Great Learning Starts with Great Staff

At The Principal Center, we define instructional leadership as the practice of making and implementing operational and improvement decisions in the service of student learning. 

Student learning and school improvement depend on a stable, professional teaching and support staff. Now more than ever, school leaders must meet HR challenges head on. 

The Principal Center is proud to present the HR Excellence 2023-2024 Cohort, or HRX—now accepting inquiries from public, network, and independent schools worldwide. 

Why Staffing Challenges Are Growing

Starting the school year fully staffed—and staying that way—is no longer a given. 

The education workforce has changed dramatically over the past four years. Even before the pandemic, teachers in hard-to-fill areas such as SPED, math, and science were in short supply. 

Enrollment in teacher education programs has been on the decline for years, and a wave of retirements and resignations has only exacerbated the problem. 

As other fields have increased pay, education has become less attractive by comparison, and teacher working conditions aren't helping. 

The stress of the past few years has made teaching an even more difficult job, and new hires with less training and experience need more support.

If we want to win the competition for talent, and make the people we hire successful, we must focus on factors within our control.

Fortunately, instructional leaders have a great deal of leverage over 8 sets of factors.

The 8 Pillars of Human Resources Excellence

School leaders can attract and retain talented staff by leveraging 8 sets of factors: 

Let's look at how these factors impact staffing, and how we can influence them. 

Pillar #1: Safety & Order

Great people know they can only do great work in a safe, orderly environment. 

One reason teachers report leaving their jobs—or leaving the education profession entirely—is the stress they face from unsafe and overwhelming working conditions. 

Student behavior—including violence against teachers—has risen to unprecedented levels, and teachers are reporting that there are often no consequences for serious misbehavior. 

In HRX, participants will assess key school climate factors and develop an action plan to increase safety and learning-focused behavior across campus. 

Pillar #2: Recruiting & Hiring

School leaders can no longer count on a flood of well-qualified applicants when they post a position. The power dynamic has shifted—schools are competing for talent. 

Hiring now requires strategic action, from the job description, to recruiting outreach, to application screening, to the interview process. 

In HRX, participants will develop a recruiting plan, job descriptions, and seamless processes for hiring excellent staff for every role. 

Pillar #3: Onboarding & Induction

Hiring is just the beginning for new staff, who need robust onboarding and induction support to bolster their commitment and ensure their success on the job. 

Too often, new hires are left to their own devices as they prepare for the new school year and attempt to build relationships with their colleagues. 

Without a strong connection to their new school, new hires are vulnerable to better offers—a shorter commute, more money, or the chance to work with friends. 

In HRX, participants will develop an onboarding and induction plan, and use social media templates to welcome and integrate new hires into the school community—increasing their commitment and reducing the need for last-minute hiring. 

Pillar #4: Professionalism & Autonomy

Great people want to work with great people, and have the opportunity to do great work. Too often, these essential conditions are threatened by unprofessional colleagues and micromanagement. 

Each staff member is hired to do a specific job—the what of the work—but professionals need a high degree of autonomy over the how.

And they need colleagues who won't wear them down with unprofessional behavior like gossip, freeloading, and chronic absenteeism. 

Teachers who leave their jobs often do so in search of better colleagues and more autonomy. 

In HRX, participants will use the Micromanagement Matrix to identify key zones of autonomy, and will use targeted interventions to deal with unprofessional behavior. 

Pillar #5: Workload & Resources

In our attempts to improve teaching and learning, we often make the job harder. 

Teachers often cite endless meetings and paperwork—data spreadsheets, call logs, lesson plans—as a chief source of overwhelm. 

We need to streamline the work so teachers can focus on their core duties, and ensure that they have the resources—such as curriculum and supplies—to do this work without reinventing the wheel, buying supplies out-of-pocket, or searching the internet for questionable lesson resources.

In HRX, participants will streamline their expectations so teachers can focus on their core work. 

Pillar #6: Goal-Setting & Professional Growth

Great teachers want to keep getting better. The annual goal-setting process can play a central role in this growth, but too often, it's a painful exercise in compliance. 

In HRX, participants will learn how to create the psychological safety teachers need to set and pursue ambitious professional goals that will maximize their growth. 

Pillar #7: Walkthroughs & Feedback

Great teachers don't want to be micromanaged, but they don't want to be ignored, either. 

The key, according to the Autonomy Matrix, is professional respect—a combination of autonomy and attention from instructional leaders, offering the support people need without micromanagement. 

The Autonomy Matrix

In HRX, you'll learn how to visit classrooms every day and have feedback conversations that change teacher practice and inform your leadership decisions, without the top-down feel of traditional feedback. 

Pillar #8: Observations & Evaluations

Lastly, maintaining a great staff requires effective supervision and evaluation. Every student deserves an excellent teacher, and every teacher deserves a fair, evidence-driven evaluation. 

In HRX, you'll learn how to capture rich evidence of practice and use it to make defensible, well-informed decisions about each teacher's evaluation and employment. 

Registration includes the full Evidence-Driven Teacher Evaluation Certification Program, so you'll have our comprehensive training and time-saving tools for teacher evaluations. 

Our Flagship Teacher Evaluation Program

Teacher evaluations are necessary, but they often don't feel worth the effort—and who has time to put in even more effort?

To become more than a formality, teacher evaluation needs an overhaul—but what can we change while respecting established contracts and policies?

HRX includes the full Evidence-Driven Teacher Evaluation Certification Program, our flagship training for instructional leaders. 

In Evidence-Driven Teacher Evaluation, we focus on our task itself: how we observe, document, discuss, and rate teacher practice. 

We can follow the existing rules, but get superior results. 

We have the opportunity to conduct dramatically better observations and evaluations in less time, through a combination of time-tested and innovative approaches, aided by new technology.

At the heart of this approach is evidence—that's why we call the whole process evidence-driven.

Evidence isn't a hammer—the proof we need for a "gotcha" evaluation. It's how we uphold our "Hippocratic Oath" as instructional leaders: 

Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

Changing the way we think about evidence is the shortcut to faster, better teacher evaluations. Here's what you'll learn in each module of Evidence-Driven Teacher Evaluation.

The HR Excellence Cohort (HRX) will dramatically strengthen your instructional leadership skills and help you ensure staffing excellence throughout the year.

We're fully confident that it's the most powerful professional development for instructional leaders anywhere—but don't take our word for it. Try the program for yourself, and experience the transformation that it brings to your leadership.

If you're not 100% satisfied with the our program for any reason, contact us within 30 days for a full refund.

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