Principaled: Navigating the Leadership Learning Curve

by Kate Barker

Five of the big pillars we’ve established to ground our practice are reflection, focus, connection, care, and love.

key to success is not to avoid failure, but to fail forward. We can do this by reflecting, taking ownership, and learning strategically from when things go wrong.

You also don’t control other people’s attitudes, actions, or thoughts. Trying to do so will smother your joy like quicksand, swallow you up, and make you lose your traction.

If you choose to forego academic achievement to develop culture, behavior, or social-emotional learning, you are choosing to create achievement gaps.

formative assessment, professional collaboration, and feedback have profound impacts on student achievement.

key elements that will advance student achievement, such as a clear curriculum, formative assessment, professional collaboration, and high-impact teaching strategies.

The only power move you have is to control your perceptions and to presume positive intentions.

rates. The impact of feedback is arguably the most critical and powerful aspect of teaching and learning.

To gain immediate and timely results, you need feedback early and often so you can respond to the overall needs of your students, staff, and community.

Feedback is about learning, so be curious about it.

people change through enhancing their strengths and building on their

successes, far more than by identifying and focusing on their weaknesses.

At any given time, you and your teachers should be able to answer these questions about every student in your care:

What is the data telling you about your students’ learning? How is the staff using the standards for instruction? What strategies are being used to teach the standards? Are your students growing? How do you know? How does it feel to be at school?

important to note that strategies connect the curriculum to the students, and without them, the curriculum is meaningless.

The number of opportunities to respond strategy could come in the form of choral responses, turn and talk, structured partnerships, total-body responses or physical responses like thumbs up, writing on a small whiteboard and holding up the answer, cooperative learning, or group work with assigned roles.

This may be something that makes it crystal clear what you are doing together, why you are doing it, and what you want to achieve as a team.

effective leaders capitalize on their strengths and avoid being stretched too thin by taking on too much.

the effective leader will acknowledge their mistake (or their circumstance) and step up to have the difficult conversation.

Lovingly keeping your community committed to high standards develops a positive culture that people want to be a part of.

Being a strong leader isn’t about always making popular decisions, but when you make decisions that are consistent with your mission and communicate them with care and empathy, you will build relationships in ways that profoundly strengthen your community.

that the more we plan for professional enhancement and build our schedules to support our development, the more likely it is to happen.

relationships aren’t built during times of challenge or conflict, they are tested. Relationships are best cultivated and created in the months and years leading up to the conflict. An authentic relationship is developed by being vulnerable, honest, and transparent.

We should attune our actions to our students’ emotional and social well-being all while removing obstacles that hinder academic progress.

“saving” our students from discomfort, they will never reach their potential. Love them enough to engage them in higher-order thinking.