school leaders. But researchers report that districts appear to have a long way to go in strengthening principal evaluation systems.
“A Brief Overview of Principal Evaluation Literature,” released earlier this year by the education think tank WestEd, finds that evaluation practices vary greatly within and across schools and districts. The principal evaluations are usually conducted by district administrators “who have little or no specific policy guidance or training,” Karen Kearney and Nancy Sanders report. The process often reflects “individual evaluator perspectives,” and evaluator practices are “largely decoupled from state and district goals for school improvement and increased student learning.”
The study recommends that evaluations of principals be used “formatively” to improve leadership practices and that evaluators be trained in the evaluation process, which needs to be aligned with federal, state and district policy goals. The California Professional Standards for Educational Leaders, based in part on the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium Standards for School Leaders, can be an effective advisory tool for school administrators when they are developing their district’s principal evaluation templates.
Kinley, the former school board member and principal, offers another bit of advice on principal leadership—something that is not codified in state or federal standards: Good leadership develops over time, she stresses.
“Often, principals need to be given the time to implement new programs,” says Kinley. “It might take several years to turn the school around.”
Pamela Martineau is a frequent contributor to California Schools.
Resources on effective principles
‘A Brief Overview of Principal Evaluation Literature’
www.wested.org/online_pubs/resource1108.pdf
This report from the California Comprehensive Assistance Center at WestEd surveys recent research and offers a framework for what to consider in selecting principal evaluation models.
‘California Professional Standards for Educational Leaders’
www.wested.org/online_pubs/cpsel_standards.pdf
This brief summary, developed by WestEd and the Association of California School Administrators, draws on the 2001 California Professional Standards for Educational Leaders that were developed by representatives of those groups and the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, California Department of Education and California colleges and universities.
Designing Principal Evaluation Systems: Research Guide to Decision-making
www.naesp.org/sites/default/files/PrincipalEvaluation_ExecutiveSummary.pdf
This report summarizing current research on the condition of principal evaluation systems and the relationship between principal evaluation and principals’ capacity to lead learning communities was developed by researchers from the American Institutes for Research and the Center for Research and Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins University, and prepared in collaboration with the National Association of Elementary School Principals (www.naesp.org).
Using Competencies To Improve School Turnaround Principal Success
www.publicimpact.com/school-principal-turnaround-competencies
This report from Public Impact, a national education policy and management consulting firm, was made possible by the University of Virginia School Turnaround Specialist Program. It “describes how using competencies that predict performance can improve turnaround principal selection, evaluation, and development, and summarizes prior research about how districts can create the right environment to increase school turnaround leader success.”
New Leaders for New Schools
www.nlns.org
This New York-based nonprofit recruits and trains school leaders.