What Principals Need
to Lead School Reform
Most school districts prepare principals to be managers of bureaucracies,
not leaders of school reform.
Researcher Barbara Neufeld of Education Matters, Inc. reached this conclusion
after studying the work of middle school principals in school districts
with Clark Foundation school reform grants. If principals are going to be
leaders of school reform, Neufeld says, they must know how to:
- Develop and support teams of teachers who work together;
- Show the school how to set goals and plan effective strategies;
- Make the school a place where teachers have the freedom and the support
they need to find the best ways to teach;
- Take a measure of the progress of reform.
How do principals learn to do these things? They need wise mentors, a good
professional development program, and lots of practice. Principals in Chattanooga
and other Clark-supported districts have had some of this: they've begun
to work more with teachers in planning groups, they've been shadowed and
critiqued by outside experts, and they've taken part in professional conferences.
They've gained some insight into what it means to initiate and sustain change.
But Neufeld reports that these experiences have been limited and are far
outweighed by the training principals receive to be managers of bureaucracies--and
the time they must spend managing the mundane affairs of school life.
Principals have learned a lot about assessing reform, Neufeld found, but
they have had little time to try out the new ideas. As time passes without
the opportunity to apply their new knowledge principals tend to lose interest
in assessment and return to routine ways of thinking about success and failure.
Second, the principals have not yet learned how to create what Clark consultant
Don Rollie describes as "faculty-ness." Rollie, who is a nationally
recognized leadership consultant, uses the term "faculty-ness"
to describe the sense of partnership among professional workers that is
familiar in successful small businesses and many college faculties. "Faculty-ness"
is achieved with teachers have formed a cohesive group working toward common
goals.
Neufeld also found that while principals are relying more on planning, they
are uncertain about how to use planning processes most effectively.
Finally, Neufeld says that principals in Chattanooga and other Clark-supported
districts have not made much headway in creating a "learning community"
where principals and teachers can critique each other's work in an atmosphere
of trust and support.
More principals recognize the importance of creating such a community, where
teachers assume the responsibility to help each other and to share knowledge,
but few principals have the experience (and sometimes lack the personalities)
necessary to make such a large change in their home schools.
Like teachers, principals have had the "introductory course" in
many areas of school reform, but they haven't had much follow-up. Neufeld
offers these ideas to improve principal leadership for reform:
- Districts need to establish benchmarks of quality principal performance.
- Central offices must be less attentive to the management side of the
principalship and more open to real educational leadership.
- Principals' professional development cannot be the same for all principals
in a school district.
- Principals need to learn as much about central office perspectives
as the central office needs to learn about principals' perspectives.
- Central office leaders themselves need to learn more about kinds of
school leadership that is necessary for successful middle school reform.#
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