Qualities of Effective Principals

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome back to the program Dr. James Strong. James Strong, PhD, is the Heritage Professor of Education in the School of Education at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and he's the President and CEO of Strong & Associates Educational Consulting. His research interests include policy and practice related to teacher quality and effectiveness, teacher and administrator evaluation, and teacher selection. He's worked extensively with state departments of education, school districts, and national and international educational organizations to support teacher and leader effectiveness. And he presents and consults extensively throughout the US and internationally.

[00:50]

James is the author of more than 200 articles and more than 30 books, including Qualities of Effective Principles, now in its second edition, which we're here to talk about today.

[01:00] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[01:03] SPEAKER_00:

Dr. Strong, welcome back to Principal Center Radio. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be back, Justin. Well, I'm excited to speak with you because we've previously talked about some of your other books. We've talked about qualities of effective teachers.

[01:14]

And when it comes to qualities of effective principals, I mean, this is kind of our roadmap. for our own practice to kind of guide what we're doing day to day and what we're growing toward and for principal supervisors, for people who evaluate principals and hire principals and make decisions about principals. Also, it is the roadmap to what the profession looks like. So take us into kind of a 30,000 foot view of qualities of effective principals. What does the research say in the broad strokes about what it means to be an effective principal?

[01:49] SPEAKER_01:

Perhaps the best place to start, Justin, would be to say principals matter. Next to teachers, principals have the greatest impact on student success of any school-based factor. And in fact, they have a much bigger footprint than we often recognize. If we consider the impact that teachers have, the percentage of our variability in student learning According to some studies, John Hattie suggests that teachers explain about 30% of that variability, whereas principals only explain about 5% or so. It's still 5% to 10%. It's still second.

[02:26]

But remind me, who hired those teachers? who developed those teachers, who helped induct those teachers, who evaluated those teachers, who coached and supported those teachers and kept them in the profession. Principals play an outsized role in the effectiveness in their school. There's some old research from the Dallas Public Schools, Dallas, Texas, that found very early when value-added assessments were starting, found that the quickest way to turn around a school for good or bad is to change the principal. Principles play a very powerful, dynamic role in the success of any school. So if we take that idea, that's what I built off of as the philosophical foundation.

[03:10]

Principles matter. That's the foundation I built on for the book in both of its editions and qualities of effective principles.

[03:20] SPEAKER_00:

What is it that principles actually do? Well, let's get right into it then. What are some of those qualities of effective principles? What do the most effective principles do according to the research?

[03:29] SPEAKER_01:

There are a lot of ways to slice and dice what the research says. But when I take the view of what does empirical evidence say, not popular ideas that are here today and gone tomorrow, but that if we look at a meta review, a very strong, solid empirical evidence, meta analyses, systematic reviews of literature, everything that we have available. What do we know? And ultimately I distill this into six broad interrelated categories, or I call them qualities. We could refer to them as domains. So let me just walk through those very quickly and we can get into any one of those as you see fit.

[04:08]

But I would start with instructional leadership. We would need to define it, but there's certain components and elements underneath instructional leadership. What the principal does that leads instructionally in the school is going to play a role in the success of that school. Second area, second quality is school climate. I could even put that first if I wanted to not prioritize, but to order in terms of how principals impact and how quickly. School climate is the place where principals have the most direct early impact and lasting impact on a school.

[04:43]

If you change the climate in It matters enormously in that school and principals' attitudes, behaviors, they emphasize and how they influence will affect school climate. Number three is human resource leadership or human resource management. We often think that's a function of a district office, but most outside of recruitment, most of the big HR functions happen in the school. I mentioned a moment ago about Even interviewing, the selection process is part of it. Induction, development of the teacher. Every time I walk into that classroom, every time I speak to that teacher.

[05:24]

Evaluation, retention. Those are all HR functions and they happen in the school. There's a lot of evidence to show that principals impact that positively or not so positively. The fourth area is organizational management, or if we want, we can call it organizational leadership, but it's the functional aspects, almost the day-to-day functions of the school. Some studies have shown that principals who are more effective with organizational management get higher student achievement gain scores in their schools than those who are spending a lot more time in the classroom. I'm not advocating that principals remove themselves from the classroom.

[06:04]

Certainly they need to do that, but there's no substitute for good organizational management. It is not the poor second cousin of instructional leadership. And yet in our literature, and yet in our leadership, We often classify management issues in a derogatory form. They're not. In today's world, for example, if you don't check to see that the doors are locked on the building, kids and staff can be critically at risk. That is a management issue and it's essential.

