An Open Letter to Principals: Five Leadership Strategies for the New Year
By Eric Sheninger
8Eric Sheninger is principal of New Milford High School and the subject of a recent article in USAToday on social media in the classroom. He is the author of Communicating & Connecting With Social Media. You can also follow him on Twitter at NMHS_Prinicipal.
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As the calendar turns to August, school leaders across the country are meticulously planning for the upcoming year. This process has become more difficult as mounting challenges such as budget cuts and what seems like a relentless attack on the profession of education have taken their toll on staff morale. With this being said, quality leadership becomes even more essential in order to cultivate a school culture whose primary focus is on the learning and achievement of each and every student.
Here are some of my leadership strategies for making change during challenging times. Please feel free to share any other ideas in the comments section below.
Strategy One: Make No Excuses
Success in this endeavor relies on us to take a no-excuse attitude. Ask yourself this: What am I prepared to do to improve all facets of my school? How will I accomplish more with less? Think and reflect upon the ways to accomplish the goals you set as opposed to the challenges, roadblocks, and pushback you will experience. These are all common complications that arise during the change process and should not be used as excuses not to push forward.
We must be the pillars of our respective institutions and focus on solutions rather than problems. Succumbing to the negative rhetoric, abiding by the status quo, and having a bunker mentality will do nothing to initiate needed changes in our building to improve teaching and learning.
Each day we are afforded an opportunity to make a positive difference in the lives of our students through our role as education leaders. Our passion for helping all students learn and assisting staff in their growth should be the driving motivational force to make our schools the best they can be, regardless of the obstacles. Everything is changing -- the world, learners, job market, technology, access to information -- the sad reality though is that schools are not. We need to be catalysts to drive this change!
Tip: Meet with your administrative team and teacher leaders prior to the start of the school year to identify issues where excuses routinely arise. Begin to map out collective responses focusing on positive solutions to these problems.
Strategy Two: Model a Vision for Excellence
Begin by articulating a clear vision to your staff. The consensus has to be that every student can and should learn. Getting your entire staff to embrace this concept is at the heart of effective leadership. I prefer to use the word “embrace” rather than “buy-in" -- a more commonly used word synonymous with change efforts. We should not be trying to sell our staffs on pedagogical techniques and other initiatives that will better prepare our students for success once they graduate.
In order to promote the embracing of new ideas, strategies, and techniques we need to collaboratively work with staff to transform traditional classroom environments into vibrant learning communities where all students are authentically engaged.
Tip: Engage your staff in a brainstorming session during the first faculty meeting in order to develop a collective vision on how to transform the school for the betterment of all students.
Strategy Three: Embrace 21st Century Pedagogy and Curriculum
A vision begins with talk, but will only become reality with action. As society evolves due to advances in technology, we as principals must ensure that instruction follows suit or we run the risk of our schools becoming irrelevant. By irrelevant I am referring to our ability to prepare students with the skills to think critically, solve problems, demonstrate learning through creation, and compete in a global society.
As instructional leaders, it is our primary responsibility to observe and evaluate instruction. With this comes the responsibility to ensure that teachers are provided the freedom to take risks, knowledge of effective practices, resources to make it happen, and flexibility to incorporate innovative teaching strategies. With these parameters in place, principals must then be able to consistently identify, foster, support, and promote 21st century pedagogy.
Inherent within this shift is the need to re-evaluate the curriculum as the real-time web and information age present new challenges to instruction and student engagement. The time is now to lay the foundation to ensure that our students evolve into critical consumers of content, understand the importance of digital citizenship, as well as possess the ability to create, analyze, and interpret an array of media messages.
Tip: Start the year off by gathering key stakeholders to collaboratively revise your curriculum to emphasize essential skills necessary for today's learners to excel beyond your walls.
Strategy Four: Breathe Life Into Professional Development
Most teachers cringe when they hear the words “professional development” and rightfully so. The traditional model utilized by many schools forces educators into structured silos based solely on district and school goals while ignoring staff interests and passions. PD can be inspiring and fun when people are free to follow these interests and develop their own support communities.
Tip: If you thirst for an innovative culture focused on student achievement, begin the process of transitioning to Professional Learning Communities (PLC's). To take it a step further, model and encourage your staff to form their own Personal Learning Network (PLN). Then step back, give up some control, and watch your staff thrive as their passion fuels a transformation of the teaching and learning culture at your school.
