Learning the many skills needed to be an effective principal requires learning beyond what you get in a master’s degree program. Most principals will tell you they really learned the role on the job and with the support of a few mentors.
What if there were a better way to train principals?
This post is about our vision for what that training should look like. It’s working in North Carolina, and we think it can work everywhere.
Reimagining school leadership and school-leadership training
In recent years, North Carolina has reimagined school leadership. They’ve envisioned principals less as administrators and more as executives. Among other things, principals are expected to:
- See their work as “a social act,” in which “people are always the medium” by which they conduct their leadership.
- Recognize the “moral purpose of school leadership” and “work to eliminate the gap between high and low performance.”
Some years ago, the Wallace Foundation tried to codify all of the things a principal has to do in a set of 21 Competencies. These competencies encompass more than just factual knowledge. They’re about experiential knowledge, meant to convert understanding into doing. They range from Communication and Delegation to Emotional Intelligence, Responsiveness, and Sensitivity.
They’re missing one key thing: a focus on equity in leadership. The North Carolina Principal Fellows Program wanted to operationalize these competencies, and they asked us how to do that through an equity lens.
NC’s Leadership Competencies: An Equitable Approach in Practice
Since 1993, the North Carolina Principal Fellows Program (NCPFP) has been providing merit-based scholarships for educators who aspire to become principals within the public school system. It’s an amazing model, and we’re proud to partner with them.
Starting in 2020, APC Leadership Collaborative and the NCPFP teamed up to reimagine principal preparation through job-embedded, experiential learning. In other words: more job prep, less book-learning.
The result is an online course that leads principal fellows through each of the 21 competencies with a specific focus on equity. They don’t have to go it alone, though, as a coach supports the fellow’s reflection through the course. The course is performance-based rather than knowledge-based. And importantly, it’s not evaluative – because competency is about constantly growing and learning, not hitting some imaginary standard.
“You can sit in a grad school class all day and talk about the philosophy of this or that,” says David Wils, a Principal Fellow at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, “but having real, tangible strategies that you can put into place not only forces you to think really well as someone who’s training to be an administrator, but it’s something you can actually carry with you as you go into the job.”
“They receive formative critique from the coach in a safe, trust-building way. Essentially, they may struggle from time to time without the worry that their ‘job’ depends on it,” says Dr. Eddie Price, Director of NCPFP. “With the leadership competencies course, Principal Fellows work through challenging scenarios that many MSA programs fail to emphasize.”
Prepare, Apply, Reflect, Extend
Let’s take a look at how these “challenging scenarios” play out for just one of the 21 competencies: Conflict Management.
- First, fellows are presented with a writing prompt: How do you feel about your ability to fully listen to others when in conflict?
- Next, they read about the neuroscience behind how the brain responds to perceived social threats, exploring the “SCARF” model developed by neuroscientist David Rock.
- From there, they complete a survey to identify their conflict management style.
- Then comes the all-important application portion. Principal Fellows select one of three scenarios to role-play with their coach.
Among the scenarios is one that’s provocatively titled “All Y’all Are Racist.” In this scenario, a parent of color shares concerns about their belief that their son is disproportionately punished for minor behavioral issues. When you, the principal, tell her that you’ll “look into the situation,” the parent responds, “Look into it? All y’all here are racist. Nobody ever takes our concerns seriously, including you. I want you to do more than look into it.”
After the role-play, which is almost inevitably going to be difficult and charged, the fellow reflects on the scenario with their coach, identifying links between the neuroscience they’ve read about and the approaches they took to the conflict at hand.
“Making sure that I was self-aware, making sure that I knew how I was entering a space, was so critical when you’re talking with families who don’t have a lot of trust in the system and don’t have a lot of trust with you,” says Imani Harper, Principal Fellow at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.
By looking at the key competencies through an equity lens, and by practicing real-world scenarios rather than relying on theoretical instruction alone, the principal-to-be engages in a thought-provoking training exercise that stays imprinted in their memory.
Unfortunately, such training exercises are rare.
“There are very few opportunities for aspiring school leaders to practice what they are learning during their MSA program,” says Dr. Price. “No matter the quality of a school leadership program, it is practically impossible to fully understand the nature of the work without living it and learning from those around you who have mastered it.”
Could this approach also be used to develop the skills of mid-career principals? We think so.
School systems everywhere would benefit from practice-based training for principals. And we think a focus on creating and sustaining equitable learning environments must play a critical role in that training.
Feel free to contact us if you’d like to learn more about how we’re using and adapting this model!