"L" is for Leadership. I am currently reading a book our colleague Iline Tracey gave me, The Leadership Challenge (Kouzes and Posner). Its sound advice echoes much of the collective wisdom of other leadership gurus, but it also offers some fresh perspectives worthy of mention here and mingled with my own.

When I first became a principal, I heard constantly that the role was changing. We were no longer to be building managers, but instructional leaders. That was fine with me because instruction I loved. Management, I did not, as evidenced by the piles of papers that covered my desk. My leadership was then and continues to be a work in progress.

We have all read about leadership and we have the books to prove it. We speak the language: I am an instructional leader. This is our vision. We don't have faculty meetings any more--we have professional development. I share leadership. We analyze data during our grade level team meeting. We are having a walk-through to assess our progress. We are trying hard to engage parents. I'm reading Michael Fullan.
Now what?

First Lead Yourself

Although our primary responsibility is to our students, I am often reminded of a passage I read years ago in Roland Barth's Improving Schools from Within, where he used flight attendants' instructions to make a point about self improvement:

In order to help others, we must also ensure our own growth. Senge calls it developing personal mastery. Covey readers refer to it as sharpening the saw. It's that component of our work that ranks low on our priority list because of time issues for the most part. Or is it that we just don't see our learning as an issue?

The quest for leadership is first an inner quest to discover who we are-

It's a list. It's not a list meant to indict or I would be indicted myself. It is meant to lead with questions, not answers, and it may be useful in helping us to get a grip on the realities of our own leadership as we survey what is happening in our schools.

Then Lead Others

A number of the strategies and structures available to us could be very useful if as principals we explored together some ways to maximize their impact. Among us are many examples. These are just some starters:

Professional Development It's not worth the power point if it is just an event to fill those alternate Wednesdays the district allows. Professional development responds to a need the leadership team has identified in the literacy action plan, school improvement plan, or other faculty data collection, including school review. What happens after the professional development is as important as what happens during. How much of the learning is demonstrated in the classroom practices that follow. What happens when it is not demonstrated? What happens when it is? What tough questions do we ask as leaders to strengthen the professional development work, and how comfortable are our faculties with our tough questions? Asking the tough questions is as much a part of leadership as the praise for work well done.

Walk-through Everybody these days is doing a walk-through, and walk-throughs can be extremely useful. They get principals into classrooms, focusing on teaching and learning, determining whether instruction is aligned with the curriculum, assessing teacher and student strengths and needs, and generating content for reflection and dialogue. When I hear about walk-throughs, I hear more about the walk than the impact of the walk. I hear about what colleagues have seen and the feedback on what is in place and what is not.

Here's a thought. How often do we approach a walk through our schools with the goal of doing more than just affirming that a practice is in place or the culture is shifting? How often do we walk through with a goal of finding some issues to wrestle with as a faculty?

Last summer we read Lisa Delpits' Other People's Children, discussed her issues and raised some of our own. How many of us took the issues back to school and used school improvement strategies like the walk-through to put our own practice under the microscope? What would happen if we used our achievement gap data as the impetus for a walk-through to uncover child-deficit assumptions that lead to teaching less or teaching differently? What would happen if we took a slice of a school day and examined it closely until we uncovered those innocuous little demonstrations of low expectations eclipsed by good intentions? Leadership is confronting the issues that stand between us and a quality education for all children.

About the Reading List

Cris Tovanni wrote an adolescent reading text titled, I Read It But I Don't Get It. Her book is about struggling readers, but that is not our problem. Some of us, instead, are struggling doers. We have read the text, but like the resistant faculty members we speak of so often, we seem resistant to implementing the very practices we laud. We are happy to use our video conference time to talk about crafting, new children's books, or a wonderful teaching strategy we just saw. This is great because it shows we are developing our instructional capacity, but we seem much less willing to address the content for leadership practice and how it is played out in the schools we lead. While we are reading and learning more about best literacy practice, we should also be learning more about best principal practice. When we come together to discuss what we are learning through our common experiences (even though our schools are very different), we all grow.

Lots of good work is occurring in Cornerstone schools and lots of children are learning. We have no doubt. But as long as student achievement has not reached a level that matches our greatest aspirations, as long as the achievement gap exists, as long as public schools are not considered the best option for the public, we have much work to do as leaders. We have said we accept the call of leadership. We have read one more article. Now what?

Reference

James Kouzes and Barry Posner, The Leadership Challenge (Jossey-Bass, 2002)