School Principals As Reformers
Sometime ago, I taught a one-day session for 30-plus secondary school principals in the San Francisco Bay area. The subject was “Principals as Change Leaders.”
Seems like a contradiction in terms at first since these principals from affluent suburbs and inner cities are often caught in the middle between bosses who tell them to implement district policies in their schools and teachers who want to be buffered from intrusive parents and unpredictable youth. Keeping the ship afloat and passengers happy seems to be the major task, not leading change. But it isn’t a contradiction because these principals—ranging in age from mid-30s to mid-50s and running small high schools, large comprehensive high schools, and middle schools–were mid-career, savvy about organizational politics, and wanted to improve their schools.
So if you are caught in the middle where you look upward to your bosses for direction, sideways to your teachers who do the daily work with students, and outward to parents many of whom believe they know more than you do about schooling–how exactly do you make changes, much less lead others?
They knew well the instructional, managerial, and political roles that they had to perform (see here and here). What they wanted to discuss was not these roles but how do you lead change amid contradictory demands from parents who want particular changes, bosses who expect policies to be put into classroom practice when you are utterly dependent upon teachers to get the daily work done, and, of course, teachers who seek support and resources, not reforms designed by others.
So before we turned to case studies of principals in action, I spoke briefly on principals as reformers. Here is what I said without the pauses, uhhhhs, and hmmmms:
Leading change begins in your head. Knowing which questions you have to ask CONTINUE READING: School Principals As Reformers | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
