Who’s on Your Bench? Developing School Leaders from Within
This Fall, I spent one of several Saturdays watching a difficult conversation between a principal and a struggling teacher who was consistently using deficit language about his students. It was the first of nine Leadership Fellows sessions of the 2020–21 school year and the culmination of the cohort’s first Problem-Based Learning experience. Ferdinand, a high school teacher at Summit Sierra High School, had been nominated to model the conversation in front of the entire cohort of 32 experienced teachers and early-career school administrators.
As Ferdinand engaged in the conversation, he tried to embody the tone his group had decided was best for the situation: be supportive, but directly challenge the teacher’s concerning language head on.
Two hours prior, Ferdinand had met in a group to deconstruct the hypothetical situation he would likely confront at some point if he decided to move into school leadership.
The group considered the impact of deficit language on the school community, the challenge of staffing certain teaching roles, the balance between leading and managing, and the best coaching style to use in this situation. Ultimately, the task allowed each Fellow to consider and practice how he or she might approach this challenge in the school setting.
After his self-described “nerve-racking” simulation in front of his peers, Ferdinand was met with warm smiles and applause. The group provided him with glows and grows on his performance, and he was able to reflect back how he felt he performed and what he’d do differently next time. In his journal entry for the day, Ferdinand wrote:
I learned that language is a powerful window into people’s mindsets. It is of vital importance for leaders and teachers collectively to identify and challenge mindsets that infringe on the opportunity and ability for students to be successful.
As we embark on our year focused on coaching for equity, Ferdinand ended our first session in the right spot. If we neglect to uncover, confront, and change the unproductive underlying mindsets and beliefs of those at our schools, our efforts to improve instruction will always stall.
It was a good first step in a long journey.
School leaders are important. The word principal often conjures the image of a disciplinarian and building manager meant to maintain stability. Though this stereotype likely over-simplifies the reality, the landscape of education has changed tremendously in the last few decades and the role of school leaders has evolved. Rather than “keep the order,” principals of today are regularly called upon to be disruptive: break traditions, develop solutions, catalyze change, and inspire collective action.
High-quality school leaders of today need to be effective visionaries, instructional leaders, people managers, systems thinkers, culture-builders, and executives. During the school day, effective school leaders are more likely to be found in a classroom than behind a desk. Most crucially, high-quality principals have the ability to retain, develop, and multiply the impact of a school’s most valuable resource: powerful teachers.
And we need a lot more high-quality teachers and leaders — fast.
A 2019 report by the Center on Education Policy found that 24% of schools in the country are designated as “low-performing” by their states. Disparities in educational outcomes based on race and socioeconomic status remain pervasive across the nation on nearly all relevant measures: test scores, grades, disciplinary action, graduation rates. As our schools continue their relentless work towards educational equity, they will need powerful school leaders.
In a comprehensive review of how leadership influences student learning, the Wallace Foundation concluded there “are virtually no documented instances of troubled schools being turned around without intervention by a powerful leader.”
While there are many worthy education causes that demand our attention and help explain the state of our nation’s schools — from disparities in funding to better supporting our English Language Learners — school leaders will be the drivers, leaders, and champions on the ground. They need to be ready.
Despite the changing, challenging, and high-stakes nature of the principal role, many university-based preparation programs have not yet evolved. District leaders remain largely dissatisfied with the quality of their local programs, as many candidates confront an outdated curriculum that doesn’t reflect the work they’ll confront on the job. Additionally, inadequate preparation and professional development is cited as a primary cause of the distressing national principal turnover rate, which hovers around 18 percent per year. Nationally, we need to do a better job preparing principals for the realities of the complex job they face, and creating systems for ongoing, high-quality professional development.
Another concerning and persistent trend is that principals overwhelmingly don’t look like the students they serve.
While the majority of public school students are now people of color, white principals continue to lead 78 percent of public schools. And, concerningly, a recent survey by the RAND Corporation found that nearly 2 in 5 white principals self-reported that they weren’t well prepared to support Black, Latino, and low-income students.
