Book summary “Principal”: summary

Introduction

You face mounting stress and widespread alienation as expectations for student achievement rise while resources dwindle. Reforms often demand compliance rather than fostering genuine professional growth, leaving you isolated and overwhelmed by daily administrative tasks. Michael Fullan demonstrates in Principal that traditional micromanagement fails to improve schools and burns out educators.

To maximize impact on student learning, principals must move away from micromanagement and become lead learners, system players, and agents of change.

You will discover how to build professional capital, collaborate across the wider school system, and master change competencies. The book guides you through transforming instructional practices, harnessing digital technologies, and driving sustainable reforms.

You can use this book to answer critical questions about your daily leadership:

• How do you shift your focus from administration to instructional leadership?
• What strategies build collaborative cultures among teachers?
• How do you navigate systemic reforms without losing momentum?

1. The Crisis in Education and Wrong Drivers

Schools are trapped in a negative trend where students, teachers, and principals experience growing alienation, stress, and dissatisfaction. While responsibilities have massively increased, satisfaction levels have plummeted across all levels of the school system over recent years. You face widespread burnout and defensive behaviors rather than genuine improvement.

Schools suffer from declining satisfaction and flawed policy reforms that rely on compliance rather than human capacity.

Metropolitan Life Insurance Company surveys show that teacher satisfaction declined 24 percent from 2008 to 2013. It dropped from 62 percent to 38 percent. Two-thirds of initially happy kindergartners become alienated from schooling by grade 9.

Principal satisfaction dropped from 68 to 59 percent since 2008. Seventy-five percent of principals feel their job has become too complex. Half of all principals feel under great stress several days a week, and 90 percent of principals think they are the ultimately accountable person.

The Decline in Satisfaction

You navigate a system driven by a wrong direction and a frenetic urgency. System reforms fail when driven by four counterproductive policy errors:

• accountability;
• individualistic solutions;
• technology;
• fragmented strategies.

These wrong drivers act as quick fixes that appeal to the public and legislators. They rely on carrots, sticks, and compliance rather than genuine human motivation and capacity building.

Extreme pressure through distorted accountability mechanisms inevitably produces systemic gaming, unethical behavior, and a culture of endemic cheating. When high-stakes targets are tied to rewards and punishments without corresponding capacity building, educators resort to fabricating results.

In the Atlanta public school system, test scores rose until superintendent Beverly Hall was named superintendent of the year in 2009. By 2011 she and thirty-four other educators were indicted by a grand jury for a culture of endemic cheating.

The Four Wrong Drivers and Micromanagement

Attempting to reform schools through individual teacher appraisals and isolated superstar leaders fails because individuals cannot easily change entrenched organizational cultures. Treating teaching as an isolated individual pursuit creates a cat-and-mouse game between principals and teachers, resulting in superficial compliance rather than real growth.

In recent teacher evaluations in Florida, Tennessee, and Michigan, 97 percent, 98 percent, and 98 percent of teachers respectively were deemed effective or highly effective. These inflated results stem from superficial appraisals in unconstructed systems.

Detailed compliance-driven observation rubrics create a heavy administrative burden that burns out principals and turns instruction into an odious task. When states mandate rigid observation frequencies and massive subcategory rubrics, you spend hours on bureaucratic paperwork.

In Tennessee, evaluation rules require principals to observe new teachers six times a year and licensed teachers four times across 116 subcategories. Each observation requires four to six hours of work. The proposed model bases 50 percent of teacher evaluation on principal observations, 35 percent based on student growth, and 15 percent based on student achievement data. This micromanaging leads to micro madness and a compliance nightmare.

Districts succeed when they abandon extreme autonomy and micromanagement in favor of developing and employing the collective professional capital of their teachers and principals. By encouraging educators to break through classroom isolation, jointly design projects, and collaborate on what works, you achieve dramatic improvements.