[06:36]

Getting textbooks to the teachers at the right time. There's so many things that matter. Fifth area is communication and community relations. There's a lot we can say about that. And then professionalism. How the principal behaves professionally impacts her or his success and the success of the school.

[06:54]

So those are the qualities. They could be divided up differently, but this is the format, the framework that I've used throughout my work on qualities of effective principles.

[07:04] SPEAKER_00:

I love it. And I'm so glad that you talked about that dichotomy that we often insert between leadership and management. And everybody seems to want to be a leader and seems to not want to be a manager. And maybe that's a result of some moves in our profession in the past to get us to look beyond management. And certainly, we've probably all known people who saw themselves only as building managers and not as instructional leaders. I think most of us have come across people like that and thought, you know what?

[07:30]

I think we can do both. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. And for me, it has always just seemed that there are two sides of the same coin. I remember as a first year teacher, I panicked when I looked through the supply room and saw that the textbook that I was supposed to use with my science students, I had about two thirds as many copies as I needed. And I thought, oh no, how am I going to teach if I don't have textbooks for every student? And obviously there are many aspects to teaching other than having a textbook, but you know, I'm brand new.

[07:58]

I've just been hired. I've just walked into the building and gotten my keys. So I went to my principal. And I said, what do I do? I don't have nearly enough textbooks. And I'll never forget what she did.

[08:07]

She wrote me a little note that said, Esther, Esther was our school secretary, said, Esther, buy 50 of whatever Justin needs and signed it. And that was it. I walked out with my little handwritten note and my textbooks came and we eventually stopped using those textbooks. They weren't that good anyway. But I'll never forget her commitment to writing. both sides of that coin of realizing that if she was going to give me feedback as a teacher and help me improve, part of what I also needed to succeed was the actual resources that I was going to teach with.

[08:39]

And again, those changed, but that really left an impression on me and left me with a view of instructional leadership that says that all of that other stuff that might be a hassle, it might be less fun, we might not have had as many courses on it, there might not be as much research on it, but all of that stuff that makes teaching and learning possible really matters a great deal. Talk to us, if you could, about the use of time on these different domains, because, you know, to me, it seems that everything kind of blurs together and everybody is interrupting you constantly with various issues that you probably couldn't sort very neatly into those different buckets. And I've seen lots of principal time use studies. You know, my dissertation was on principal productivity. So I've read a lot of the literature on principal time use. And of course, Every researcher has to categorize, was this activity management or leadership or discipline or curriculum or what was it?

[09:32]

How can we think about the relationship between these six different domains and what we actually do in the day? Help us see how to use this framework to actually guide our practice.

[09:43] SPEAKER_01:

Maybe as a precursor to discussing that issue, let me say on your point, I think your right own point with your teaching experience and needing some science books, managing and leading are almost indistinguishable. And there are clear categories where they are different. but they're almost indistinguishable in the best practice of the best principles. Your principal came out and said, he needs textbooks. Let's provide those textbooks. That normally would be considered an organizational management issue.

[10:14]

Why don't we just call this educational leadership and combine the two where they need to be, but understanding that there are discrete elements within each. Don't ignore either of those. We do so at our own peril and at the peril of our school if we're not good at instructional discernment and in managing what happens in a school. So they're both really essential. In terms of time, I do have seen lots of studies. I've conducted studies.

[10:43]

on how principals use time. Most recent evidence that I know suggests that principals spend about 87% of their time on non-instructional activities, meeting with parents, dealing with a discipline issue, being called away to deal with some meeting, and on and on. And I recall in one study I conducted in Illinois with more than 100 principals in which I asked the principals to maintain a log of what they do for 28 straight days, including weekends from 7 in the morning until 10 at night. And in that study, I think the most remarkable thing was that I got more than 100 principals to participate. I bet if I tried to replicate it today, it'd never happen. But for whatever reason, they agreed to participate.

[11:31]

The number one time consumer was just administration. And some of that was administrivia. Some of it can be removed from the day. The ability to distinguish on what's important and what's not and dealing with issues before they become a crisis is an important element of a good principle. Principles wear all of these hats and they're not going to take, we're not going to remove those hats. All of those things are going to be occurring, all those responsibilities on any given day.