Strategy Five: Stay Connected
Principals need support -- here are some resources to help you stay connected to others making change:
•A Principal's Reflections My blog
•Connected Principals Community and resources for principals
•Burlington High School Principal's Blog Patrick Larkin's Blog
•#cpchat Connected principals chat on Twitter.
•#edchat Educator chat on Twitter
•What is Edchat?
•Administrators Discussion group on Edutopia
•Educators PLN
•Future of Education Steve Hargadon's interview series with leading educators
•Edcamp a series of "unconferences" around the world
Change begins with a no-excuse mentality. Don't waste one more minute pondering what could be. There is a revolution going on right now in learning, and it is up to us to lead the way. Please share any leadership strategies that are making a difference in your building.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
New teachers...
New Teachers: Are You in It for the Long Haul?
By Jaime O’Neill
Welcome, newbies, to the wonderful world of education. You are now embarked upon that career for which you’ve been preparing for so long. You’ve jumped through the hoops, sat through classes that often seemed irrelevant and/or stultifyingly dull. You’ve taken those horrible courses in education and teacher training that were required of you, those classes that took time away from gaining greater command of the discipline you were preparing to teach. And, despite the fact that those education classes offered almost nothing, you sat through them, nonetheless, demonstrating to all future employers that you have what it takes to deal with the myriad pointless faculty meetings and in-service breakout sessions that lie ahead. Should you find that you don’t like teaching, you can, of course, change course and head into the better-paid realms of administration, where a tolerance for wasting vast amounts of time in meetings is absolutely central to the work you will do.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, since you’ve only just begun and already I’ve got you bailing out.
The temptation to bail out is, however, one of the hallmarks of your new career. A bad student, a bad class, a paranoia-prompting administrative overseer, or the mere drudgery of the paperwork that now takes up so much of your time will have you considering other occupations nearly every week. When the stress of meeting a big and ill-defined spectrum of expectations leads you to pour one more glass of wine each night than you know is good for you, you’ll surely think that a career in retail sales might be a better alternative than taking attitude from a kid whose chief concern is the current state of his complexion, not your precious words of wisdom.
For some of you, that kid, or some other catalyst, will drive you out of the classroom. For those who stay, it won’t help your dedication or your motivation to find your job threatened each and every year when the annual state budget reveals once more that big cuts to education are coming, that you’ve been pink slipped until or unless there’s a last-minute reprieve. That yearly panic will cause you to wonder why you ever went into teaching in the first place, and you will surely make plans to seek other employment with each mention of just how precarious your employment is.
If you manage to avoid losing your job for budgetary reasons, many of you are in for the duration. Dedication, or the force of habit, will keep you coming back, year in and year out, as you gradually morph into some version of those teachers you yourself once had: people with impossibly faulty senses of style, or ear hair, or other focal points of ridicule that served to amuse you and your middle school peers back when you were a kid.
But what separates you now from the pack of twerps in front of you is that you're older and wiser; you’ve got perspective, skills, and insights to share. Having once sat where they sit, you know how much posturing is going on, how much insecurity they possess despite the attitudes they cop. You also know the challenges they face, the rockiness of the road that lies ahead, and how many ways there are for them to spin out and crash.
If you stay, you’ll harden yourself against the whispered derision, the groans when you explain an assignment, and the student excuses you’ve heard over and over—excuses you may once have offered to one or more of your own teachers. You’ll soldier on through days that seem interminable, through semesters in which little you try seems to work, through years that can seem like decades.
And you’ll keep up that work, and re-steel your resolve because there are those days when things click into place, when a face lights with understanding, or an exchange with a class makes even you see an idea in a new light. You’ll keep up that work because your students frequently remind you of just what it feels like to learn new things, and to experience the sense of growth that comes with knowing more.
You will reach the end of each academic year feeling somewhat spent, but exhilarated, and you will return when classes resume the following fall because you know the satisfaction that comes with doing work that can make a difference in people’s lives, that offers you a chance to make small but meaningful contribution to the future.
You will return because, unlike so many other jobs, teaching allows for repeated chances to get it right, to learn from the things that didn’t work, to use your brain, your creativity, and your full range of talents to invent new and better ways of doing it.
Despite administrators who often have priorities that conflict with real learning, despite the emphasis on testing and the educational fads that get trotted out by politicians and educrats who seldom get near actual students, you will return because you have a growing suspicion you are needed, and the feeling of being needed isn’t always easy to come by.
You will return because, when it is all said and done, you are a teacher. You didn’t choose this profession; it chose you. It picked you out when you were a student, selected you because getting rich wasn’t your highest priority, because you were absorbed by the subject you now teach, because you had a teacher who made you want to be a teacher—one who stirred your interests, fired your passion to learn, and helped you find your way.
