Serving as a principal requires specific skills and characteristics that positively affect the school as a whole. Researchers now believe that what makes a great principal also makes a great school. Setting clear direction, mentorship and investment in professional development — these things matter in the classroom, at the school level and at the district level. Want to share a great resource?
Let us know at submissions eschoolmedia. Username or Email Address. In fact, the research indicates that school improvement is correlated with the principal as the key instructional leader. Effective principals focus on instruction by encouraging research-based strategies in discussions with teachers, spending time in classroom visitations, providing specific feedback to teachers, and providing time for teachers to collaborate on instruction. This includes such things as shortening administrative time to give teachers more planning time, encouraging lab sites, peer observations, grade-level meetings, and effective professional development.
Today, federal and state regulations insist on accountability for schools, and principals must learn to manage this data efficiently. There is demographic, achievement, instructional, and perceptual data that they have to deal with. They have to ask the right questions of the data, and use it in discussions with teachers.
It can also provide good information to parents and students. By using data judiciously, principals can drive the continuous improvement in their schools. They can identify gaps, inconsistencies, and needs. They can challenge staff to analyze the data and determine what practices to change based on the results. A principal must be an instructional leader to have the most impact on student learning and the culture of his or her school.
More details are found online. Report on the Wallace Foundation research on best practices. ASCD report, www. The key to effective focus on instructional excellence in your school is the tools and language that you use. Our Instructional Leadership Workshop will help you gain automaticity with them and take your administrative capability to the next level — and your school as well! Schedule a webinar today using our form. Previously, he taught English in middle school, high schools, and colleges in Illinois, Puerto Rico, and California.
He has edited national trade magazines and presented seminars nationwide for businesses and non-profit organizations. He believes words are a powerful educational tool for reporting, reflecting, and revealing.
Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Post comment. Skip to content. Facebook page opens in new window Twitter page opens in new window Pinterest page opens in new window Linkedin page opens in new window. Principals need to be able to differentiate effective and ineffective instructional approaches and make useful suggestions about what teachers might do differently.
People skills are about building and maintaining relationships: good communication skills, caring, and the capacity to build trust within the school community.
Skills related to the organization are those that would be necessary to run any complex entity, not just a school. These include data use, strategic thinking, and ability to allocate resources to advance school goals.
Effective principals draw on all three sets of skills to engage in the behaviors or practices that drive a successful school. Our review identified four sets of practices:.
The close work principals do with teachers to improve instructional practice has three dimensions. The first is leveraging teacher evaluation. High-quality evaluation systems center on structured, rubric-based teacher observations to improve teacher practice and student achievement. Principals are the linchpin of these systems, building buy-in, putting in the time to conduct observations, and taking care to ensure that ratings are accurate so that they can be acted on.
Second, and closely related, is feedback and coaching. Strong principals use what they observe in classrooms to give teachers useful feedback, which evidence suggests can raise teachers' impacts on their students. Third, effective principals use data to guide specific instructional decisions, drive the school's overall instructional program, inspire action around improvement, and monitor the school's progress toward its goals.
A robust school climate is associated with many benefits. For example, teachers' instructional effectiveness improves more rapidly in schools with strong professional climates and student test score growth is higher in schools where the climate features an academic focus. Principals can contribute to a positive school climate by helping teachers feel empowered and helping students feel safe, valued, and supported.
Principals draw on their emotional and social intelligence to foster a school environment that promotes trust, collaboration, engagement with data, and continuous improvement. Efforts to build a productive school environment extend to parents and other community stakeholders, too. Effective school leaders may go to great lengths to support and affirm the local community's culture, language, and traditions.
Collaboration around instruction and learning can drive student outcomes, but it doesn't happen by accident. Principals encourage it by ensuring common planning time for instructional teams and by setting up and maintaining high-functioning professional learning communities PLCs. PLC success varies not only across, but also within schools, so principals must be intentional in their design and continuously engage with all PLCs in their school.
They should explicitly connect them to other learning opportunities for teachers, like in-service trainings, and leverage the expertise of others in the school to push PLC work. The final area is strategic management of personnel and other resources. Strategic means that principals optimize how resources are used or allocated to support teaching and learning. Research documents several resources that successful principals manage strategically.
An example is time, either their own or the school's. The biggest resource a school has, however, is its people, and evidence is clear that strategic personnel management can push school improvement.
For one, principals who consistently hire strong teachers see higher school growth. To consistently hire well, principals have to make hiring decisions based on evidence about what makes teachers effective.
Strategic principals also recognize that some teachers may be more effective in some grades or with some groups of students, and they assign them accordingly. They also take care to disrupt patterns of assignment inequity—namely that low-achieving or low-income students often are assigned to less experienced or less effective teachers. Finally, good principals take steps to reduce overall teacher turnover in their buildings, especially among their best teachers. Another factor that drives principal success is that effective leaders bring an equity lens to their work.
Principals play an important role in the closing of achievement and opportunity gaps for historically marginalized groups. A growing body of mostly qualitative work demonstrates the channels through which principals' equity-oriented practices can serve these goals. For example, in working with teachers on instruction, equity-focused principals focus on alternative instructional approaches such as culturally responsive teaching to meet the learning needs of all learners in the building.
They engage teachers in specific professional development around serving the needs of marginalized populations. They communicate high expectations for teaching and learning of marginalized students. In building a school climate, they ensure that diverse students are—and feel—valued. They attend to disparities in how students from different groups are treated, such as addressing racial gaps in student discipline practices. They encourage collaboration not only within the school, but also with external stakeholders explicitly around meeting the needs of marginalized students.
Finally, they infuse equity into organization management practices, including ensuring that students have equal access to the school's strongest teachers, regardless of their background or status.
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