Handbook of School Improvement

How High-Performing Principals Create High-Performing Schools

Jo Blase, Joseph Blase, Dana Yon Phillips

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781412979979
• eBook ISBN: 9781452271507
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

"A practical, useful, easy-to-read resource that I will keep on the edge of my desk as a reference. The book is filled with excellent and useful information and serves as both a concise summary of focal points for principals as well as a resource for additional information."
—Kari Dahlquist, Principal
Creek Valley Elementary School, Edina, MN

"All school administrators who want their school to become a high-performing school have to read this book. It is transformational!"
—Sean Beggin, Assistant Principal
Andover High School, MN

Learn how successful principals make a difference in their school?s performance!

Outstanding principals are made, not born. With insights drawn from a ground-breaking study and numerous firsthand accounts, this illuminating book reveals how principals develop the leadership qualities that support schoolwide achievement.

Written by best-selling authors and respected experts in school improvement, this comprehensive guide captures unique perspectives from 20 successful principals, representing a wide range of urban and rural schools. Presenting real-life strategies and best practices, the authors show how principals use a systems-development approach to build empowered teams and excellent organizations. Designed for school and district administrators as well as staff developers, this resource:

• Describes the key characteristics of extraordinary principals and high-performing schools, including nine crucial actions that drive positive change
• Focuses on how principals balance both administrative responsibilities and instructional leadership
• Shows how to actively involve teachers, staff, and families in school improvement, including individual and group activities
• Addresses the role of research and data in stronger schoolwide performance
• Offers tips and suggestions from highly regarded principals, along with recommended resources for further study and team trainings

Learn how the experiences of fellow principals can help you energize your team and realize your school?s promise!

Part I

Administrative Leadership for School Improvement

Action Foci of High-Performing Principals

 

INTRODUCTION TO PART I OF THE HANDBOOK

Today’s emphasis on accountability for achievement in schools has made educational leaders eager for answers to the overriding question, How do we develop instructionally effective schools? Specifically,

• How do we develop a school organization and culture that promotes and sustains learning?
• How do we lead for continuous school improvement?
• How do we encourage and enable teachers to engage in the kinds of behaviors that are linked to increased student achievement?
• What leader behaviors are linked to increased student achievement?

The Handbook is written to provide answers to these and other crucial leadership questions. By studying principals who create high-performing schools, we can now describe the attitudes, beliefs, values, and actions of extraordinarily successful educational leaders. These findings, coupled with the best existing knowledge base in education, provide powerful guidance to achieve instructional and school improvement.

WHAT IS A HIGH-PERFORMING SCHOOL?

A solid body of highly respected research demonstrates that in high-performing schools the components that matter most for school improvement include the following 10 school conditions and five teaching strategies (Cotton, 2003):

10 School Conditions

1. Safe and orderly school environment
2. Strong administrative leadership
3. Primary focus on learning
4. Maximizing learning time
5. Monitoring student progress
6. Academically heterogeneous class assignments
7. Flexible in-class groups
8. Small class size
9. Supportive classroom climate
10. Parent and community involvement

5 Teaching Strategies

1. Careful orientation to lessons
2. Clear and focused instruction
3. Effective questioning techniques
4. Feedback and reinforcement
5. Review and reteaching as needed

In short, in high-performing schools, the focus of administrators and teachers is instruction; that is, both sets of educators engage in day-to-day efforts to assess and enhance student learning. This body of research also reveals that the components of school improvement—or successful school reform—include the following factors, all of which support effective classroom instruction:

1. Effective, research-based methods and strategies
2. Comprehensive planning and instructional design with aligned components
3. Professional development
4. Measurable goals and benchmarks
5. Support within the school
6. Parental and community development
7. External technical support and assistance
8. Evaluation strategies
9. Coordination of resources

Throughout the Handbook, we demonstrate that organizational conditions and teaching strategies as well as instructional leadership in the high-performing schools we studied are generally consistent with those found in related studies of high-performing schools (Cotton, 2003; Elmore, 2000).

WHAT IS A HIGH-PERFORMING PRINCIPAL?

Again, we turn to the existing research base to define a high-performing principal. In fact, this research base centers on the leader behaviors that have strong effects on student achievement. An effect is a statistically derived, predictable result; thus, a high-performing principal exhibits behaviors (also called “best practices”) that yield statistically greater student learning than if the leader did not engage in those behaviors. This is a bottom-line definition of a high-performing principal. In brief, the six largest student achievement effect sizes derive from the following (Waters, Marzano, & McNulty, 2003), which will be discussed in depth later in this book:

1. Situational Awareness: The principal is aware of details and occurrences in the school and uses the information to address current and potential problems.
2. Intellectual Stimulation: The principal ensures that faculty and staff know current theories and practices and make related discussions a regular part of the school culture.
3. Change Agent: The principal is willing to and actively does challenge the status quo.
4. Input: The principal involves teachers in the design and implementation of important decisions and policies.
5. Culture: The principal fosters shared beliefs, a sense of community, and cooperation.
6. Monitors/Evaluates: The principal monitors the effectiveness of school practices and their impact on student learning.

More specifically, Blase and Blase (2006) found that principals and teachers of high-performing schools routinely ask questions such as,

• How do we enhance our commitment to improving student learning?
• Are we engaged in ongoing study of the teaching and learning process?
• How effective are our assessment procedures and our use of data for school improvement?
• What decision-making structures enable teachers, parents, and others to be meaningfully involved in decision making?
• Is teacher leadership emerging?
• What opportunities exist for collaboration and professional growth?
• Do teachers engage in creative problem solving?

