Why School Leadership Development Matters

Every year, thousands of students housed in underperforming schools represent a continuing tragedy in the K-12 system in the United States. Every student who attends those schools will struggle for a lifetime; not being able to secure stable employment, obtain adequate housing or health insurance, therefore living shorter lives characterized by greater stress and limited life options. At the same time, every urban school district classified as holistically failing has within its school’s examples of success, and generally it is the principal at the helm of the school that makes the difference. The Wallace Foundation (2007), beckoned:

The school leader has become the central ingredient to school improvement. Hess and Kelly (2007), revealed that school principals are the front-line managers, the small business executives, the team leaders charged with leading their faculty to new levels of effectiveness. Leaders of today are dealing with issues that leaders of yesterday could not have imagined. In an era where accountability measures serve as the barometer of success or lack thereof, principal effectiveness in schools is an educational organization’s best hope for success. Moreover, authors and theorists have concluded that effective leadership serves as the cornerstone for future success and also reveals an obvious relationship between effective leadership and overall school effectiveness and student achievement outcomes. (Davis, 2003; Furman, 2003; Hallinger & Heck, 1999; Schein, 2000).

Highly skilled school leaders are not born — nor are they fully forged in the instructional setting of the school classroom. Neither do they emerge fully prepared to lead from traditional graduate programs in school administration. Most likely, effective new principals who have been rigorously prepared and deliberately mentored in well-designed programs that immerse them in real-world leadership experiences where they are challenged to excel will be the most successful (Southern Regional Educational Board, 2007). Many districts are now attempting to place the power and authority back into the schools after many different attempts at reforming from the outside. According to the 2008 Wallace Foundation study entitled Becoming a Leader: Preparing School Principals for Today’s Schools:

Schools of the twenty-first century require a unique and different kind of principal who can fulfill many different roles. Principals in today’s schools must have the intellectual acumen to simultaneously serve as instructional leaders, community leaders, and visionary leaders simultaneously. The antiquated model of principal preparation that focuses on management and production is no longer aligned to the needs in today’s schools.

The Case for Program Development

TranscEnDence Educational Partners seeks to broaden the current focus of strengthening school leaders by significantly increasing the capacity of its leaders in schools provides to capitalize on impacting a major piece of the education eco-system that includes: principals, teachers, districts and parents (see figure one below).

Theory of Action

The TranscEnDence Educational Partners Leadership Development/Coaching model is grounded by Transformational Leadership Theory focused on the development of reflective school leaders capable of transforming urban schools. This customized approach is based on collaborative inquiry, discovery, and learning processes that empower school leaders to: gain knowledge of the most relevant research-based theory; implore practical application of theory in the real world of work; and to gain targeted support in the implementation of sound practices and systems to drive improved student outcomes. Grounded by the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) Standards, this atypical leadership development model is anchored by an extensive coaching and mentoring model which requires collaboration driven by three elements of rigorous support: technical assistance, personal support, and individual challenge for school leaders. These three elements are held together by a relational bond between the leader and education executive serving in the coaching role.

A pillar of the TranscEnDence Educational Partners’ Leadership Development/Coaching Model is the pairing of leadership development to real-time coaching around ten core elements of campus foci. Based on a keen understanding that the principal alone is unable to drive systemic change, the TranscEnDence Educational Partners’ model includes actionable deliverables each principal must make to drive the implementation of a distributive leadership model designed to develop the skills of all campus leadership team members and the effective creation of high-yield team structures and practices.

The Model: Phases of Leadership Development, Implementation & Coaching

The three-year professional development/coaching cycle includes three phases of core work with Priority School Leaders all grounded by a cyclical focus on school leader development, strategic planning, quality implementation, real-time coaching and sustainability as follows:

Phase I focuses on assessing school leader strengths and areas for development alongside the creation of a robust professional development plan for each school leader as part of the training process. A customized, interactive 360 Leadership Development tool will be administered as part of the initial data collection and analysis process. The collection of and analyzation of data will serve as the springboard for the development of a customized coaching plan for each leader categorized by the ISLCC standards. School districts have the option also has the option to customize the 360 instrument prior to administration around targeted leadership competencies being measured within the district. Results of said survey will be housed on an electronic platform where the school leader and members of the TranscEnDence Educational Partners’ team can access and utilize the tool to define professional development and coaching goals. All coaching notes and feedback will be housed on this platform as well to track progress against goals and serve as a shared housing source to drive collaboration between TranscEnDence Educational Partners’ coaches and district personnel. Supervisors of school leaders will also have access to the tool to ensure alignment between internal and external supports provided to ensure alignment of supports and a concentrated focus on making each leader stronger based on both quantitative and qualitative data

As part of Phase I, School Leaders will also engage ten (10) monthly in-person professional development sessions to build a broad base of understanding around key aspects of school turnaround and best practice. These sessions will take place at an off-site locations designed to maximize the power and synergy of leaders learning, processing, planning and reflecting together. Professional development themes will be centralized around four (4) core themes related to school turnaround and transformation. They include:

• Leadership as Central to School Improvement
• Maximizing Campus Climate/Culture to Drive Change
• Instructional Improvements as the Foundation for Excellence
• Data as a Key Lever of Change

Leadership Development Modules

Paired with these four themes are ten (10) professional development and performance coaching modules designed to anchor learning, focus school leaders on research and best practices and provide a roadmap for implementation. This proprietary content back by an intensive on-the-ground coaching methodology of support will serve as the key lever towards building school leader capacity and driving school transformation. These leadership development modules offer a comprehensive, “turnkey” solution for addressing leadership deficits, and are supported by years of research and successful practitioner experience that has resulted in a consistent track record of educational transformation success.

