Short on Time

How do I make time to lead and learn as a principal? (ASCD Arias

William Sterrett

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781416618157
• eBook ISBN: 9781416618188
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

There's never enough time. Sound familiar? This might be the most common lament voiced by school principals today. How can we find time to meet students' and teachers' needs, foster ingenuity and innovation, and apply best practices when so much is demanding our attention right this minute?

School leadership expert and former principal William Sterrett comes to the rescue with practical advice on how principals can make the most of their time to achieve real success. Learn how to

* Balance district, instructional, school, and community events and responsibilities.
* Communicate about the work of the school in timely, innovative ways.
* Maximize instructional time by making smart use of transitions and recruiting teachers to build the school schedule.
* Cultivate professional growth by running effective, efficient faculty and PLC meetings and promoting collegial learning through peer observations and collaborative partnerships.

It’s About Time

If only I had the time. How often do school principals hear this phrase from their hurried colleagues? Educators’ sincere desire to do more, learn more, and engage more continually runs up against the realities of the frenetic, ever-changing world of teaching and learning.

I wish I could reach Benjamin better and see him more engaged. How is this possible, with so many other student needs to meet?

I would love to read that new book and apply a new perspective to my work. Who really has time to read, digest, and apply emerging ideas and best practices when so much is demanding our attention right this minute?

It would be great to log on to my Professional Learning Network (PLN) and collaborate with others. Despite our best intentions, exhaustion often trumps professional learning goals at the end of a busy day.

Today’s educators are more stressed out than ever before. The MetLife Survey of the American Teacher (2013) examined the perspectives of teachers and principals across the United States and found some discouraging trends:

• Teacher job satisfaction has dropped by 23 points since 2008—its lowest level in 25 years.
• Principal job satisfaction has dropped by 9 points in the same period.
• The responsibilities of school leadership have changed significantly in recent years, leading to a job that principals say has become too complex and highly stressful.
• Half of all teachers function in formal leadership roles, yet few desire to become principals (although half are interested in a hybrid role that would include some teaching).

We are living in a time of sweeping curricular shifts and demographic changes. Uncertainties abound regarding educational funding and policy. Innovation inside the classroom and access to resources and perspectives outside the classroom hold unprecedented potential and promise for teaching and learning. We sorely need leadership in our schools. We must teach, learn, collaborate, and lead—together. Schools cannot be powered by a hard-working few or count on a small core to “show the way” to success.

Fostering ingenuity and innovation while maximizing student learning require deliberate planning and targeted action. In my 2011 ASCD book Insights into Action, I focused on practical action steps that effective school leaders take to realize success. Here, I want to build on that work by showing principals how making the most of the time allotted to us can lead to even greater success. In this era of unknowns, we must focus on maximizing the one predictable resource that is given to us each day: it’s about time.

Reading Short on Time will help you take action and realize change in your school and professional life. You will gain insights into specific steps that you can apply to the context in which you serve. These action steps involve teaching, innovating, and leading. They require planning, action, and reflection.

Time is a limited resource, but it is the most equitably distributed resource. We get 24 hours of it each day. Let’s use it well.

A Time for Managing Priorities

Principal Dwight Carter does not have a moment to spare. Now in his sixth year of leading Gahanna Lincoln High School, located on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, Carter maintains relationships with over 2,300 students and 200 staff members. Carter’s reach, however, extends far beyond the high school walls and district lines. Named a 2013 NASSP Digital Principal, Carter’s presence can be found throughout the blogosphere as a tech-savvy, innovative educator who writes, speaks, and learns through his PLN. It’s not always easy.

“I used to get frustrated every day at work,” recounts Carter. “I would start with a long to-do list of five or six items, and only complete one item. And then it hit me: I needed a shorter to-do list” (personal communication, July 24, 2013). He realized that sitting at his desk day after day, feeling defeated by his growing to-do list, was making him stagnate and keeping him from learning. Carter started to prioritize, completing one or two items a day and ramping up his efforts to engage students in class, teachers in the hallways, and parents in the office.

