National School Reform Faculty

Professional Development for Principals
Seven Core Beliefs

by Paula Evans and Nancy Mohr
Phi Delta Kappan, March 1999

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Seven Beliefs

1. Principals' learning is personal and yet takes place most effectively while working in groups.
2. Principals foster more powerful faculty and student learning by focusing on their own learning.
3. While we honor principals' thinking and voices, we want to push principals to move beyond their assumptions.
4. Focused reflection takes time away from "doing the work," and yet it is essential.
5. It takes strong leadership in order to have truly democratic learning.
6. Rigorous planning is necessary for flexible and responsive implementation.
7. New learning depends on protected dissonance.

1. Principals' learning is personal and yet takes
place most effectively while working in groups.

The centerpiece of the Annenberg Principals' work is continuous discussion in small and large groups. Work in groups reinforces the value of building on one another's thinking and of being willing to let go of earlier thinking in order to construct knowledge together. Our work as facilitators is not to "deliver the goods" but to design the ways in which this learning takes place.

The relationships that evolve out of these ongoing seminars sustain the work between gatherings. Participants stay in touch through e-mail and telephone -- and sometimes airplanes. They become very familiar with one another's contexts and are therefore able to encourage and prod one another in helpful ways. They make commitments to one another and build a web of "lateral accountability."

2. Principals foster more powerful faculty and
student learning by focusing on their own learning.

Principals have difficulty discovering that it is not selfish to take time for their own learning. To lead well requires that principals be learners. Our work is focused on their learning, their interpretation of text, their issues, their problem solving. It is terribly tempting for principals to want to focus on what "others" (teachers, students, superintendents) should do differently. We bring principals back to themselves and, at the same time, stay close to the core of school -- students, teachers, and content. What does that triangle look like in your school? What will you -- not your faculty, your parents, your central office but you -- do to facilitate positive changes in that triangle?

Every time we gather, we examine a piece or two of student work, and all Annenberg Principals include examples of student work in their professional portfolios. One participant noted, "The sharing of student work pointed out how much that work reveals about the culture of the school as well as about curriculum and level of performance." Again, the focus is on the principal's understanding of that student work and how her leadership relates to the quality of that work.

3. While we honor principals' thinking and voices, we want
to push principals to move beyond their assumptions.

One way to get beyond comfortable but ineffectual practices and habits is to learn different ways of communicating that involve counterintuitive behavior. Text-based discussions are an example of this approach. Participants are required to stick very closely to an intellectually challenging text and to milk it for new knowledge. Principals are not allowed to simply tell stories. Discussions are framed by questions designed to be open-ended and to allow for the building of new knowledge. We learn to listen hard and to expand on or change our original thinking.

We often move beyond the participants' comfort zone by introducing questions and issues that are central to everyone's work and that are at the same time terribly difficult to confront -- expectations, standards, race, and power, to name a few. After working with texts by Grace Paley and Lisa Delpit, one participant wrote, "The civil discourse and rigorous analysis of such difficult issues are marvelous. If only my faculty meetings were like this."

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