Union City, New Jersey, transformed from a poor-performing district into one where 89.4 percent of students graduated by 2011. This rate was 15 percent higher than the national average. Union City grade 8 math passing rates rose from 42 percent to 71 percent by focusing on professional capital and focused collaboration rather than the great leader theory.

2. Leading Learning and Professional Capital

Effective principals maximize student achievement by acting as lead learners and building human, social, and decisional capital.

Ken Leithwood notes the principal is second only to the teacher in terms of impact on student learning. Acting as a direct instructional leader by observing and evaluating individual teachers room by room is an impossible and narrow trap. Instead, the lead learner must focus on shaping the conditions for continuous learning across the whole school and system.

The Principal as Lead Learner

Principals maximize their impact on student learning not by managing individuals or acting as distant visionaries, but by actively participating as learners alongside teachers. Viviane Robinson reports an 0.84 effect size for leading teacher learning and development, which is twice as powerful as any other leadership domain. Other domains carry an 0.42 effect size for establishing goals and expectations, an 0.42 effect size for ensuring quality teaching, an 0.31 effect size for resourcing strategically, and an 0.27 effect size for ensuring an orderly and safe environment.

Principal James Bond at Park Manor Public School got messy with technology implementation, modeled applications, and learned alongside teachers and students.

You can apply this approach through practical steps:

• Be willing to get messy with new tools, programs, applications, or websites that do not work perfectly at first.
• Make technology easily available in classrooms so teachers just have to turn it on.
• Showcase and model applications at staff meetings or professional development sessions using a gradual release model.
• Connect teachers who are learning new technologies to those who are reluctant.
• Let staff find ways to help students and drop uses that are not value-added.

Helen Timperley's research emphasizes creating inquiry habits of mind rather than completing checklists. By treating team leaders as their primary class of learners, principals can leverage those leaders to guide other teachers.

A principal realized she was too busy attending to individual teachers and concluded that her actual class of learners included team leaders who could leverage the learning of other groups.

You can guide this work by following these priorities:

• Ask the guiding question: Who is my class?
• Target leadership learning needs of team leaders who can leverage the learning of other groups.

Tony Bryk and colleagues compared 477 elementary schools in Chicago and found that successful schools used leadership as a driver for change by focusing on professional capacity, school climate, parent and community ties, and an instructional guidance system. Hancock School fostered a vigorous professional community and gained 10 percent in reading and 19 percent in math. Alexander School suffered from fragmented efforts and lost 9 percent in reading with no improvement in math.

Building Professional Capital

Systemic school transformation depends on building and interacting three components of professional capital: human capital, social capital, and decisional capital.

Michael Fullan and Andy Hargreaves coined professional capital to move beyond individualistic solutions by combining individual talent, collaborative relationships, and collective decision-making expertise. At Park Manor Public School, the combination of collaborative strategies and technology integration raised provincial reading proficiency scores from 72 percent to 93 percent and writing scores from 70 percent to 87 percent in three years.

Carrie Leana measured human capital, social capital, and math achievement over a one-year period across New York City elementary schools. Her research demonstrated that teachers with lower individual skills working in schools with high social capital achieved better student results. Furthermore, principals who spent time building external social capital achieved higher student test scores, whereas mentoring and monitoring teachers individually had no effect on student achievement.

OECD survey data shows that 22 percent of teachers have never had any feedback from their principals, and over 50 percent of teachers have never received feedback from an external source. Yet 79 percent of teachers would find constructive feedback helpful. Marc Tucker posed a true-or-false question on teacher evaluations improving accountability and achievement, finding no evidence that evaluation at scale produces significant student performance improvements.

You can ground formal appraisal in a developmental strategy:

• Make the appraisal framework sound based on best standards and efficient assessment ways.
• Underpin appraisal use with a philosophy oriented to development and improvement rather than a punitive stance.
• Make the learning culture the main event and integrate performance appraisal to serve shared work.
• Ensure professional development and learning are fundamental, ongoing features of the entire process.
• Build the most effective feedback into purposeful interactions between and among teachers and the principal.