“Reflecting is at the heart of our profession,” Carter says. “If we aren’t reflecting, we aren’t growing. I have chosen to reflect through writing my blog, for instance. It’s for me. I’m not looking for reaction, or responses; writing helps me. Learning is key, and learning is mobile.” To that last point, Carter adds, “learning must be 365 days a week, 24/7; for instance, if I have a few spare moments, I take time to connect with my Twitter feed. Instantly, I have educators speaking to me, I am reading current articles and education news, and I am learning, even if it is just for a few moments.”

Carefully cultivating those few moments requires deliberate effort and savvy time management. To manage their time optimally, principals must first master the schedule.

Mastering the Schedule

The role of the leader is critical in helping the school realize its mission and vision in a timely manner. By building a unified calendar that focuses on the big picture of leadership and by prioritizing district, instructional, school, and community events and responsibilities in a balanced manner, school leaders can foster shared leadership and maximize participation and buy-in among the school community.

Synchronize the calendar. When principals who cannot master their schedules think about classroom walk-throughs, authentic conversations with teachers about professional goals, or pulse-taking meetings with parents, they sigh. They may think, Sure, I’d love to do more of that . . . if I only had the time. Time will pass, and they will give up on finishing that doctorate, sending off that article for publication, or writing that local grant to improve their school grounds. Their schools stagnate along with their practice.

It’s time to stop saying, “I just don’t have the time.” There is time, but principals who use that excuse have failed to carve out their time in a proactive manner. Instead, they have let their time be devoured by reactive work.

The first step to mastering the schedule is to synchronize your calendar. It’s vital to use one calendar. As a principal, I quickly learned to empower my office associates to place important items—parent meetings, scheduled check-ins from maintenance, fire drills—on my calendar. Most school leaders use a web-based calendar that synchronizes from the server onto a handheld device. Synchronize your personal items—birthdays, dentist appointments, soccer games—onto the calendar as well, since personal and work-related events often overlap (use privacy settings if you don’t want your office staff to know about your second cavity in a semester!). Even the most effective principal can feel torn between a daughter’s basketball game and the school dance, but planning ahead will help you maintain control over the calendar. Schedule monthly calendar meetings with office staff to ensure you are “synched” for success.

Review your calendar at the end of each day. Glance over the next day’s events and consider how you can maximize your preparation for each. For instance, if you have a district-led principals meeting to attend, review the agenda items to prepare any updates or insights to share. If you have walk-through observations prioritized in a particular grade level or department, brush up on the pacing guide to consider what students are learning in those specific classrooms.

A four-point DISC perspective. There are four general categories of items that school leaders must prioritize in their master schedule, and they can be summed up by the acronym DISC: district, instruction, school, and community. Each of these key focus areas requires its own allocation of time and appropriate action.

• District. District items mandated by the central office include school-board hearings, principal meetings, leadership retreats, district subcommittees, and job recruitment fairs. Although any great principal is first and foremost an advocate for the school, district work is crucial to realizing results. Thus, principals must consider the district calendar before setting other calendar items. When you place district items on the calendar, adjust settings to ensure that you arrive 10 minutes early to the meeting or event. This small adjustment will enable you to make vital connections with district leaders and community members prior to the meeting and demonstrate that you are taking the meeting seriously.
• Instruction. Instruction-related calendar items are the heart and soul of a principal’s work and include such events as grade-level or department professional learning community (PLC) meetings, five-minute classroom walk-throughs, collaborative faculty meetings, and school-level committee meetings focused on student and staff success. Serving as the instructional leader requires intentional planning and collaborative action.
• School. School-centered events, activities, and celebrations help make the school the hub of the community. These can quickly overwhelm a principal who does not carefully incorporate them into the master schedule. It is important to maintain visibility in a healthy cross-section of school life, but a principal at any school level or size simply cannot attend them all. Prioritize!
• Community. Community items extend outside the boundaries of the school grounds. The principal has a powerful platform to engage and build partnerships with external entities, such as businesses, civic organizations, and social groups that can support the school, benefit from the school, appreciate its mission and vision, and provide ongoing insight and support. These unique partnerships require time and trust to cultivate and maintain.

