2. Creating a climate hospitable to education.
For students to reach learning goals, and for teachers to be able to help them, principals must establish such basics as safety and orderliness, but these alone are not sufficient to create a positive instructional climate. Research indicates that effective principals also focus on building a sense of school community that is upbeat, welcoming, solution-oriented, and professional.
To change negative school climates–and begin to combat teacher isolation, closed doors, negativism, defeatism, and teacher resistance–the most effective principals focus on building a sense of school community, with the attendant characteristics. These include respect for every member of the school community, professional and solution-oriented environments, and efforts to involve staff and students in a variety of activities, many of them school-wide.
3. Cultivating leadership in others.
Consistent with scholarship on leadership in general, effective school principals empower those around them, including influential teachers and staff teams. Hallmarks of this practice, which correlates with better student performance on math and reading tests, include consistent and well-defined student learning expectations, and frequent discussion and pedagogical critiques among teachers.
Principals who get high marks from teachers for creating a strong climate for instruction in their schools also receive higher marks than other principals for spurring leadership in the faculty, according to research from the University of Minnesota and University of Toronto.
4. Improving instruction.
Research indicates that, next to teaching itself, principal leadership is the most important in-school factor in driving student achievement, but the report also shows that effective principals work to get the most out of the teaching staff. They do this by promoting high expectations, attacking teacher isolation and instituting research-based strategies to improve learning through professional development.
Whether they call it formal evaluation, classroom visits or learning walks, principals intent on promoting growth in both students and adults spend time in classrooms (or ensure that someone who’s qualified does), observing and commenting on what’s working well and what is not. Moreover, they shift the pattern of the annual evaluation cycle to one of ongoing and informal interactions with teachers.
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