Ask yourself, how many more important investments can a school board, superintendent or community make than the good health of its school principals and their leadership teams? If you know life inside of schools, it’s hard to disagree that the demands and stressors on school leaders today are unprecedented in the history of American education.
Yet, it’s amazing how very few leaders get the invaluable support they need. And for some who do get coaching support, it’s usually very short-term, and it's mostly focused on maintaining the status quo, keeping the trains running as they always have. It makes me wonder why this issue seems so invisible to so many.
Things Have Changed
But these days, if one were to check out the headlines from community newspapers around the country, we’d get a sample of new, additional issues on a principal’s plate: red v blue politics, parent controversies, woke or not-woke, LGBTQ+ issues, what’s in the library, sports eligibility, bathroom and cell phone policies. These issues were not in your grandfather’s newspaper nor seldom part of a principal’s life. These often-political confrontations wash over a school, are seldom easy to reconcile and are almost never part of a principal’s training. Issues like the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, cyber bullying, presidential politics, or, sadly, the death of a student, all require immediate responses. In many cases there are perceived winners and losers in these situations, and all parties live in the same communities and attend the same schools.
The Mental Health Challenge
As has been often mentioned in our ERC newsletters and alerts, these are incredibly challenging times for student’s mental health, placing a huge burden on schools not built or prepared for that work, but who must deal with it anyway. And such challenges extend across the spectrum to wealthier communities and to differing age groups. The Association of Children’s Hospitals has declared a mental health emergency! How many school boards know about that? How many are discussing it?
Principals must decide how best to keep up preventative systems and practices to avoid being mired in endless interventions which are time-consuming, require copious documentation, and disrupt the school’s smooth operation and focus on learning. Leaders also need to develop new partnerships within and beyond the school to help deal with the demand for services and to support students and families in the crucial “after-school” hours. Managing extensive partnerships is terra incognita for new and even seasoned principals. How do they fit that into an already demanding day? How do they decide what gives? --being in classrooms? sitting with students in the lunchroom? greeting buses and cruising hallways? supporting new initiatives or meeting with parents?
A Safe Haven to Be Thoughtful
We know that the principal’s office is a beehive. Most everything goes through there in a good school with an active leader. A leader’s schedule is almost always booked to the hilt, emails routinely top 80-100 a day and there are always drop-in’s to speak with “the boss”. By contract and tradition, principals must also devote countless hours to writing up teacher evaluations, often with precious little time to observe classrooms, provide feedback and have conversations about instruction or classroom environment. Everyone, especially parents and school boards, want issues solved yesterday and email and texting have made the expectation: “now”!
The problem-solving, root-cause analysis, scenario building, negotiations, and employing a sharp instructional eye are a high touch workload for leaders. They’re also incredibly time-consuming on top of a laundry list of administrative tasks. What we’ve seen increasingly is providing the necessary, consistent support is beyond the reach of a superintendent who might like to help by being somewhat available or employing an elder principal in the district assigned to “mentor”, which mostly means show them how the system currently works. People forget how hard it is to reveal your inner thinking to your boss(es). Asking for second opinions, confessing temporary uncertainty, seeking out a possible blind spot --am I missing something here?--are not the kinds of behaviors leaders want out in front of their boss or her/his minions, even though they’re the necessary hallmarks of reflection and deliberation that make for good leadership.
Many readers will know Difficult Conversations authors Doug Stone and Sheila Heen. In their follow-up book Thanks for the Feedback there’s a powerful chapter on the need for intimate help called “See Your Blind Spots”. One assertion stands out: “Nothing affects the learning culture of an organization more than the skill with which its executive team receives feedback”. (Penguin Group, NY, NY; chapter 4)
But We Already Have a Prepared Leader
School board members are likely thinking, either we have a principal already in place or we just spent a good deal of time finding the best one out there to join our district. We listened and probed and hired someone who’s ready to do the job. Why do we need to dedicate more time and resources to supporting them?
I have to believe it’s time for boards to step in, to weigh the costs and benefits and invest in the good health of their principals as private sector companies, sports teams, surgical hospitals and hedge funds routinely do. It’s possible that some board members have a rather outdated understanding of the role of today’s principal. So much has changed about the inner workings of schools, not to mention the larger sphere in which a leader operates. In most of today’s schools, principals must
deploy, support and manage a fleet of other administrators and specialists –assistant principals, special educators, registrars, literacy and numeracy coaches, IT specialists, student life deans, and behavioral personnel.
One of the comments we hear from our ERC coaches is that the principals they work with often say, “thanks for making me stop spinning around and pay attention to important stuff. The incoming is relentless, and I can get lost in the fog”. (One of our tools is the Eisenhower Matrix, which helps busy leaders think through the hurricane of incoming issues and tasks.)
Doesn’t A Coach Have to Know OUR District?
Of course, some familiarity with a particular school or district can be helpful to a coach but it’s not essential. What is essential for a coach to know are the many critical elements of school leadership. Every principal must know how to evaluate and manage staff, build a school schedule, find and hire staff, manage a range of meetings, communicate clearly to multiple stakeholders, develop and manage a budget, work with multiple stakeholders to develop and maintain vision for their school, collect and analyze various school data, help to develop standards and handbooks for staff and students, manage conflict, design professional development for school staff, monitor compliance with local, state and federal mandates and develop a safe and welcoming learning environment. This list is by no means exhaustive, but it illustrates that much of the work of school principals is common across most schools and at all levels of preschool to grade twelve. A coach who knows how to share, assess effectiveness, and improve these dozen or so responsibilities with a principal will be helpful and effective regardless of a school or districts’ demographics or unique characteristics.
Is Good Enough Good Enough?
In my experience, the best principals need support and want to improve. They see themselves as adult learners. They want to grow. They like real back-and-forth. They know there are few black-and-white decisions in the principalship, and they want regular opportunities for what we call critical friendship – someone rooting for me but who isn’t afraid to ask me hard questions. Wouldn’t a board or superintendent want a principal they might rate as a 6 or 7 on a 10-scale to be pushing for 8 or 9 status? And doesn’t that improvement translate to better learning, a satisfied professional community and more support for schools?
I’ve been a principal several times over and I’ve been coaching principals for 15 years now. There is no doubt in my mind that the help a coach provides to a principal even just a few hours a week can help them succeed. In most cases working harder, longer or faster is not the solution, even if it were possible. Working smarter is one possible alternative, one that is more likely to be achieved if a principal has a dedicated coach who knows deeply the work school leadership. When I first meet a principal, I tell them that I’ll be far more successful at helping them prevent problems than solving them after they’re in full-blown crisis mode. I want every principal I work with to think of me as their “thought partner”.
Time spent working with a coach to explore problems of practice, analyze issues and brainstorm solutions can actually save time and damage control and allow a leader to focus on the positive and more constructive elements of building a strong and healthy school community.
It’s time for a new era of support for school leaders, time for school boards, families and district leaders to understand the new realities and the new demands for both coaches and leaders.
Wayne R. Ogden has worked as a teacher, high school principal, assistant superintendent and superintendent. He coaches new and veteran leaders across New England. He is one of the co-authors of The Skillful Leader: Confronting Mediocre Teaching. Wayne is a METCO Board member, was a long-standing member of the Advisory Board for the Principal’s Center at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, and was a Founding Director of the Vermont Principals Center.
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