Breakthrough Principals

A Step-by-Step Guide to Building Stronger Schools

Jean Desravines, Jaime Aquino, Benjamin Fenton

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781118801000
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

Bridge the achievement gap with proven strategies for student success

Breakthrough Principals debunk s the myth of the 'superhero' principal by detailing the common actions and practices of leaders at our nation's fastest-gaining public schools. Based on the authors' Transformational Leadership Framework, which they developed through in-depth study of more than 100 high-gaining, high-poverty schools, the book distills findings into a practical, action-focused plan for diagnosing school needs and implementing structures, systems and practices that accelerate student achievement.

Brought to life by case studies of principals who have led dramatic gains in student achievement, the book is a how-to guide for increasing the quality of teaching and learning; improving school culture; attracting and supporting high-performing teachers; and involving parents and community to help students achieve. You'll learn how breakthrough principals make the school's mission a real part of both strategy and practice, and set up sustainable systems that support consistent, ongoing improvement. High-impact practices are organized into five broad categories: learning and teaching, school-wide culture, aligned staff, operations and systems, and personal leadership.

The primary job of school leadership is to help students succeed. It begins with first recognizing and prioritizing areas of need, then finding and implementing the most effective solutions. Whether you work in a turn around environment, or want to make a good school better, this book will give you a set of concrete practices—illustrated through examples of real principals in real schools—that have been proven to work.

• Discover the primary drivers of student achievement
• Work toward the school's vision in staffing, operations, and systems
• Set the tone for all relationships and practices with good leadership

Closing the achievement gap is a major goal of educational leadership, and principals are forever searching for viable methods that help them better serve their students. Breakthrough Principals unveils the details behind the success stories from across the nation to provide a roadmap to transformative gains.

Part One
Diagnosing Your School's Stages of Development

1. Introduction
2. Chapter One
   The Stages of School Development
3. Chapter Two
   Diagnosis and Action Planning

Introduction

AS A RECENT GRADUATE OF THE NEW LEADERS PRINCIPAL TRAINING PROGRAM, Janeece Docal was excited about her next step as the new principal of Powell Elementary School in Washington, DC. Thrilled to be working in a community where she had previously taught—some of the elementary school parents had been her students when they were in high school—Docal also had real trepidation given what she knew about the school. Powell had been labeled as “failing” for more than two years and had recently cycled through a number of principals. Parents were concerned about whether the school was meeting the needs of their children, almost all of them first-generation Americans. Before Docal started, they protested a district proposal to close the school; they wanted a good neighborhood school where they could be actively engaged and know that the many Spanish speakers in their ranks would be supported. They wanted a community school that worked.

Docal knew she needed to lead a dramatic transformation so that the school could deliver the outstanding education its students deserved. The big question was where to begin. She could focus on only a few priorities at once, but everything was essential. She knew she needed to first focus on areas that would deliver the greatest benefit for the students.

To find her answers, she spoke with staff, parents, and community members, asking what they hoped for the school's future, what was working well at Powell, and what needed to change. She and her staff also examined a variety of data, asking themselves: “What does a scholar leaving Powell need to know and be able to do?” The answers formed the basis for a shared vision for the school's future. Working backward from that vision, Docal's team looked at what practices the school already had in place that would advance that vision and what high-impact actions they could take to help the school improve in areas where it was falling short.

They created a school improvement plan centered on three priorities: increasing the rigor of curriculum and assessments, improving family engagement, and setting up students for social-emotional success. Docal developed a program that welcomed families into the school and increased parent involvement both inside and outside classrooms. She and her staff designed an instructional program centered on project-based learning that aligned with local learning standards but also engaged students in ways that inspired their curiosity and pushed them to study topics in depth and from interdisciplinary perspectives. She also built time into the schedule for teachers to regularly collaborate on refining lessons and curriculum based on how students were doing and where they needed extra support.

Underlying all of this work was Docal's deep conviction that all students could perform at high levels if they were given the right supports and if the school fostered a culture of continuous improvement for children and adults alike.

These changes bore fruit almost immediately. Powell experienced dramatic student achievement gains, including a 14 percent increase in reading scores in her first year and a 16 percent increase in math scores in her second. The school's halls are clean, bright, and lined with dynamic classrooms. It is not unusual to see parents in the building, and Docal even initiated staff visits to student homes, a strategy that effectively eliminated chronic truancy at the school.

With those changes in place, both teachers and parents came to trust Docal and were inspired by the promise of the school's future. Said one parent, “She looked at the school not just from an academic standpoint, but very much as a whole community [with a focus on] involving teachers, students and parents.”¹ Docal continued to make improvements in her initial priority areas while adding new initiatives such as a student leadership program.

By taking this systematic approach to school improvement, Docal and her staff transformed Powell from a school that many local families avoided to a model of what an excellent neighborhood school should look like, with an award-winning bilingual program. The student body has more than doubled in size from 200 to 450 students, and Powell now has a waiting list of families eager to enroll. Student proficiency in reading and writing nearly doubled, and math proficiency rose by one-third. Docal's transformative leadership was recognized when she was honored as the District of Columbia Public Schools Principal of the Year in 2014.

The Transformational Leadership Framework in Action

In making these substantial improvements at Powell, Docal was bringing the Transformational Leadership Framework (TLF) to life. That framework, the focus of this book and published in full in our earlier book, The School Leadership Playbook, outlines a set of high-leverage actions great principals like Docal have taken to improve their schools. By breaking down these actions, the TLF provides a road map for leaders seeking to build vibrant schools where teachers and students work together to continuously improve their schools.

Principals can directly influence student achievement, but their greatest impact comes through establishing effective school practices and building a strong instructional culture. The TLF outlines the ideal sequence for implementing these proven practices, helping leaders understand what important steps to take first during the journey to sustained school improvement.

The TLF will help you assess the current state of your school and identify priority areas for improvement. By using this framework as part of your annual planning and improvement process, you can design a plan that builds on the school's distinctive strengths while also identifying and addressing its high-priority growth areas. After implementing that plan, you can use the TLF regularly to evaluate your plan's effectiveness, make adjustments, and begin the process anew. This is by no means a linear process, and it requires a balancing act of choosing and focusing on priority areas while maintaining all the other areas of your school. But by repeating this cycle, leaders can readily recalibrate priorities, looking to the TLF at every stage as they respond to their school's most pressing needs.

This is the approach Docal followed when she took the helm at Powell Elementary. She knew that the diagnosis she made using the TLF was not a judgment on her or her staff, but an opportunity to identify and enact the changes needed to better support students' learning. A national nonprofit that develops transformational school leaders and designs effective leadership policies and practices for school systems across the country, New Leaders prepares all of our principals to continuously assess and improve the schools they lead. Our principals work in diverse schools, large and small, charter and district, across all grade levels and in different areas of the country. No two schools are identical, but New Leaders encourages every school leader to regularly analyze where she or he needs to take the school next.

For the first time, Breakthrough Principals shares the strategies and actions that have enabled New Leaders' principals to deliver outsize gains for students with education leaders outside its own programs.² By providing tools that New Leaders–trained principals use, this book walks you through how to identify your school's needs, how to determine the most efficient and essential actions you and your staff can take to improve student learning at your school, and how you can best put those practices in place.

You probably already spend time reflecting on your school's strengths and weaknesses and making changes based on those reflections. However,...