Decisional capital is the cumulative expertise to make wise, discretionary decisions when no precedent exists, and it is sharpened through continuous collaborative practice. Malcolm Gladwell popularized the ten thousand hours of deliberate practice over ten years or more to accomplish trade mastery. Elizabeth City, Richard Elmore, Sarah Fiarman, and Lee Teitel introduced instructional rounds, which Teitel later adapted into school-based rounds to increase teacher engagement and collective efficacy.

You can adopt specific methods to build this capacity:

• Use instructional rounds as a tool or complement to extend learning, not as a replacement for establishing a shared collaborative culture.

Unscripted visits to schools and districts in Ontario revealed that teachers, principals, and students were amazingly articulate, consistent, and specific in explaining their work and results.

3. System Players and Change Agents

A principal cannot stay effective by working in isolation. You must act as a system player who connects your school to districtwide and external networks. While a school can occasionally become great on its own, it cannot sustain effectiveness if the wider system fails. By engaging externally through intradistrict development and peer learning, you access new ideas and contribute to the betterment of the system.

Sustainable transformation requires connecting schools to wider systems and developing specific change competencies.

Parks Manor in Elmira, Ontario, William G. Davis Sr. Public School, Central Peel Secondary School, Sanger Unified School District in California, and Edmonton Public Schools Communities of Practice demonstrate how school-to-school clusters drive improvement. The Peel District School Board operates across 246 schools with wireless access capacity, serving 350 and 935 students respectively in two filmed schools. However, 60 percent of principals surveyed indicated that their districts only occasionally provided opportunities to work productively with colleagues from other schools.

Philanthropic initiatives like those from the Gates Foundation have shifted toward whole-district reform. After four years of heavy investment in the MET program to measure teacher performance, the foundation launched iPD focusing on whole-district continuous learning and inter-district collaboration.

System coherence requires a combination of vertical rapport with the district and horizontal interaction among peer principals. High-performing districts develop core processes, supporting conditions, relationships, and leadership across both the center and the schools. You can break out of isolated operations by asking targeted questions:

• What boundaries have you been slow to cross? Why?
• Whom in your district have you put off getting to know? What can you do about that?
• What school-to-school bonds could you explore, based on common interests?
• How coherent is your district? If its coherence is less than perfect, what holds things back?
• What are colleagues doing that you might also do to be more active and visible in your district or larger system?

Pairing schools with external sister schools creates a high-yield strategy for lateral professional development. District 96 in Illinois, comprising fewer than 15 schools, required each principal to find an external sister school three years ago. Preparing presentations for visiting educators forced teachers to reflect on their practices at a deeper level.

Large systems can drive reform from the middle through district collaboratives. California has a population of 38 million compared to 35 million in all of Canada, with 7 million students and over 1,000 school districts. Ten districts currently in CORE, the California Office for Reform in Education, serve over one million students and secured a federal waiver approved by Arne Duncan in August 2013 for one year.

Skills for Leading Change

Following blind passion is dangerous advice in change leadership. True passion is a side effect of mastery, skill development, and actual success. You must focus first on building career capital, keeping in mind the ten-thousand-hour rule for deliberate skill development and perfection of craft.

Effective educational leaders must master seven specific competencies that span status quo challenging, trust-building, planning, teamwork, urgency, continuous learning, and networking.

Lyle Kirtman identifies 35 subitems across seven distinct competencies that generate instructional improvement. You can apply these domains to your daily practice:

• Challenge the status quo.
• Build trust through clear communications and expectations.
• Create a commonly owned plan for success.
• Focus on team over self.
• Have a sense of urgency for sustainable results.
• Commit to continuous improvement for self.
• Build external networks and partnerships.