THE NEW CHALLENGE OF ADMINISTRATIVE LEADERSHIP FOR SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT

The field of education is rife with debates about approaches to effective school leadership, including managerial, instructional, transformational, distributed, and balanced leadership. Such debates notwithstanding, effective approaches invariably include leader and teacher behaviors that link to student achievement. Thus, some educational scholars argue that an excellent analytical tool for explaining “best leadership practices” in complex organizations such as schools is distributed leadership (Spillane, Halverson, & Diamond, 2004). To improve teaching and learning, educational leaders engage in the social distribution of tasks (e.g., delegating and sharing) and the situational distribution of support (e.g., coaching and providing instructional materials) to enhance instructional practice; in other words, principals structure the entire school context to facilitate instruction). It is argued that distributed leadership increases the number of people concerned with improvement and involves a broader range of participants in collaboration to achieve school improvement goals; it also blends traditional practices (i.e., program evaluation, teacher evaluation, curriculum design, and professional development) with external accountability expectations (i.e., coupling of teaching and leadership, teacher collaboration, professional learning aligned with instructional goals, and monitored instructional outcomes) (Halverson, Grigg, Prichett, & Thomas, 2007).

Similarly, other scholars argue that a traditional instructional leadership approach should be conceptualized broadly as “instructional improvement.” This suggests a combination of (1) leadership for instructional matters (e.g., development of strong staff development programs, ongoing curriculum review, instructional supervision, and oversight of evaluation and assessment) and (2) creation of school-level conditions that enable teachers to collaborate, to do the complex and often-messy work of finding more effective ways to teach (e.g., providing opportunities for teachers to collectively create, adapt, and refine instructional lessons that are framed by “best practices”; developing communities of teachers who are committed to continuous inquiry and the teaching of one another; and engaging in incremental, schoolwide improvement informed by data and aimed at increasing achievement for all students) (Elmore, 2000; Fullan, 2001; Joyce & Showers, 2002).

Moreover, according to our study, high-performing school principals improve teaching and student learning by creating accountable learning subsystems, and these subsystems derive from the principal’s nine action foci. Principals who create high-performing schools:

1. Are models of learning;
2. Are exemplars of the field’s standards of leadership;
3. Focus on school and teacher practices associated with increased student achievement;
4. Lead in ways that have maximum impact on student achievement;
5. Work with teachers on the school mission: They engage in ongoing, collaborative study of schoolwide instructional improvement efforts;
6. Use a systems approach to dispatch with managerial responsibilities and to organize instructional aspects of work;
7. Take an empowering (team) approach to almost everything, and create learning communities in their schools;
8. Hire strong people for administrative, faculty, and staff positions; and
9. Insist on using data to inform instructional decisions.

In Chapters 1 through 9, we will explore each of these nine action foci.

1

Learning

Principals of high-performing schools are models of learning.

During our research, we examined each high-performing principal’s background with respect to his or her approach to leadership. Without exception, principals asserted that they were lifelong learners and models of learning. We asked how they learned what they know and use in day-to-day school leadership; we also asked them what they had learned that they believed was most crucial to the successful practice of school leadership.

HOW DID THEY LEARN?

How did high-performing principals learn what they know? Principals told us they learned a great deal from experience, especially from positive and negative role models they had encountered, and through trial and error.

Learning From Positive and Negative Role Models

According to our findings, high-performing principals attributed much of their effectiveness to disciplined reflection throughout their careers as teachers, assistant principals, and principals on experiences with both positive (i.e., effective) and negative (i.e., ineffective) principals:

I have been very blessed to have worked with excellent principals, assistant principals, and teachers—people who have accomplished a great deal; I have been able to ask all of them questions and figure out what makes them tick. I worked with a National Middle School Association principal-of-the-year; I really enjoyed working with her and getting her feelings about how to be an effective administrator. Prior to that, I worked with the faculty and staff in another school, which became a national School of Excellence. Those experiences were extremely helpful to me.

—Middle School Principal

I have been exposed to great leaders in my life, from a very young age until now. I was a teacher in a school where the principal empowered us. Then I was an assistant principal; and for seven years, I had conversations with many great principals. I have worked with principals who were both great leaders and great managers.

—Elementary School Principal

I took everything I could from the principals I knew—what to do and what not to do. The first principal we had, all he did was worry about how he looked. The second principal, all he did was worry about discipline; if you moved out of place, he got all over you. He jumped on me one time because I moved the seats in my classroom! Then there was the principal who was lazy; he did the announcements and then let the kids run the school. The next principal loved the kids, but he was disorganized, and the one after that was very organized but not very friendly. I got my organization skills from the last one.

—Elementary School Principal

I was an assistant principal, and I worked in the county office, and I worked with very effective and very ineffective principals. From them, I learned a lot about what to do and what n...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• The Book in Brief
• Foreword
• Foreword
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Part I. Administrative Leadership for School Improvement: Action Foci of High-Performing Principals
• 1. Learning
• 2. Modeling
• 3. Focusing
• 4. Leading for Achievement
• 5. Improving Instruction
• 6. Developing Systems
• 7. Empowering
• 8. Hiring
• 9. Using Data
• Part I. Suggested Reading for Further Learning: Administrative Leadership
• Part II. Instructional Leadership for School Improvement: Goals of High-Performing Principals
• 10. Teaching and Learning
• 11. Culture
• 12. Dialogue
• 13. Research
• 14. Development
• Part II. Suggested Reading for Further Learning: Instructional Leadership
• Part III. Conclusion: Systems Thinking and the Systems-Development Approach in Educational Leadership
• 15. The Importance of Systems Thinking and the Systems-Development Approach for School Improvement
• 16. Afterword: A Summary and A Note About Preparation for Educational Leadership
• Research Method and Procedures
• References
• Index