Fundamentals for the New Principalship: Things to Know and Do

Copyright © 2021 by Marvin J. Henderson, Ph.D.

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Rev. date: 12/08/2021

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CONTENTS

About the Author

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1 What Is Leadership?

Chapter 2 The Principalship

Chapter 3 A Case of Three Schools

Chapter 4 Knowing Yourself

Chapter 5 Knowing Your Administrative Team

Chapter 6 Knowing Your Faculty

Chapter 7 Knowing Your Students

Chapter 8 Knowing Your School’s Culture

Chapter 9 Knowing Your Parent Community

Chapter 10 Knowing Educational Emphases

Epilogue

References

This book is dedicated to my personal and professional families for their genuine care and appreciation of my knowledge and service to improve life experiences for others. To my colleagues, thank you for your kind words, collaboration, and friendship. I hope that my influence on your life has been as significant as your influence has been on mine. Because of the support of all of you, I have been relentless in my pursuit to give my best as I strive to be my best.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The author is a veteran educator who has served in many roles in public schools and other organizations. Over the years, he was a teacher, an assistant principal at the middle and high school levels for six years, before becoming a middle school principal. He later worked as a high school principal where he continued eight years as a high-performing school administrator. After achieving success in years of school-based leadership, he was appointed as an executive director with the responsibility of supervising principals in K-12 schools.

He served in the school district for thirty-one years until he retired and was subsequently employed at a college in another state for one year. There he served first as director of a learning center for five months and then as interim vice president for student affairs for the remaining seven months. After that period, he was hired as an associate professor in the college of education at a local university and served three years as the superintendent/director of the university’s developmental research school. He later returned to a public school district as an assistant superintendent for school management services. In that position, he supervised school principals and the leaders of special programs and sites, transportation, and food services departments. After five months, he was appointed as the deputy superintendent of schools and served eleven years as second-in-command of the school district until his second retirement.

The author holds a bachelor of science degree in speech pathology, a minor in psychology with certification in intellectual and motor disabilities; a master of education degree in educational leadership, and a doctor of philosophy degree (PhD) in educational leadership. Among his membership affiliations are the state’s Association of School Administrators, American Association of School Administrators, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, University Alumni Associations, several civic advisory boards, and a Greek letter fraternity.

PREFACE

We are all leaders, and we begin the leadership process early in life. We make decisions, judgments, and other choices that we feel will benefit us best. Most are easy, and if they happen to be the wrong decision, we can usually forgive ourselves and move on without consequence. The motives that influence our decisions at a young age are generally selfish. This quality that I will call the me value or what’s in it for me mindset becomes more obvious to us as we are integrated into larger secondary groups. Decisions of the secondary group, which differ from our own, may require compromise or more selflessness on our part. Compromise requires that we think of others as we process variables to make decisions. We learn by our experiences and soon develop the ability to put aside our personal preferences, biases, and prejudices to do what is in the best interest of the group, which is one of the fundamentals of leadership. Along the way, the leadership experiences shared by others allow us to grasp concepts at a more rapid pace. Understanding the information we absorb enables us to internalize it and make it our own. The degree to which we are successful with this particular process correlates with our potential for effectiveness as a leader of a group.

As much as we may have visualized ourselves as the leader of a large enterprise or as a member of administration in an organization, it is important that we take into account our own assets and liabilities. Either we were born with a good system of values and skills, which establish our moral compass and work ethic, or they are developed later in life by the influence of others who teach us values and work habits. Our ability to evaluate ourselves honestly in terms of our strengths and weaknesses is tantamount to effective growth in leadership. As the Shakespearean saying goes, To thine own self, be true. As soon as a deficit is realized, prudence dictates that something be done to remedy it. Most people do better when they know better.

INTRODUCTION

For the past fifteen years, I have focused my attention, almost exclusively, on leadership development for individuals who assume the critical position of school principal. As I observe the mass exodus of veteran administrators, the loss of valuable institutional knowledge concerns me. The profile of the new administrator is one of less experience than their predecessors, and there is limited evidence of organized efforts to close the gap in the learning curve. This has created a sense of urgency in school administration. A new principal’s understanding of the complexities of the position, increased accountability requirements, and day-to-day challenges are some of the factors that create concern. However, another critical factor—the lack of experience—presents major challenges to school districts across the country. This composition recommends a strategy to address the experience gap.

As a public education professional, I spent well over four decades as a teacher, school principal, and district level administrator. Beginning with the public’s call for more educational accountability, there has been a continuous period of reform and transformation in terms of what is taught to students, how it is taught, and by whom it is taught. School leadership has come under added scrutiny as principals, among others, are required to comply with the additional requirements while ensuring that schools operate effectively and efficiently.

