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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4. Focused reflection takes time away from "doing the work," and yet it is essential.

Traditionally, professional development for principals has assumed that acquiring new techniques is the bottom line. If only administrators knew how to evaluate teachers properly. If only they had practiced the skills necessary to deal with an unhappy parent. While there is much to be said for teaching the skills directly related to management tasks, principals who are not thoughtful and who lack the ability to plan, analyze the implications of the plan, and then reflect back on what worked and what didn't are doomed to make poor decisions.
It is, therefore, important to build into the professional development experience many opportunities and ways to reflect. Before each session, every principal writes about a critical school issue and frames a related question with which he or she is wrestling. These issues are difficult and confounding. If they were simple and if they responded to simple solutions, they would have been solved long ago and would not occupy our time. Here are questions of the type we believe are worth principals' time and thought:

How do I genuinely include all voices in the discourse and at the same time have a strong, clear agenda of my own?

What is the difference between giving folks enough time and enabling them to procrastinate?

How do I balance the needs of the teachers with the needs of the students?

Do I avoid getting into classrooms because I don't know what to do about them?

How do I make use of standards without letting them obfuscate what's really important?

How do I stop waking up at 3 a.m.?

5. It takes strong leadership in order to have truly democratic learning.

Leaders are most truly democratic when they listen carefully and then design the work for the group. The principals observe the facilitators working as a teaching team. They remark on our shared convictions and our willingness to disagree publicly. They then work in teams. While immersed in their own experience, they continuously step back to reflect on their role as leaders of teams back in their schools. What am I doing? What does this mean about my own learning? What does this mean about the learning of the teachers I teach back in school? And what does this mean about students' learning? How do we build teams? The principals learn that disconnected team-building activities have little impact. Instead, they should focus on demanding, supporting, and exemplifying rigorous thinking and performance.
One participant wrote, "There are times I need to be more assertive, saying consensus is fine, but right now we're going to do this, and here's why. Interestingly enough, my staff just evaluated me, and they like that I'm doing that. It took me six years to reach this point."

6. Rigorous planning is necessary for flexible and responsive implementation.

Even though there are many critical issues on people's mind, we accomplish the most when we have one "essential question" and focus all our work around it. Each meeting of the Annenberg Principals must connect to and build on the previous ones. At each session, we spend time:

creating shared understandings -- connecting people to one another; reviewing agendas, goals, and norms; examining our process;

engaging in intellectual dialogue and debate -- reading and discussing recent research and publications and hearing from speakers who might provoke new thinking; and

planning specific applications of learning -- planning next steps back home, creating and critiquing a plan of action, assuming responsiblity for one's own progress as well as that of others in the group.

7. New learning depends on protected dissonance.

Providing a safe setting within which to stretch makes all the difference. We get to know one another. We form small groups within the larger group in order to foster ongoing critical friendships that are sustained between our meetings. As the leaders of the group, we must model the willingness to be uncomfortable, wrong, and maybe foolish. Can we muster the energy and persistence we demand of participants to take risks and ask tough questions? In the midst of this very serious work it is, in part, a sense of humor that gives principals the elasticity and the willingness to face tough choices and difficult times. We have some fun -- we eat and laugh together. Somethimes we cry together.

Paying close attention to the intricacies of principals' learning and to how their learning relates to their role and responsilbities has changed the way we work. Professional development used to be assessed by "feedback sheets" filled out at the end of a session. Rate the session 1-5. Did everybody feel good? Now we are more demanding of ourselves. We ask; What is something you are doing differently as a direct result of our work together this past summer? If principals aren't changing their practice, our work hasn't made an impact.

Principals' work is essential. Principals who reexamine their belief systems and transform their practice facilitate change at their schools. Good professional development for leadership scrutinizes its own belief system, content, and process. Everyone, including the facilitators, stretches and grows, and that truly makes a difference.

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