What can school districts do to ensure that schools have the best principals? Deanna Burney and Robert Hughes, writing for the Harvard Education Letter, propose that districts create a growth-oriented system of principal professional development and certification and tie this system to principal evaluation.
Following is the basic idea for the Burney and Hughes’ proposed principal development system:
To ensure that all schools have effective leaders, we believe school districts should create an authentic professional development system for aspiring and resident principals. Specifically, school districts and states should give consideration to creating reciprocal evaluation systems that acknowledge professional growth and development as a key criterion for improved instructional leadership. The systems approach to principal growth and development… is not a mere pipeline that conveys a supply; it is a long-term, authentic developmental path that prepares and shares highly effective principals as school leaders.
By taking advantage of professional networks that include support and feedback from fellow principals, the model proposed by Burney and Hughes would abandon the idea of one-time certification in favor of a four-tiered approach that would create mentor principles whose key role is to develop future successful principals.
A growth-oriented model of principal development might adopt a guild approach that identifies four distinct levels: apprentice, resident, master, and mentor. The principal’s evaluation—and, ideally, corresponding certification level—could be tied to these four levels, which clearly communicate increased competency, performance, and achievement. An attendant certification process would allow participants to move from apprentice to resident principal, from resident to master principal, and, for a select few, from master principal to mentor principal.
The apprentice/resident/master/mentor system includes an intensive screening, recruiting, and induction stage (the apprenticeship); a residency of a few years (in one or more schools) in which support from the district, other principals, and partners such as state educational agencies, executive development programs, and/or institutions of higher education is deep and persistent; a master level in which the principal accumulates and affixes his or her signature to a body of work evidenced by positive student outcomes; and, at the apex, mentors who, having internalized and synthesized the multifaceted work of the principal, train master principals.
At each of the four stages of a growth-oriented development model, leadership competencies, including setting goals, aligning resources with priorities, promoting collaborative learning cultures, using data, and communicating thoroughly and effectively, are the basis of the continuous learning and commitment of the practice.
While the ongoing certification process would in some ways be more difficult, the addition of support from other principals may make the system more feasible and encouraging in the long-term.
For more information, please visit: http://hepg.org/hel/article/574