Although new administrators have completed many years of preparation in colleges of education, the qualities and related skills necessary for effective leadership are not always acquired or mastered during classroom instruction. Competence in the generic skills of oral and written communication, school business management, and personnel administration is expected for principals; however, the many nuances of school operation can be learned best by time on the job. The question for me is simply this. How can we fill the experience gap and provide needed assistance to the new principal without undermining his or her authority and autonomy as the school leader?

Research confirms the benefits of mentoring and coaching. According to Horace McCormick (2014), program director at the University of North Carolina’s Executive Development Office, mentoring is a strategic tool that, when done right, can attract and retain high-potential talent and accelerate leadership development and readiness. Mentoring improves employee satisfaction, retention, and recruitment in an organization (Kessler 2010). It can also improve an organization’s diversity by increasing promotion rates for people from underrepresented groups like women, African Americans, Latinos, and Asians (DiversityInc 2014).

In this book, some of the competencies are discussed, which do not generally receive adequate attention but are necessary for effective leadership. While the information is not exhaustive or all-inclusive, it will hopefully shed some light on some of the fundamental skills needed by principals and other administrators in their quest for desired proficiency in leadership.

Most of us are familiar with the role of coach in relation to an athletic team or individual. The coach’s responsibility is to instruct, demonstrate, and develop an individual player’s ability by telling the player exactly what he or she is to do, play by play, in various situations and circumstances to increase chances for success. Unlike the athletic coach, the goal of a mentor/coach is not to direct or tell the principal what to do. Instead, a process of probing and questioning allows the principal to arrive at his or her own solutions to school issues and situations. The mentoring/coaching strategy is gaining popularity today as a way to fill the experience gap and loss of institutional knowledge in the profession. The mentor/coach model can be used by school districts to increase job readiness of new principals by assigning him or her a mentor/coach as a resource. This mentor/coaching model should be implemented in a way that does not create a burden or increase the difficulty of the mentee/principal’s job. The goal is to enhance his or her efforts by providing insights and perspectives. A caveat of the mentoring/coaching concept is that all discussions and collaborations between the mentor/coach and the mentee/principal are confidential.

During the 2018–2019 school term, I served as a mentor/coach for three middle school principals who were new to their respective school communities. I spent one full day per week with each principal, literally shadowing his or her every move. Lasting nine months, the experience was exciting and filled with a variety of challenging situations. Among general discussions, issues, and situations were those related to school staffing, teacher performance and evaluation, school budgeting, student performance, classroom management, student discipline, student activities, parental involvement, conferencing techniques, and other school-related issues. No school-related subjects or situations that they wanted to discuss were off-limits. The continuous sessions of probing and questioning in which we engaged were effective, enlightening, and productive.

Opportunities to provide mentor/coaches for mentee/principals should be considered by school districts as a strategy to assist principals in their new role. Mentor/coaches may be engaged to facilitate in-person (face-to-face) or virtual sessions for a prescribed periods and frequencies. Virtual sessions, if selected as a delivery system, may be conducted for individuals or groups. In addition to new principal/mentees, the mentor/coach concept may also be used with veteran or returning principals and other school administrators. The mentor/coaching experience is highly recommended as a strategy to bridge the experience gap and flatten the learning curve among principals as they attempt to establish and maintain high-performing schools. It is also a tremendous learning opportunity for both, the mentee/ principal and the mentor/coach, as they collaborate to ensure quality schools.

It must be stated, however, that the individual who will be mentored must have awareness of his or her own skills and abilities in the profession. The new principal’s learning curve will be steep and replete with challenges that do not wait for the development of competence. Therefore, it is imperative that the knowledge required for proficiency at various stages is developed as soon as possible, if lacking, utilizing all available resources. Having a mentor to assist him or her as he or she develops this proficiency would hasten growth in the position of principal leader.

Broadwell (1969), a management trainer, described a model that he named the four levels of teaching. Although the four stages are excellent categories to describe teaching, it is my position that they are also applicable for describing the stages of proficiency for new principals and other administrators. Progressively, each represents a level of growth toward overall proficiency. The four stages of competence from Broadwell’s model are unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence.

• Stage 1: unconscious incompetence. The individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognize the deficit. They may deny the usefulness of the skill. The individual must recognize their own incompetence, and the value of the new skill, before moving on to the next stage. The length of time an individual spends in this stage depends on the strength of the stimulus to learn.

• Stage 2: conscious incompetence. Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, they recognize the deficit, as well as the value of a new skill in addressing the deficit. Making mistakes can be integral to the learning process at this stage.

• Stage 3: conscious competence. The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires concentration. It may be broken down into steps, and there is heavy conscious involvement in executing the new skill.

• Stage 4: unconscious competence. The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it has become second nature and can be performed easily. As a result, the skill can be employed while executing another task. The individual may be able to teach it to others, depending upon how and when it was learned.

An awareness of his or her current stage of competence is important. It would be the mentor’s role to assist the new principal in the development of proficiency in his or her advancement from one stage to another. Ideally, the new principal would enter the demanding and consequential position at stage 4; however and unfortunately, this is not