A Million-Dollar Question about School Leadership

Before the pandemic, I prided myself in having a standing desk on wheels and spending my days as a principal out in the hallways, in classrooms, in the cafeteria, and out on the playground. I would eat my lunch while standing in our rotunda, the heart of the school, feeling guilty as droplets of juice fell on the tiled floor as I peeled my orange.

Before the pandemic, I didn’t have a chair at my desk in my office because when I was in there, I didn’t want to get comfortable. I knew that when I was NOT in my office, I was always in the right place at the right time. A leader cannot possibly know what teachers and students need unless she is out among them the majority of the day.

Before the pandemic, I felt like I was on my way to aligning my day-to-day leadership behaviors to the needs of the school community. The scales were beginning to tip toward spending more time proactively planning and a little less time being reactive. Rather than running around putting out fires, I was able to have deep conversations with teachers about pedagogy, evidence of student learning, and their goals.

And all that flew out the window in March of 2020. Let’s skip right over the massive undertaking of remote learning and talk about the challenges we faced when we returned to school for in-person instruction. In my district, along with most districts in the state of Michigan, we went back to school in the fall of 2020. And, like with all teachers, leaders and support staff alike, my job drastically changed when we returned to school.

We had mandatory new school leadership tools; rather than wearing my fanny-pack with speakers around, I needed to wear a tool belt to hold my tape measure. My desk on wheels gathered spiderwebs because I was tethered to the office as we navigated ever-changing orders from the health department, upset and confused parents, quarantine phone calls, student illnesses, staff communication, and so much more. As the school leader, I felt like I needed to overhear all the conversations to clarify the information, answer questions and calm the rising tension.

All my school leader friends are nodding along here and reflecting on their own return-to-school circumstances. It felt like all of the leadership progress we had made slammed into a brick building and we became “survival principals”, doing what we had to do to stay in school. Our jobs shifted into 100% reactive mode, and we were running around like chickens with our heads cut off. But, here’s the thing. As I work with principals across the country, we are still running around playing whack-a-mole with problems.

A million-dollar question: when are we going to have the conversation about supporting principals with shifting from reactive to proactive?

When will principals have the opportunity to start aligning their daily behaviors to leadership best practices? What needs to be taken off their plates and what do they need to prioritize? And, how can the district support principals to make this shift happen?

The research is out there, we know the leadership behaviors that support student learning. From the February 2021 Wallace report on “How Principals Affect Students and Schools” to John Hattie’s updated research on effect size in his new book Visible Learning: The Sequel to every set of school leadership performance standards, we know the daily behaviors that leaders must engage in order to increase student achievement. Here are three top leadership priorities:

• Collaborating with teachers: This includes both learning and innovating alongside teachers AND supporting teachers in developing a culture of teacher collective efficacy. We cannot simply carve out time for teachers to meet. If we want every teacher to be valued and included in the collaboration, coaching needs to happen. We also need to support them in collaborating around instruction and evidence of student learning.
• Creating a positive, supporting and engaging culture: Principals must demonstrate love for the work and model the culture. This is difficult to do when we are running around putting out fires, so it is imperative that leaders carve out space in their days to analyze, reflect and build culture. This is not something that school leaders can or should do alone, working with a school leadership team is important.
• Managing resources and personnel: The human capital of any school is the most valuable commodity, and principals are charged with the responsibility to put the right people in front of students. This work is increasingly difficult with the staff shortages schools are facing, but that doesn’t make it any less important. As Dr. Douglas Reeves teaches us, we need to be investing in people, not programs.

How do we move from here to there? It all starts with asking the question–what does being a principal look like right now in our district and what does it need to look like in order to support student achievement? Identify the current state of school leadership and align it with the desired state, and then do the most important part–create an action plan to move from here to there one step at a time. We are asking teachers to collaborate around evidence of student learning in PLC teams, let’s support principals in collaborating with each other using the same model.

I don’t have all the answers, but I do know that this is a conversation that needs to happen in districts across the country. If your district is engaged in this work, I would love to hear from you. Feel free to comment below, or email me at AllysonApsey@gmail.com.