Although Figure 1 is not comprehensive, it provides a snapshot of how principals can incorporate recurring appointments into the calendar and consider time allocations for each. By setting the calendar in advance and using alerts, you are guaranteed to never forget a meeting. By inserting relevant “action notes” in the calendar as a reminder to arrive early, review the agenda, or prepare a short address, you can prepare to actively participate—rather than passively attend—important events, meetings, and opportunities.

Each of these DISC components should be seen as a recurring opportunity to sustain momentum in maintaining relationships and school improvement efforts. Building these items into the calendar as proactive opportunities still leaves plenty of time for the many items requiring reactive responses that continually crop up at the building level. Carving out time in advance will ensure that important priorities don’t get lost in the mix.

Communicating Effectively

Once you have mastered the schedule, it’s important to share it with stakeholders. Like you, these stakeholders have little time to waste. If your e-mails are lengthy and verbose and your “robocalls” to parents deliver a sermon-length to-do list, then you’ve effectively lost your audience. You are wasting your time—and certainly theirs—due to poor communication. Let’s face it: most of our communication is about time. Staff development will begin promptly at 2:00. Our student recognition assembly kicks off at 10:00. Our main goal is to communicate an event’s purpose and time briefly and concisely.

As I train future principals, work with teacher leaders, or engage with school staff members on school improvement work, I often see principal memos intending to share important information with the audience (usually teachers and staff). Sometimes, these memos are thesis-length narratives that literally form a knot in my stomach. What is the important takeaway here? I wonder. What actions will actually result from this memo? Communicate that you value others’ time, and you will lay a foundation for action and excellence in your school.

Communicate in innovative ways. Using innovative channels such as blogs and Twitter can help principals exponentially when it comes to communication. For example, principal Dwight Carter’s blog, titled “Mr. Carter’s Office” (http://dwightcarter.edublogs.org), provides a good model of how principals can communicate news and insights in an engaging way. Through his blog, Principal Carter shares insights on everything from the importance of staff expectations to a conference session he attended.

Principals can also benefit professionally from connecting and collaborating through Twitter and can model innovative sharing by inserting a school-based Twitter feed onto their school’s home page. Twitter feeds enable schools to continually share successes, provide updates on events, and link to important announcements. School leaders seeking to innovate and collaborate in this manner might consider checking out Connected Principals (http://connectedprincipals.com) to gain insights from school leaders in the field on how to share best practices and leadership ideas.

Schools have increasingly embraced robocalls as a way to instantly disseminate e-mail or voicemail updates to parents. Principals should ensure that these messages are concise—aim for a message that takes less than a minute to listen to or read—and make no more than three key points. As in a classic five-paragraph essay, introduce the three key points, expound briefly on each, and then repeat the key points again. Like it or not, we are communicators-in-chief, and we must always be “on” in this particular role.

The daily e-mail. E-mail is the primary mode of communication we use with faculty, but it’s like fast food: fine in small doses, but too much of it can make you sick. Principals should carefully ration the e-mails they send to staff. My goal as principal was to consolidate everything important into one daily e-mail. Before I left to go home in the afternoon, I would sit at my computer and open my calendar to review the following day’s events, meetings, and deadlines. I thought through the day’s goals and considered important items and action steps to note in the message. Then I wrote and sent out the daily e-mail. In this way, I prepared both my staff and myself for the next day.

An effective e-mail is concise, bulleted, and reader-friendly. In Insights into Action (2011), I provide a sample daily e-mail that includes some of these key components:

• An initial greeting and the day’s date.
• Highlights and achievements to share and affirm.
• Managerial items, such as fire drills or meeting times and locations.
• Schoolwide events, such as assemblies, athletic events, or field trips.
• Upcoming items to consider, such as Back-to-School night or an impending due date.
• An inspirational, relevant, and meaningful quote.

Taking time to end the day in a reflective moment and craft the e-mail for the following day helped me find balance as an assistant principal and principal. Staff members often told me how much they appreciated the consistency, and even inspiration, that this communication brought.

Reflective Questions on Managing Priorities

1. Do you own the master calendar in your school, or does it own you? How might you align the school calendar in a consistent, coherent manner that reduces confusion and maximizes participation and buy-in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• It’s About Time
• Encore Divider
• Encore
• References
• Related Resources
• About the Author
• Copyright