The work of leaders

Being very good at a job doesn’t equate to being very good at leading others in doing that job. Leadership requires a whole array of additional skills. These include being able to set organizational goals, bring others together around those goals, build a strategy to achieve those goals, assess progress toward those goals, and change course if necessary. And that’s just one slice of the work. For school leaders, for example, the work includes listening to the voices of all sorts of stakeholders — students, families, teachers, community members, policy makers — juggling their various needs and concerns, and communicating clearly about how those needs and concerns are being addressed. Being a great teacher doesn’t automatically make someone a great leader of teachers — never mind a great leader of counselors, librarians, bus drivers, office staff, and so on. School and district leaders need preparation specific to their work.

And the stakes are high. Drawing on more than 20 years of research, the Learning Policy Institute (LPI) has reported that high-quality principal preparation is associated with higher teacher retention and student achievement (Darling-Hammond et al., 2022). What does such high-quality preparation look like? It involves authentic learning that enables principals to put into practice what they’re learning in their courses. That’s something multiple articles in this issue of Kappan emphasize.

The LPI study, which included surveys of principals, found that only 77% of principals had an internship. Of those, only 46% felt the experience sufficiently prepared them for their first year on the job. In this issue of Kappan, Craig Hochbein points out that internships are often too limited in scope, something aspiring principals fit in around their current full-time work. They aren’t getting the full experience of what it’s like to have to oversee bus arrivals, handle a student disciplinary matter, field a parent complaint, and prepare for a teacher evaluation, all in the space of an hour. LPI found that principals whose internships included opportunities to make decisions typical of an education leader, develop an education leader’s perspective, and align their fieldwork with their coursework felt more prepared. Hochbein suggests that full-time yearlong internships would give principals the kinds of experiences they need.