Building Instructional Leadership Capacity

Melanie and I are attending the NASSP, National Association of Secondary School Principals, conference, Ignite '16 this week.  We both just love learning and growing, so we are those people who get to each session early to get the best seat, drag out our bag of colored pens, sticky notes, hi-liters and tabs, and take copious notes!  We do get some looks for being "those people," but we wouldn't have it any other way!

One of the sessions that we attended today was about building instructional leadership capacity, which is one of my favorite topics. The authors of The Principal Influence: A Framework for Developing Leadership Capacity in Principals shared a specific framework on how we can increase our effectiveness as leaders.  You can read more about the book and purchase it here: http://www.ascd.org/Publications/Books/Overview/The-Principal-Influence.aspx

The four key roles of a principal are Visionary, Instructional Leader, Engager, and Learner/Collaborator.  To assess your effectiveness in each of these areas, ask yourself:

• How aware am I of the teaching and learning in my school, our current reality and needs, and my leadership role in relationship to this?
• How intentionally do I align decisions, actions, policies and resources to meet our needs?
• How do I know whether my leadership action are positively impacting the staff and school community?
• How responsive am I to the results of my assessment, and how does that translate to action?

This made me consider the frequency, accuracy and depth to which I reflect. It is important to identify specifically what areas we need to grow as leaders so that we can tailor our leadership development to improve in that area.

If, for example, your goal is to grow as a visionary, your leadership development should include strategies for providing focus in order to address initiative fatigue and strategies for monitoring/measuring the use of resources against the vision.  What are the "sacred cows?"

Leadership development for the area of instructional leadership might include strategies for supporting PLCs that are more than "data meetings," practicing how to coach as a principal, or strategies for differentiating supervision and feedback.

To grow as an Engager, some leadership development actions could include strategies for creating reflective practitioners school-wide and implementing whole child practices in the school community.

Growth as a Learner/Collaborator might include strategies for how to make sure professional learning is differentiated, strategies for how to provide support for job embedded practices, and strategies for gathering the right evidence to show impact on teacher practice and student outcomes.

A special thank you goes to the authors of The Principal Influence (Pete Hall, Deborah Childs-Bowen, Ann Cunningham-Morris, Phyllis Pajardo, and Alisa Simeral) for being willing to share their collective knowledge, research and experience!  Those colored pens, hi-liters, sticky notes and tabs sure came in handy in this meaningful session!