I have had this idea stirring around in my head for a few days now, but only now am I able to get it out onto paper. Today I find myself wondering about making decisions. My perception is that a principal needs to make a lot of decisions during the course of their day. Some of these could be termed as mission critical and others as not so much. In envisioning administering a school environment I am wondering specifically about decisions where everyone has made up their mind on the best course of action.
I came into this post through a group project I am doing for a course on organizational decision making to complete my Master’s. Our group has been tasked with examining the decision making process by the Bush administration post-911. As I said, a topic which everyone has some opinion on and middle ground is not so obvious. This got me thinking about the applicability to schools or more specifically; “how does the principal embrace collaborative decision making when the room is split in two?”. I personally find this instance the biggest challenge of becoming an administrator and I think that these discussions are often the points at which administrators “lose the room”. Is it simply a matter of identifying the most timely decision and going from there? In school, we termed this the dissatisfaction phase or the groan zone where pulling the staff out of it was simply a matter of turning the page in the book. As the Great Oz once stated “ignore the man behind the curtain”, but can we. What happens when theory becomes practice and you cannot simply turn the page? I think this is the struggle that goes on in my head especially when I see myself with the bright light shining on me. How can the principal embrace discourse and make people feel that they have been heard, but yet make a decision?
Any thoughts out there for an emerging principal?
My last post was a bit of a revelation to me. When I posted the question of “What is a Principal“, I was only sure of one thing, that it would put me one step further on my journey as the emerging principal. What happened was unanticipated, someone read it and commented on it. I certainly know that getting people to read my blog and add their thoughts to it is a big reason why I do it, but I just had no expectations when that would occur. Now that I have started to see the exchange piece of my blog come into play I feel that I can now see the true value of these tools, communication. Suddenly I had feedback from principals in Wisconsin and Virginia. Without this site, I would have never extended my reach beyond New Hampshire and Vermont and now after less than a month I am starting to get what I am looking for out of this site. I wish I could sit here and tell people that my comments were the result of people just googling my site, but that is not the case. The missing piece has been my discovery of Twitter and the starting of my personal learning network. As a technology director, I have been aware of this tool for some time but I could never see why I would want to answer the question “what am I doing” over and over again. Thanks to Scott Elias’ and Melinda Miller’s Practical Principals podcast I decided to give Twitter a try. I took me a bit of time to get the idea, but now I starting to see a Personal Learning Network emerge. The comments on my blog were indicative of the presence of this network and were the direct result of my use of Twitter. So on the Sunday of the 500, on your mark, get set, communicate! A couple questions to leave you with:
1. Are you using Twitter as a school communication tool? If yes, how? Anyone out there using it in a rural environment?
2. Any schools out there using a blog as a core piece of your website. If yes, please post a link so we can see some examples of uses beyond the random musings of an emerging principal.
3. Communication starts through the development of a personal learning network. Mine starts with Twitter, so please post a link to your Twitter profile so I can continue expanding mine.
I am not sure if it is symptomatic of being in my last term before graduation, but lately I feel I am loosing track of what a principal really is. I think I can still apply the definition of a principal as the administrative head of the school, but the rest of the picture is really blurry in my mind. I think as one emerges beyond the theory and starts to see reality staring you straight in the face, the question of whom you really are becomes most visible. I have seen many different school leaders through my years in education, but I have never seen the same leader in two different schools. I think I can safely state that I have never seen the perfect principal in my travels, though I have seen a lot of exceptional school leaders. It just seems like there is a lot of grey area in this question. Could it be that being a principal is like a relationship in that there is a school we are meant to administer? I think that is the question I am struggling with right now. Where is the school for me and what do I need to be doing now to be prepared for it? Being a graduate student, I have been forced to look at the theory behind school leadership and often that seems to occur in a bubble. One of the great things about schools are the teachers, but like principals, no two staffs are the same either. Often the reading in graduate school do not fully embrace the individual dynamics in each school. I think this question is either extraordinarily easy or difficult to answer though I am sure the answer is very much related to the perspective one brings into the position.
A couple questions for my readers,
1. What should the newly certified (or certifiable) principal be doing to emerge from a student into a practitioner?
2. Does the perfect principal exist?
Yesterday I had the unique opportunity to visit a school far away from my own world. Now I would be the first to tell you that schools within New Hampshire are relatively the same, maybe even 95% the same. Visiting another school allows to see first hand the 5% difference that exists between schools. When I used to work in private schools, school visits happened weekly whether through a school activity like sports or through an attempt to see a new process. Private schools just seemed to encourage staff to visit other schools and look for new ideas and innovative ways of doing things. Public schools seem to operate on an island and I am not completely sure why. I could hypothesize that much of that has to do with the pressure of being accountable to both the state and federal government as well as the parents, but it just seems like a missed opportunity. I am thinking as the emerging principal, that part of the emerging process needs to be through seeing new ideas. Conferences attempt to provide us with new ideas, but I find they are often presented by someone who last worked in a school during the Clinton adminstration. You know the dark ages, before blogging. My visit was a short one, but I think I was able to come away with a couple new ideas that could be easily implemented. Just think what my school would look like if I could do six of these a year! I started blogging in order to start the process of conversations about becoming an emerging principal, I just forgot that these conversations take many forms. You can scale a mountain, just don’t forget to look in the swamp.
A couple things I learned (that may or may not be news to you)
1. NECAP Remediation – Help those dragging the school numbers down without teaching everybody to the test
2. Saturday Homework Club – Kinda like the Breakfast Club, but without Mr. Vernon. If one wants to create accountability, nothing could scare some students more than having to go to school on Saturday to finish their work.
Lake Tarleton New Hampshire – Ice Fishing with Mount Moosilauke in the background