[12:06]

The day doesn't belong to the principle. You can't always plan out your day, but I think the way to sort it for me, Justin, is to ask a question. Does this help children? Does what I do make a difference for children? And if dealing with discipline, okay, but let's find a way so that it doesn't keep recurring. Let's find a way to improve the climate in the school.

[12:29]

So it's not eating up all the time. Do I need to focus on curriculum development? Of course I do, but I can't do it at the expense of other issues. So finding a way to manage and prioritizing, getting rid of the things that are unnecessary and not impactful and focusing on the things that matter becomes important. And that whole milieu of all six of these categories come to matter. If you remove a principal from communication and community relations, that principal is going to fall flat on his or her face.

[13:02]

Do you know the number one reason principals get fired? Bad communication, bad relations. It's not my technical skills, not my conceptual skill. It's relationally based on why I would get fired. So I can't ignore that. I do it at my own peril.

[13:20]

I do it at the harm of the school. Professionalism, how I behave with others. is going to communicate enormously. So I have to understand the nature, the dynamic nature of this job. I'm never going to get to a hundred percent of my time being devoted to instructional leadership. I'm not even going to get to 50% of it, but can I increase it from 13%?

[13:43]

And can I do it efficiently where everything else functions really, really well? Those are the questions that I'm giving you sort of broad answers instead of very specific ones. Because I don't know the specific answer. I don't know how much time should be spent on each of these. I know that they all count.

[14:01] SPEAKER_00:

And it strikes me as kind of a task of establishing kind of a Maslow's hierarchy of needs for your school. And to some extent, we're always playing whack-a-mole with problems that come up. But the more we can be proactive and invest in preventing problems, predictable problems that'll take up her time. A big one, I think, for a lot of school leaders is discipline. If I'm dealing with lots and lots of discipline, that takes huge amounts of time that I can't use for something else as a result. And it's also very frustrating to have to spend a great deal of time on discipline.

[14:33]

And as you said, the climate of a school is one of the most visible and impactful effects that a principal has on climate. So maybe using that as an example to think about that establishing a Maslow's hierarchy of needs and figuring out how do I solve, you know, the biggest and highest leverage problems first. Like, let's say we have a principal who's listening to us today, who is spending too much time in their view, dealing with discipline, thinking about the broad strokes of six domains, as we talked about of the responsibilities of the job. If I'm finding myself stuck doing too much discipline, I don't want to spend all my time doing this. But at the same time, those are the issues that are coming up. How might I think long term about making those shifts in what I spend my time on so that maybe six months from now, I'm not spending so much of my time on discipline and we're more in a place of where we need to be as a school so that those issues are not taking up so much of my time?

[15:30]

How would you think about that issue?

[15:32] SPEAKER_01:

I think first we have to recognize that all schools are different and the clientele are different. Some schools have children who are needier. who have perhaps had less discipline previously. And they've been in a school environment where it's been acceptable practice to misbehave. We're not going to get rid of that overnight. but we can turn the school around.

[15:58]

That's where the study from Dallas that I mentioned earlier, I think plays a role. Principals can change the environment. I can give you just a quick example of a time I visited my older daughter's middle school. One morning, I had just some quick simple business to transact. I think maybe she forgot her lunch money or I don't remember what it was, but I walked into the school, signed in like I'm supposed to and stood at the desk. in the office and just waited to take care of the business and get out of the way.

[16:31]

Well, nobody recognized me. Nobody said anything to me. There were a lot of people passing back and forth behind this counter in the office. Finally, there was a woman who was over in the back shuffling papers, probably very important papers, but shuffling those papers. She didn't come over and greet me. She finally turned around and looked over at me and says, there's something I can do for you.

[16:54]

Of course, there's something you can do for me. I normally don't walk in off the street and look around in middle schools. I have a reason to be here. That kind of attitude can be traced back pretty directly to the principal and would be pervasive. Justin, you can go into two schools built by the same architect. In one of them, you smell the coffee, you see student work, you see order in the hallways, you see people going about their business.

[17:19]

And in the other one, it's chaotic. What a difference that makes. And in the one school, discipline will be handled faster, easier. There will still be discipline problems, but there will be far fewer of those and that will free up time for teachers to teach and principals to spend time with their other leadership responsibilities. How we function in a school with climate, among other issues, is important. How we create rules, that's part of climate.

[17:51]

and how we abide by those rules. Are they fair rules? Do people understand them? I'll give you a second example that's a little more germane, but this one is at the teacher level. And then I think we can extrapolate that to the school level. I conducted a study looking at teachers who were receiving high value-added gain scores and low value-added gain scores.

