Building leadership capacity in schools
• Equitable gains across socioeconomic group; imporvement regardless of gender, race, or ethnicity
• Narrowed gaps between socioeconomic groups
• Sustained improvement over time, with improvemet increasing and gaps narrowing the longer that students are exposed to school improvement factors
The role of the principal
Teachers must take the major responsibility for building leadership capacity in schools and ultimately for the work of school improvement. Teachers represent the largest and most stable group of adults in the school, and the most politically powerful (lambert, kent, richert, collay, & dietz, 1997). However, the role of the principal is more important than ever. Sound contradictory?
Why is the role of the principal more important than ever? Because the work is much more complex than we thought it was; it demands a more sophisticated set of skills and understandings than ever before. It is more difficult to build leadership capacity among colleagues than to tell colleagues what to do. It is more difficult to be full partners with other adults engaged in hard work than to evaluate and supervise subordinates.
This hard work requires that principals and teachers alike serve as reflective, inquiring practitioners who can sustain real dialogue and can seek outside feedback to assist with self-analysis. These learning processes require finely honed skills in communication, group process facilitation, inquiry, conflict mediation, and dialogue. Further, these skills are generally not the focus of many professional preparation programs and must be refined on the job.
Principals’ leadership is crucial because they are uniquely situated to exercise some special skills of initiation, support, and visioning. Among the more important tasks for the principal is to establish collegial relationships in an environment that may previously have fostered dependency relationships.
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