Now you want to help your students find their way. You can’t get enough of doing that. You won’t get enough of doing that, not this year, not next year, because there is never enough of helping students if you’re a teacher.
And, if you made it this far, the chances are you're a teacher.
By Jaime O’Neill
Welcome, newbies, to the wonderful world of education. You are now embarked upon that career for which you’ve been preparing for so long. You’ve jumped through the hoops, sat through classes that often seemed irrelevant and/or stultifyingly dull. You’ve taken those horrible courses in education and teacher training that were required of you, those classes that took time away from gaining greater command of the discipline you were preparing to teach. And, despite the fact that those education classes offered almost nothing, you sat through them, nonetheless, demonstrating to all future employers that you have what it takes to deal with the myriad pointless faculty meetings and in-service breakout sessions that lie ahead. Should you find that you don’t like teaching, you can, of course, change course and head into the better-paid realms of administration, where a tolerance for wasting vast amounts of time in meetings is absolutely central to the work you will do.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, since you’ve only just begun and already I’ve got you bailing out.
The temptation to bail out is, however, one of the hallmarks of your new career. A bad student, a bad class, a paranoia-prompting administrative overseer, or the mere drudgery of the paperwork that now takes up so much of your time will have you considering other occupations nearly every week. When the stress of meeting a big and ill-defined spectrum of expectations leads you to pour one more glass of wine each night than you know is good for you, you’ll surely think that a career in retail sales might be a better alternative than taking attitude from a kid whose chief concern is the current state of his complexion, not your precious words of wisdom.
For some of you, that kid, or some other catalyst, will drive you out of the classroom. For those who stay, it won’t help your dedication or your motivation to find your job threatened each and every year when the annual state budget reveals once more that big cuts to education are coming, that you’ve been pink slipped until or unless there’s a last-minute reprieve. That yearly panic will cause you to wonder why you ever went into teaching in the first place, and you will surely make plans to seek other employment with each mention of just how precarious your employment is.
If you manage to avoid losing your job for budgetary reasons, many of you are in for the duration. Dedication, or the force of habit, will keep you coming back, year in and year out, as you gradually morph into some version of those teachers you yourself once had: people with impossibly faulty senses of style, or ear hair, or other focal points of ridicule that served to amuse you and your middle school peers back when you were a kid.
But what separates you now from the pack of twerps in front of you is that you're older and wiser; you’ve got perspective, skills, and insights to share. Having once sat where they sit, you know how much posturing is going on, how much insecurity they possess despite the attitudes they cop. You also know the challenges they face, the rockiness of the road that lies ahead, and how many ways there are for them to spin out and crash.
If you stay, you’ll harden yourself against the whispered derision, the groans when you explain an assignment, and the student excuses you’ve heard over and over—excuses you may once have offered to one or more of your own teachers. You’ll soldier on through days that seem interminable, through semesters in which little you try seems to work, through years that can seem like decades.
And you’ll keep up that work, and re-steel your resolve because there are those days when things click into place, when a face lights with understanding, or an exchange with a class makes even you see an idea in a new light. You’ll keep up that work because your students frequently remind you of just what it feels like to learn new things, and to experience the sense of growth that comes with knowing more.
You will reach the end of each academic year feeling somewhat spent, but exhilarated, and you will return when classes resume the following fall because you know the satisfaction that comes with doing work that can make a difference in people’s lives, that offers you a chance to make small but meaningful contribution to the future.
You will return because, unlike so many other jobs, teaching allows for repeated chances to get it right, to learn from the things that didn’t work, to use your brain, your creativity, and your full range of talents to invent new and better ways of doing it.
Despite administrators who often have priorities that conflict with real learning, despite the emphasis on testing and the educational fads that get trotted out by politicians and educrats who seldom get near actual students, you will return because you have a growing suspicion you are needed, and the feeling of being needed isn’t always easy to come by.
You will return because, when it is all said and done, you are a teacher. You didn’t choose this profession; it chose you. It picked you out when you were a student, selected you because getting rich wasn’t your highest priority, because you were absorbed by the subject you now teach, because you had a teacher who made you want to be a teacher—one who stirred your interests, fired your passion to learn, and helped you find your way.
Now you want to help your students find their way. You can’t get enough of doing that. You won’t get enough of doing that, not this year, not next year, because there is never enough of helping students if you’re a teacher.
And, if you made it this far, the chances are you're a teacher.
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