Leaders often suffer from distorted self-perceptions and struggle with behavioral continuums. Research by Sebastien Brion, Cameron Anderson, Robert Kaplan, and Robert Kaiser reveals an illusion of alliance. Miles Davis once told John Coltrane to take the horn out of his mouth when Coltrane claimed he could not stop playing, illustrating the risk of becoming domineering. You can counter distorted mirrors through structured reflection:

• Take Kirtman's self-assessment inventory contained in his book.
• What are your passions? What are your strongest skills? How closely do these two lists match up?
• Get feedback from staff on your balance between talker and listener.
• Which of your strengths might you need to fear?
• Supportively describe each other as talkers and listeners.

4. The Digital Revolution and Planned Change

Principals must harness the unplanned digital revolution and lead rigorous curriculum standards through disciplined execution.

The Unplanned Digital Revolution

The unplanned digital revolution is propelled by a push factor of boring schooling and a pull factor of the alluring digital world. Schooling pushes students and teachers away due to alienation and boredom. The digital world pulls them toward engaging technology. This interaction guarantees the current status quo cannot continue and requires a new pedagogy where students and teachers become learning partners.

Three schools in Ontario—Park Manor, William G. Davis Sr., and Central Peel Secondary School—integrated technology over three years without an initial master plan. This work resulted in buzzing classrooms and high teacher and student engagement. Central Peel Secondary School had just under a thousand students. Central Peel's committee grew from six or seven teachers to some thirty teachers.

New learning environments share specific operational traits:

• Irresistibly engaging for students and teachers
• Elegantly efficient and easy (from a technical standpoint) to use
• Technologically ubiquitous 24/7
• Steeped in real-life problem solving

Organic and naturally occurring digital change requires specific elements of leadership to provide systemic coherence. Park Manor used the Accelerated Learning Framework and Central Peel used the 21st Century Learning Framework as jointly owned structures.

People are most motivated and energized when they feel they are making progress, even through small steps in daily work. Research shows that the negative effects of obstacles carry three times more negative weight than progress carries positive weight. Therefore, frequent small positive steps and celebrating them are vital for organizational motivation.

Planned Change and Leadership Traits

State leaders from forty-six states published the Common Core State Standards in English language arts and mathematics in 2010. Almost half a billion dollars funded by the federal government for assessment consortia like PARCC and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortia. The implementation of Common Core State Standards demands world-class rigor and a fundamental shift from presentation of information to active student engagement.

Leaders who succeed under difficult and chaotic circumstances exhibit three distinct behavioral traits:

• Fanatic discipline
• Empirical creativity
• Productive paranoia

Principals must continuously evaluate their school environment through reflective action items regarding push-pull factors, technology criteria, and state standards. You should examine daily conditions using precise questions:

• What do you keep fighting for?
• What are the push and pull factors operating in your school?
• How is your school doing in terms of the four technology criteria I proposed in this chapter?
• For your school, what are the advantages and problems of needing to meet state standards in testing?
• Do you still want the job?

10 Key Ideas

1. Schools suffer from declining satisfaction and flawed policy reforms that rely on compliance rather than human capacity.
2. System reforms fail when driven by accountability, individualistic solutions, technology, and fragmented strategies.
3. Systemic school transformation depends on building and interacting three components of professional capital: human capital, social capital, and decisional capital.
4. Effective principals maximize student achievement by acting as lead learners and building human, social, and decisional capital.
5. Sustainable transformation requires connecting schools to wider systems and developing specific change competencies.
6. Pairing schools with external sister schools creates a high-yield strategy for lateral professional development.
7. Following blind passion is dangerous advice in change leadership, as true passion is a side effect of mastery, skill development, and actual success.
8. Effective educational leaders must master seven specific competencies that span status quo challenging, trust-building, planning, teamwork, urgency, continuous learning, and networking.
9. The unplanned digital revolution is propelled by a push factor of boring schooling and a pull factor of the alluring digital world.
10. Leaders who succeed under difficult and chaotic circumstances exhibit three distinct behavioral traits: fanatic discipline, empirical creativity, and productive paranoia.