book Richard DuFour or Rebecca DuFour for professional development, contact [email protected].
The Essentials for Principals series offers a rich resource for both aspiring and experienced principals. Each book in the series addresses a topic of vital interest to principals and offers specific steps to help them apply the most-promising strategies in that area to their schools. Ultimately, however, the impact of the insights and recommendations the series will provide will be determined to a large extent by the way in which the principal defines his or her role and the purpose of the school.
What Is the Role of the Principal?
What is the role of the principal? Do not take that question lightly! How you answer it will influence not only how you approach the position but also will significantly impact your effectiveness in meeting its challenges. Do not assume that there is universal agreement regarding the role of the principal. Are principals middle managers who serve as a conduit between the central office and the school’s staff to ensure policies others create are implemented efficiently? Or are principals leaders who rally stakeholders around a shared vision of a great school?
If you profess your belief in the idea of the principal as a leader, what kind of leadership is required of a principal? Different researchers have argued that a principal must serve as an instructional leader, transformational leader, servant leader, strategic leader, learning leader, empowering leader, participatory leader, delegatory leader, or moral leader (Fullan, 2011b; Leithwood, Louis, Anderson, & Wahlstrom, 2004; Robinson et al., 2010).
Do not assume there is general agreement on the fundamental purpose of schooling. While mission statements are almost certain to assert the school’s purpose is to ensure all students learn, traditionally, schools have not operated that way. You will encounter staff and community members who argue that learning is a function of ability, and thus the school should focus on sorting and selecting students into different tracks based on their innate abilities. Others will argue the school’s purpose is merely to provide students with the opportunity to learn rather than to ensure that learning actually takes place. Still others will debate what is worthy of learning and will call for more or less emphasis on specific subject areas or will place higher or lower value on academic outcomes versus affective outcomes. Some will assert that the school should be responsible and accountable for doing whatever it takes to ensure high levels of learning for all students.
Do not assume that there is consensus on the primary clients you are to serve as principal. The board and superintendent will expect you to be their instrument for the implementation of policy, and to a great extent, your tenure in the position will depend on their perception of your commitment to and effectiveness in serving this purpose. Community members will remind you that their taxes pay your salary and that the school exists to serve the community. Faculty members will argue that the school will be effective only to the extent that you meet their needs—providing them with resources, supporting their decisions, and buffering them from outside interference. It is easy to say that a school exists to meet the needs of its students, but it is sometimes difficult to be a student-centered school when so many different adults demand that the principal do their bidding.
The Underlying Assumptions of This Book
This book is based on four assumptions:
1. The school’s primary purpose is to ensure high levels of learning for all students.
2. The most promising strategy for fulfilling that purpose is to develop the staff’s capacity to function as a professional learning community (PLC).
3. The principal’s role is to lead a collective effort to create a PLC that ensures high levels of learning for students through recursive processes that promote adult learning.
4. Principals play a vital role in creating the conditions that lead to improved learning for both students and the adults in their schools.
The idea that principals should serve as leaders of a learning community is not new. In 2001, the National Association of Elementary School Principals articulated the professional standards for principals in its publication Leading Learning Communities: Standards for What Principals Should Know and Be Able to Do. What has become more evident in the time since that publication are the strategies and processes principals must implement in order to create high-performing PLCs in their schools. This book is intended to provide clarity regarding specific, research-based, and actionable steps you can take to develop and lead a PLC.
Visit go.solution-tree.com/plcbooks to see “Why Is Principal Leadership So Important?” for a sampling of the research on principal leadership.
It may seem from the progression of the chapters in this book that the PLC process is sequential and linear: first do this, then do that, and so on. In reality, however, transforming a school into a PLC is neither sequential nor linear. In most instances you must address several issues simultaneously and you will almost inevitably need to return to correct or improve upon your initial efforts. Therefore, do not think of this book as providing you with a recipe, but rather, consider it a resource you can turn to for ideas as you confront a specific challenge.
Although the ideas presented in this book are grounded in research, we have opted to be more conversational than scholarly in tone. We do, however, provide readers with access to relevant research as well as reproducible tools and templates, all available at go.solution-tree.com/plcbooks. Throughout the book you will see feature boxes (like the one above) that refer you to these materials. In addition, www.allthingsplc.info is a tremendous free resource for those interested in implementing the PLC process in their school. This site also will provide you with more information on any of the schools we reference in this book, including contact information for readers who have questions for those schools.
Chapter 1 offers strategies for initiating the PLC process and laying the solid foundation that supports high-performing PLCs. Chapter 2 considers the steps principals take in creating the structures to support the collaborative team process. Chapter 3 draws a distinction between groups and teams, identifies the defining characteristics of effective teams, and presents specific tools for helping educators in a school make the transition from a group to a team. Chapter 4 stresses the importance of helping collaborative teams focus their efforts on factors that impact the learning of students. It also presents ideas for bringing new staff onto existing teams. Chapter 5 examines how effective principals monitor the work of the teams in their school and provides teams with the clarity, resources, and support to be successful at what they are called upon to do.
Chapter 6 is devoted to helping a school develop a key characteristic of a PLC: a results orientation. It explores how schools are using evidence of student learning to drive a continuous improvement process that represents the most powerful form of professional development. Chapter 7 provides keys to creating intervention systems that ensure any student who struggles to acquire an essential