Module #1: The Power of Leading with a Mission, Vision, Values and Goals Mindset

Module Highlights: This critical module serves as the foundation for strong school leadership. In this thought-provoking, assumption-challenging session school leaders will come to understand the importance of understanding the necessity to lead through a shared mission, collaborative vision, sound and equitable values and data driven-oriented goals.

Module #2: Cultivating Leadership in Schools: Connecting People, Purpose & Practice

Module Highlights: Central to school leadership is the ability for a leader to build capacity beyond oneself. This module focuses on providing school leaders with the structures, framework, tools and resources to build capacity across all levels of a school organization inclusive of campus leadership teams as the driver of school change. This module also includes a focus on establishing key partnerships with stakeholders to drive change.

Module #3: Building a Bridge to School Reform

Module Highlights: This highly-charged interactive module forces school leaders to examine their personal leadership practices alongside the progress or lack of progress in their schools. The module pushes leaders to examine their personal mental models and day-to-day leadership behaviors against a wall of research on transformational leadership to include: driving for results; action-oriented leadership practices; continual analyzation of data; development of and revisions to action plans based on data; driving a team towards results; the ability to challenge organizational norms without losing leadership influence; getting the right people on the bus; halting all unsuccessful strategies; and leveraging influence inside and outside of the school organization.

Module #4: Establishing a Unified Culture of Excellence & Achievement

Module Highlights: Marrying elements of academic and school culture research, this module exposes school leaders to the imperative for explicit work to be done around the establishment of sound approaches to teaching and learning that focus on valuing the academic press alongside positive cultural norms in a unified and coordinated manner. Designed around the work of national culture-climate researchers and practitioners Deal, Peterson, Fisher and Muhammed, this highly relevant module empowers school leaders to be the key drivers of the change process through a deep understanding of the interconnected nature of establishing a healthy school culture to yield strong academic achievement results.

Module #5: Leveraging the Power of Teams through a Professional Learning Community Culture

Module Highlights: The overarching PLC imperative associated with this session includes the essence of a true Learning Community that embraces a laser-like commitment to the learning of every student. School leaders will come away with a clear understanding that a clear mission and vision works to support a PLC culture, and leaders will be able to recognize the systems and processes that must be in place to ensure that a high level of learning for ALL students. Action oriented outcomes from the session include the school leader:

Module #6: Observing for Instructional ExcellenceModule #6: Observing for Instructional Excellence

Module Highlights: This module focuses on the necessity for the school leader to regularly observe the quality of both instructional and social-emotional interactions between teacher and students that have been proven to contribute to students’ academic achievement and social competencies. School leaders will explore multiple dimensions of teaching including the provision of emotional support, effective classroom organization, classroom organization, use of time, and quality instructional support as the hallmarks of effective classrooms; regardless of the grade level or subject. Leaders will learn how to provide meaningful feedback to teachers based on the level of their current classroom practices and glean strategies to improve areas of teaching that have direct links to student achievement.

Module #7: Differentiated Coaching to Drive Instructional Improvements

Module Highlights: This module will engage school leaders in the proper and most efficient manner in which they must differentiate coaching methodologies when observing classrooms for effective and efficient outcomes; thus providing customized and targeted feedback that drives changes in teacher behavior through self-evaluation and the setting of teacher professional goals.

Module #8: Leading through the Lens of Assessment “For” Learning

Module Highlights: This targeted module focuses on pushing school leaders to examine, study, and answer five critical questions that work to ensure sound classroom assessment practices inclusive of: the “why” behind assessment; “what” is assessed; “how” learning is assessed; “how” results are communicated; and “how” students are involved in the assessment process?

Module #9: Real-Time Data Improvement Processes

Module Highlights: School leaders must ensure that data analysis takes into consideration academic and operational data points that significantly impact student achievement alongside core testing data. Supplemental data such as student/teacher attendance, parent participation, disciplinary and out-of-class suspension data, etc., are key levers of change a school leader must consider as impacting student achievement performance. This interactive module will aid school leaders in guiding their staff in administering responsible and useful Data-Driven Decision-Making (DDDM) as a key lever to student achievement improvements.

Module #10: Harnessing the Power of Data

Module Highlights: School leaders must ensure regular, systematic conversations with teachers and staff about the results of their classroom assessments which are proven to lead to increased student achievement through targeted data analysis processes. This action-oriented, tool-driven module provides a tangible model for using achievement data to increase teacher reflection about student performance that leads to meaningful adjustments in instruction.

Executive Performance Coaching

Every great player needs a coach. Someone that responds to questions, offers feedback, and builds individual capacity to do things at high levels when the coach is not present. Executive Performance Coaching will serve as a central lever to solidifying the targeted development work completed in Phases I, II and III with school leaders. It is only through a cycle of coaching and targeted field support that learning can take hold in real-time and school leaders can implement best practices that yield improved student achievement outcomes.

TranscEnDence Educational Partners’ Executive Performance Coaching Model is a face-to-face actionable strategy used to develop reflective school leaders capable of transforming urban schools. It is driven by collaborative inquiry, discovery, and learning processes that empower school leaders to explore their innermost thoughts, strengths, beliefs, and to establish goals to create outer results. The process relies on collaboration and is based on three components: technical help, personal support, and individual challenge. These three coaching elements are held together by an emotional bond between TranscEnDence Educational Partners’ Executive Coaching Team and the school leader and team members (see diagram #1).