The Principles of Principal Preparation

Open the Pipeline, Dig New Wells

We need audacious experimentation that produces many different avenues for becoming trained and certified.

These avenues may include programs developed inside traditional institutions like universities, but should also include a wide range of innovative programs developed by non-profits, professional associations, and even the business community.

Prepare to Lead and Manage

When did these two attributes become exclusive?

The last thing our schools need is to be led by people who are encouraged to break some eggs, but who don’t know how to make an omelet.

Use a strong, positive culture to increase student achievement.

School culture is important in its ability to increase the organizational bandwidth, which then enables a school to tackle big challenges that lead to high student achievement. A positive school culture is not a goal by itself.

Leaders Remain HereLeaders Remain Here

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Lower Threshold for Change

Upper Threshold for Change

Leaders Operate HereLeaders Operate Here

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Upper Threshold for Change

“All in the family” depends on the family.

Pathology can exist in schools. Profound failure rates over generations lead to unconscious and unspoken feelings of shame.

There is pressure to maintain an organization’s dysfunctional homeostasis. Keeping it “all in the family” can lead school communities to wall themselves off from external interventions.

We need selection processes that increase the probability that the best candidate is selected even (especially) if that candidate spotlights the pathology that may be limiting student achievement.

Know Stuff

Leadership training is focused on developing dispositions, as well as cultivating an understanding of social systems and organizational change.

Craft knowledge is underemphasized because it is contextual and not entirely generic.

Specific knowledge about regulatory language, special education laws, budgetary processes, union negotiations, contracts, construction guidelines, frameworks for effective teaching, educational assessment and evaluation, distinguishing between good and bad research are all part of the “stuff” one needs to know to be effective; and it needs to be part of principal preparation programs.

Know Yourself

A principal will fail if he or she is not on a path to a high level of self-awareness about how personal needs, motivations, desires, and hungers can make him or her an accomplice in perpetuating dysfunction.

Principal preparation programs should include meaningful opportunities for sustained self-reflection with feedback.

This practice of self-reflection will lead principals to an understanding that who they are is evident wherever they go.

Images adapted from Waltzers and Ballroom Spy by Scottish artist Jack Vettriano

Balcony

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Dance floor

Reflection in Practice