[18:15]

Kids were learning better, faster in some classes compared to others. And compared in two different studies, compared how much time those teachers were spending on discipline. And the amount of time in the least effective classes was that there was a disruptive or an off task behavior about every 12 minutes. In the best teachers classes, about once every two hours. But when principals can empower teachers, good teachers to have that kind of mastery in their classroom, and it gets permeated across 30 classrooms or 50 classrooms in that school, discipline doesn't disappear, but it really dissipates. We have to go into the classroom and have effective practices there, and that does relate to climate, that does relate to instructional leadership, that relates to human resource management and hiring and keeping the best people.

[19:07]

It relates to how we manage and organize the school and on and on. It tends to implicate every one of those qualities of effective principals. So I hope I'm still speaking English in looking at sort of interwoven approach, but there's a very direct way that we can deal with. And just one other point, sort of a postscript. I think it's a mistake. when schools set up a structure to hide behavior problems, when they will say in almost a punitive way to teachers, don't send discipline problems to the office.

[19:43]

They're still there. Do we want kids to learn? What's happening to help kids succeed? And we have to face the reality, deal with discipline where it happens, find structures, keep working on structures that allow you to smell the coffee, see the work, have order in the hallways and order in the classrooms. And it matters. Absolutely.

[20:07] SPEAKER_00:

And I imagine most people are nodding along thinking, who would think otherwise? But I got to tell you, I've heard many teachers say, yeah, in my school, we're not allowed to send kids to the office, or we have to log three interventions and three parent phone calls before we can send a kid to the office. And I think, you know, I actually would like the lesson to continue, even if there's a behavior that is incompatible with that. And as a leader, I would want to know that. I would want to be able to do something about it quickly so that the whole lesson doesn't get derailed while the teacher makes phone calls and does all these things during class time.

[20:35] SPEAKER_01:

What happens to the other 24 kids in the classroom while you're going through all of those gyrations? We have to keep first things first, which is teaching and teaching can't occur unless we have good structure. I'm not saying an overemphasis on heavy-handed structure is the right way, but I'm saying good teaching will help dissipate a lot of those problems and good leading will do the same thing.

[21:02] SPEAKER_00:

And I think that speaks to the kind of plate spinning aspect of school leadership, the lack of a dichotomy or the lack of an ability to separate these different things out. Like with discipline, sometimes we get the sense or students will even say directly, I was acting up because I was bored or the teacher is sending kids to the office because there are problems in the lesson. So there's often that real need to get into the classroom and see for yourself, what is these students come to the office and sometimes we go and see, and we think, okay, this is entirely a student issue. We're going to handle this as a student issue. And sometimes it's more complex where the lesson is not adequately planned. The lesson is not engaging.

[21:38]

And there are these interactions between what the teacher is doing and what the students are doing that prevent simplistic resolutions to treating it simply as a discipline issue. So I really appreciate that integration and that admonition to get into classrooms and be a holistic problem solver when it comes to any given problem that comes up. I wanted to ask you, because one of your domains is on the human resources side, selecting and supporting and retaining high quality teachers and staff. What do you think are some of the implications of the labor market shifts that we have seen in recent years? Because when I was a principal, hiring teachers was a luxurious practice of sifting through literally hundreds of applications and finding the best qualified people. I mean, I would have 100 to 400 applicants if I posted a homeroom teacher, elementary teaching position.

[22:28]

What do you see that has changed over the last couple of years and what implications does that have for how we use our time as leaders and how we think about our responsibilities when it comes to supporting great teaching and learning?

[22:38] SPEAKER_01:

Unfortunately, Justin, this is territory where principals are not fully in charge of their destiny. If you have a depleted applicant pool, you can't catch any big fish if there are no big fish to be caught or even small fish that are promising to grow into big fish. And we do have depleted applicant pools. It's not just the last couple of years, it's the last several years that we have seen a diminishing quality applicant pool. And there are many reasons for that. One of them is pay, and there's no way around it.

[23:15]

Some evidence says everything's not about the pay, but at the end of the day, accolades won't buy groceries. I remember an informal study that was conducted at Harvard and asked Harvard undergraduates, what would it take for you to become a teacher? Not teach for America for a couple of years, but to become a lifelong teacher. And at that point, several years ago, they were saying essentially double the salary of what teachers are earning and I'll do that. It's not that people don't want to teach. It's that they can't.

