Professional Development for Principals
Seven Core Beliefs

by Paula Evans and Nancy Mohr

PAULA M. EVANS is the director of professional development at the Annenberg Institute for school Reform, Brown Unviersity, Providence, RI. NANCY MOHR was formerly a principal in New York City and is currently a consultant on leadership there.

Phi Delta Kappan, March 1999

CAN PRINCIPALS' professional development truly improve practice? Can we encourage new behaviors that allow principals to make a genuine difference in their schools? Can we support principals as they strive to be grounded and focused, bold and unafraid? Ms. Evans and Ms. Mohr share answers to these questions -- answers learned through their work at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform.

PROGRAMS IN school leadership abound. Participants often remember the workshops as stimulating and productive and assume that their own effectiveness will improve more or less automatically as a result of their attendance. Too often, however, the workshop experience seems to fade surprisingly quickly. The principal returns to school with little more than a few insights that have already begun to dim.

We have asked ourselves, "Can principals' professional development truly improve practice? Can we encourage new behaviors that allow principals to make a genuine difference in their schools? Can we support principals as they strive to be grounded and focused, bold and unafraid?" At the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, we have learned how to help principals become much more effective in their schools. Moreover, our experience has taught us how to support the principals' growing effectiveness once the formal workshop has drawn to a close.

Annenberg Principals, all in the midst of substantial efforts to improve their schools, are drawn from schools across the country. They work in urban, rural, and suburban settings and in schools with all grade-level combinations. Participants make at least a year's commitment to the group. The seminar meets four times per year, and we encourage regular communication between meetings. Each seminar group is no larger than 35.

.......................................

TEACHING PRINCIPALS how to lead schools by
giving them predigested "in-basket" training
hardly leads to new thinking about
leadership, teaching, or learning.

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We expect participants to read and write in preparation for each session, to articulate their own goals and dilemmas, and to be constructively critical of their own work and that of their colleagues. The learning experience promotes patterns of behavior and new habits that we hope to see brought back to the school.

We also know that the learning experience for principals must be intellectually rigorous and must provoke the questioning of long-held assumptions. Reinforcing old patterns and hearing speakers who mouth familiar platitudes about the "effective" principal may make people feel comfortable, but it does not lead to substantive change. We deliberately encourage principals to question their practice, attempt change, and hold one another's feet to the fire. Our work is consciously shaped by a set of seven beliefs. These beliefs are complex -- they are conundrums not to be resolved but to be wrestled with. Their very complexity mirrors that of principals' daily dilemmas and long-term challenges.

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