Education Week - January 21, 2015 - Special Report - S10

S8 |
EDUCATION WEEK n
January 21, 2015
Shaping Strong School Leaders > www.edweek.org/go/principals
CONTINUED FROM PAGE S6
inception timeline, Maryland education officials
scrambled to assemble the syllabus for
the Promising Principals Academy.
To promote diversity of thought and experience,
the program organizers gave all the participants
behavioral assessments and ensured
that each group had members from urban, suburban,
and rural districts.
In December, the two-day retreat centered
on communication, including sessions focused
on managing and leveraging social and digital
media and responding to queries from reporters-common
issues that principals must be
prepared to deal with to be successful.
During one breakout session, the aspiring
principals used their iPads to record mock oncamera
interviews in response to a campus
crisis, such as students exchanging sexually
explicit text messages and images and school
shootings. The participants had one minute to
read and digest the scenarios before their colleagues
peppered them with questions.
By recording the interviews to review later,
the exercise provided the opportunity for peer
reflection and critique that have become the
program's hallmarks, the education department's
Mr. DeHart said.
"Much of this work is about adaptive leadership,
and emotional intelligence is necessary,"
said academy coach Nakia Nicholson, an educational
consultant and former principal in the
127,500-student Prince George's County, Md.,
school system.
The range of topics the participants tackle,
including managing staff, instructional leadership,
and using teacher evaluations to improve
students' performance, allows them
to determine if the daily demands of being
a principal is a good fit, said Ms. Nicholson,
who also worked as a principal manager in
the Baltimore district.
"It's like spinning a bunch of plates at one
time," she said.
Waiting in the Wings
Demand for principal preparation has spiked
over the past decade to the point where most
districts have some sort of training for aspiring
school leaders, said Mary Martin, an associate
professor of education at Winthrop University
in Rock Hill, S.C.
Most of the preparation now focuses on expanding
the responsibilities of assistant principals,
who traditionally were given a limited
range of responsibilities for school discipline
and operations, such as buses and food services.
To attract the best prospects, districts must
offer a broader view of the job, including training
that prepares aspiring principals to become
instructional leaders, Ms. Martin said.
Doug Anthony, the executive director
of the office of talent development for the
Prince George's County school system, has
seen the shift.
"The vice principal's role was to handle grunt
work-busing, behavioral challenges, cafeteria,"
Mr. Anthony said. "The assistant principal has
to be well-rounded and understand instruction
well enough" to prod teachers to foster better
results in the classroom.
The modern demands of the job require that
districts build a bench to ensure that schools
will have effective leaders waiting in the wings
when vacancies occur, Ms. Martin said.
She points to the Wallace Foundation's "Principal
Pipeline" initiative as a bellwether for districts
and states looking for models on how to
construct that bench.
"Principals need their own professional learning
communities," said Ms. Martin, a retired elementary
principal. "In turn, the aspiring leaders
have to be willing to grow and learn."
In 2011, Prince George's County was among
the districts that landed a five-year, $12.5
million grant from the New York City-based
foundation to measure the impact of recruiting
the most highly qualified and trained
principals into every school. (The Wallace
Foundation also supports coverage of school
leadership, arts education, and extended- and
expanded-learning time in Education Week.)
Similar efforts are underway in the districts
in New York City; Denver; Charlotte-Mecklenburg,
N.C.; Hillsborough County, Fla.; and
Gwinnett County, Ga.
Wallace embarked on the five-year, $75 million
investment across the six school systems
to support strategies to identify, train, evaluate,
and support principals.
Continuous Improvement
The key components of the initiative are role
definition of the principal and assistant principal;
high-quality training for aspiring leaders;
employment of only well-trained candidates;
and constant evaluation and on-the-job support.
In the past, when vacancies arose, it was
common practice for districts to bump assistant
principals into the top job by default with
little thought of training or preparation, said
Jody Spiro, the director of educational leadership
for the Wallace Foundation.
The participating districts have set up
systems to track the career paths of aspiring
principals. Prior to the grants, most districts
did not differentiate between assistant
principals who had aspirations to lead
a school from those were satisfied in their
current roles.
"Being an assistant principal is not the career
end," said Ms. Martin. "It's now a training
opportunity."
To avoid bottlenecks in the promotion process,
the districts also project principal vacancies
by grade level, lining up aspiring leaders
who may take on the top jobs five years down
the road. Wallace Foundation leaders see the
climb from assistant principal to principal
as a three- to five-year process, though some
high-fliers are exceptions.
The initiative also involves a new principal-evaluation
system, bonus pay for principals
who meet district performance goals,
and the use of outside coaches to help fullfledged
principals get even better.
In many districts, the training doesn't end
when assistant principals make the move
up: The Wallace Foundation grant also provides
aid to new principals navigating new
territory."The majority of folks need time,"
Mr. Anthony said. "When I became an assistant
principal, I found out how much I
don't know."
That's why Ms. Archelus, the acting principal
in Maryland's Promising Principals
Academy, decided to stick with the program
even after being bumped into the top job.
"If we want students and schools to succeed,
it's necessary to keep building capacity
in teachers and leaders," Ms. Archelus said.
"It would be a disservice to myself and the
community I serve if I just stopped." n
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Education Week - January 21, 2015 - Special Report

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