[23:46]

They feel economically they can't teach. That's one reason. There are many other reasons. That's sort of getting off the point of what you're asking for. But when we have a depleted applicant pool...

[23:57]

We're going to be filling classrooms with adult bodies that haven't had the preparation that they need. I can think of a very large school district that hires more than 50% of new teachers each year who have not had traditional teacher preparation. I'm not denigrating alternate forms of teacher preparation, but I am saying it takes a lot to learn how to teach. And so when we select teachers without the requisite skills, we're going to have to build them in the school. And that puts additional responsibility and emphasis on the principal's ability to be an instructional leader. How do you identify the best?

[24:45]

Even if you have two candidates, how do you pick a candidate who meets the bar? Or if it doesn't meet the bar, you can diagnose in the beginning and work with that teacher on building better classroom assessment skills or instructional delivery skills or whatever it may be. In those challenged schools, principals have to be even better if they're going to succeed. Their skill set has to be sharpened. They have to know more about how to develop and support teachers who aren't quite where they need to be. That's one of the biggest issues that we have.

[25:22]

The smartest thing to do is don't hire an inferior employee, but we can't put a sign up in the front lawn of the school and say, fourth grade has been canceled this year. We can't find the right teachers. We're still going to have fourth grade. So what do you do? That responsibility then comes back to the principal to be the very best that she or he can be. And the challenge where I said, this is not in control of the principal, that's a policy issue.

[25:52]

When there's a policy for cheap public payments in government schools, ultimately you get what you pay for.

[25:59] SPEAKER_00:

Well, Dr. Strong, I know the hiring of great teachers and the kind of figuring out how do I choose the best and develop the most from the labor pool that I have is one thing for principals to consider when it comes to hiring teachers. I wanted to zoom out a level though and think from a superintendent perspective or a district supervisor perspective. People who hire and support principles how can they best match the principal to the school to the situation what are some of the factors you think should go into that decision because certainly I think everybody wants to work in the most functional school possible it is just an easier job to work in a more functional school and And at the same time, as you said just now, it does take the highest amount of skill to work in a school that has the most improvement to do, the most teacher development to do, the most problems to solve.

[26:52]

How do we kind of manage that tension of staffing our schools with high quality principals?

[26:57] SPEAKER_01:

Allow me to give a two part answer. The first part is you mentioned about hiring and supporting principals. I think that's a misnomer. We hire, but I'm not sure we always support. We pour a lot more resources into supporting students for certain. And we support teachers with professional growth opportunities.

[27:16]

We don't always do that for principals. A principal can come out of a master's degree with a master's degree in leadership we put them in an ap position and we help grow them there or sometimes they go into a principalship but then we make the assumption they have everything they need they don't principals need to grow over their entire career just like teachers do so we have to put support provide support for principals at a level that I think we have not done. We've been negligent with that. The second point is a little more functional or I'll offer a functional response and that is if it works for teachers, if we can make it work for teachers to identify diagnostically and prognostically what good teaching is, if we can define good teaching based on good solid empirical evidence and

[28:10]

then go into classrooms and meet with teachers and have conversations with teachers to help support them and help them grow around instructional planning, instructional delivery, instructional assessment, learning environment, and so forth. We can do the same thing with principals and assistant principals. If the domains are anywhere close to right in what I have in qualities of effective principles with instructional leadership, school climate, HR management, organizational leadership, communication and community relations, professionalism, we need a mechanism to delve into each of those and find out how well the principal is performing and what support the principal needs. Does the principal really understand curriculum and curriculum development? Does the principal have a repertoire of good instructional strategies to use when observing a classroom teacher to provide?

[29:02]

That's the supervisor of the principal looking into the school and looking into the practice of the principal and helping that principal with instructional leadership skill development. What about having a climate assessment in the school and finding out where the school was, what it needs to improve, and then supporting the principal to improve the climate? And what about the functions on evaluating properly? That's tied to a lot of other potentially very useful effects in the school. And how about managing and how you communicate with people on an ongoing basis? If we...

[29:39]

can take each of those qualities, build protocols around them, and go into the schools and support principals and do the same thing we do with teachers. Let's gather data, let's provide quality feedback, and then let's come back and verify that those practices are in place. We help principals grow and we help schools grow.

[29:59] SPEAKER_00:

So the book is Qualities of Effective Principals. Dr. James Strong, thank you so much for joining me again on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. It's my pleasure.

[30:09] Announcer:

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