Education Week - Calendar of Events & Professional Development Directory - Spring 2013 - C4

FOCUS ON: LEADERSHIP

Principal Development Goes Back to School
New programs aim to give aspiring leaders
context-specific learning experiences

Greg Ruffing for Education Week

By Jaclyn Zubrzycki

Rituparna “Rita” Raichoudhuri, who is going through a one-year principal
residency at Wells Academy High School in Chicago, monitors students
as they head to class. Like a growing number of other aspiring principals
across the country, Ms. Raichoudhuri is getting much of her training
inside the kinds of schools where she is likely to end up working.

A growing number of principalpreparation initiatives are forsaking university classrooms in favor
of much more familiar training
grounds: the schools and districts
where those aspiring leaders will
end up working.
Through coaching and mentorship initiatives, residencies and
internships, and other new programs, both districts and university education schools are turning
their focus to building practical
readiness, in context, and offering
continued learning and support for
principals already on the job.
Traditional principal-training
programs “haven’t been as connected to the realities of the profession as they need to be,” says
Dick Flanary, the deputy executive
director of programs and services
for the National Association of Secondary School Principals, based in
Alexandria, Va. “Universities talk
about preparation, and school districts talk about readiness.”

National Teacher of the Year:
Educators Need Career Paths
By Liana Heitin
Rebecca Mieliwocki, the 2012 National Teacher of the Year,
is on a mission to give her profession a facelift. When she
received her award last April, the 7th grade science teacher
from Burbank, Calif., said she planned to use her yearlong
platform to help restore “dignity and admiration to teachers.”
She has also been outspoken about her support for tiered
career ladders—coupled with differentiated pay—as a way
to give teachers more career-advancement opportunities.
In the months since her selection, Mieliwocki has had no
shortage of influential audiences. She has given speeches
at several large, national conferences, discussed education
policy with governors, and sat down for a two-hour meeting
with arguably the country’s most influential education
funder, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
Education Week Teacher recently asked Mieliwocki about
her visions for the teaching profession and how she sees some
of the most pressing education issues playing out for teachers
across the country.
What are your strengths as a teacher? What would your
students say makes you different from other teachers?
I feel a tremendous responsibility to provide an education
that’s relevant to kids’ lives. I refuse to be the teacher that pulls
out from the shelf the dusty book and peels off another dated
worksheet and tries to make kids fill in the blanks. I just don’t
think that’s the world they live in. So it’s trying to combine an
intense delivery system that gives them both information and
knowledge that at the same time is lively and engaging and
relevant and real to their lives, which are very media-saturated, crazy wired and connected, vivid and psychedelic.
I’m also very attuned to what kids are going through.
There’s not enough language being devoted to helping kids
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navigate emotional terrain—and I teach middle school; it’s
all emotional terrain. For example, if there’s some misunderstanding, and you get some name-calling and shutting
down and anger, a lot of teachers would move on with the
lesson. But right then, what’s more important is these two
kids solving that beef. Because one way or another, it’s going
to ripple somewhere else. If I don’t handle it now in English
7, it’s going to flare up again in algebra. Or tonight on the Internet, on Facebook, a flame war is going to start. So instead
of letting that happen, why don’t I take just one minute right
now and talk about the solution, then move on?
What would be your definition of a teacher leader? Do you
consider yourself one? How?
First of all, teacher leaders see themselves as an important and vital part of something bigger than themselves.
A teacher leader doesn’t just see his or her class of 30 or
150 or seven, they see themselves as embedded in the fabric
of an entire school and believe that every kid is their kid.
They see themselves as on a quest to learn and improve. A
teacher leader is somebody that has thrown open the door
to the classroom, has invited in as many people as possible,
and has asked for feedback.
And a teacher leader expertly and elegantly finds ways to
speak difficult truths to the people that need to hear them.
Not in a negative way. A teacher leader touches another
teacher on the shoulder and says, “When I hear you talk
about your kids, it’s very negative. The standard that you
verbalize you’ve set for them is very low. I would like to hear
you talk about how your kids can do anything. When we give
little people a reason to reach, they will.” That conversation is
a very difficult one for professionals to have. But true leaders
are not afraid of that conversation because they’ve opened
themselves up to it in their own careers.

Education WEEk 2 0 1 3 CA LENDA R O F EV EN T S & P ROFESSIONAL DEVELOP MENT DIRECT ORY

Leadership-training programs
in Philadelphia; Chicago; Prince
George’s County, Md.; Gwinnett
County, Ga.; Denver; New York
City; and elsewhere all aim to
give aspiring principals—and
in some cases, even struggling
midcareer principals—contextspecific advice and support from
experienced educators. And, in a
similar vein, districts in Sarasota
County, Fla., in New York state’s
Hudson Valley region, and elsewhere have created homegrown
leadership academies and career
tracks to supplement universitybased principal-certification programs with hands-on experience,
mentoring programs, and training
in district-specific information and
initiatives.

Academies and Mentoring
“Homegrown programs often
set out to fill a gap” in the training provided by traditional principal-certification programs, says
Cheryl L. King, the director of

Tell me about your meeting with Bill Gates.
The thing that struck me the most was that, No. 1, he listened far more than he talked. I think he listened 95 percent of
the time and he scribbled notes furiously. And the second thing
that I noticed was that he’s fully engaged in the process, and he
shows it, by listening, by looking, making eye contact, smiling,
and just seeking to understand how we can be better, do better.
As you know, many teachers are critical of his involvement
in education, especially his support for teacher-evaluation
systems that rely on student-test scores. How do you
respond to that?
What I say is that I’m first and foremost a teacher and I
experience the same struggle and disappointment and frustration with my profession that they do. And if we as teachers
had the ability to transform education ourselves collectively,
and to get to a place where all of us feel we need to be, it
would have happened by now. But for whatever reason, we
haven’t gained the traction that unfortunately a gazillionaire
can get. It’s interesting that when teachers say we need to
improve schools, it floats dreamily to the ground. But when
Bill Gates says we need teacher reform and when Bill Gates
says, “I’d like us to have an effective, high-quality teacher in
every classroom and learn how to create that in every teacher
we already have,” people listen.
So I understand that people are skeptical. I understand they
want to know his agenda and his motives, but for right now,
he gets us the traction that we don’t have on our own. And
I’ll take that traction. He doesn’t have as much expertise as
teachers do but he has an open ear, I hope an open mind, and
a lot of money and resources and smart people to bring to the
table. We shouldn’t back away from that table, we should be
right there beside him.
The MetLife Survey of the American Teacher last year said
that teacher satisfaction has hit a low point. Is that what
you’re seeing? If so, what can we do to improve morale?
It’s such an oft-touted statistic. But when we talk about
morale, I’m not sure we’re talking about the joy that teachers
get out of the job they do. I’d say that’s a really strong num-

Education Week - Calendar of Events & Professional Development Directory - Spring 2013

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