The lack of leaders of color across our country is a systemic problem. Since principals are often drawn to the role after many years of success in the classroom, the troubling shortage of teachers of color across the country acts as a filter to the potential candidate pool. To make matters worse, people of color are chronically underrepresented in expensive graduate school programs — where most principal preparation still happens — acting as yet another barrier to diversifying the principal workforce.
Looking at the global problem, it’s not hard to understand why spending tens of thousands of dollars on a principal preparation program could feel like a gamble and dissuade strong candidates from stepping into leadership. Of course, some folks will be trained by traditional pipelines and become amazing leaders, but the variability in quality and the attrition rate of new leaders is too high to accept. Doing things in the same way won’t move the needle. We need an excellent pool of diverse leaders to be the national norm.
I have the honor of moderating the Leadership Fellows Program, a one-year cohort-based experience for early-career and aspiring school leaders like Ferdinand. It’s not the answer to all the problems facing our nation’s leadership pipelines, but it’s a start. This year, our cohort of 32 fellows represents four states, all K-12 grade levels, four public school networks, and 15 unique schools. Each Fellow has committed 200 hours to meeting, reading, reflecting, and practicing essential skills of school leaders over the academic year.
For the better half of the last two decades, Leadership Fellows has been an integral part of the growth of Summit Public Schools. Diane Tavenner, the co-founder and CEO of Summit Public Schools, launched the Leadership Fellows Program in 2005 to build a bench of prospective principals to found new Summit schools. Designed in collaboration with mentors from the Prospective Principal Program at Stanford University, the core pedagogy focused around Problem-Based Learning while covering the administrative standards for education leaders. Upon completion, the vast majority of Fellows decide to take the state licensure exam to obtain their official administrative credentials.
Though the specific content has evolved throughout the years, this deceptively simple and consistent structure has proven engaging, effective, and empowering for participants:
- Problem-Based Learning. Each session starts with a concrete problem they will likely face as a future principal.
- Theory and Research. Fellows are exposed to theory and research relevant to the problem (usually as pre-reading for the session).
- Problem-Solving. Fellows work in groups to decide how to use that information to solve the problem.
- Simulation. Groups simulate responding to the problem in front of the rest of the cohort.
- Feedback. The cohort provides feedback to the groups and compares the various strategies and ways of approaching the problem.
- Reflection and Practice. Each individual Fellow reflects and determines how he or she can immediately integrate the skills practiced in his or her daily work.
In the decade that followed, alumni of the Leadership Fellows Program would go on to found and lead the vast majority of Summit’s 14 schools. Having new principals who were well-versed not just in problem-solving and decision-making, but who had already experienced success as teachers within our organization and intimately knew the ideal school culture set these schools up for success. Additionally, the skills and mindsets practiced in Leadership Fellows transferred to schools, districts, and organizations across the country. Many of these leaders have since gone on to work in other senior leadership roles, found their own school networks, and lead local and national non-profits.
Though many alumni will choose to pursue school administration, Leadership Fellows is not just a training program for future leaders; the program builds the capacity of teachers to be more effective in their roles immediately. The topics we cover — team leadership, consensus-building, coaching, change management, emotional intelligence — apply to the daily work of teachers as they engage with students in classrooms and colleagues in meetings. Most Fellows will find the confidence to host student-teachers, lead grade-level teams, and drive curriculum improvement. It’s a program that looks forward towards the near- and long-term future while nurturing talent to have an immediate impact at their school sites.
Many of these leaders have since gone on to work in other senior leadership roles, found their own school networks, and lead local and national non-profits.
Having found a decade of success, we now offer the Leadership Fellows Program to school networks seeking to nurture home-grown talent that reflect the diversity of their teacher and student populations. We work with schools as they build sustainable, predictable, and accessible pipelines into school leadership in their unique communities.
During our lunch break at our second Leadership Fellows session, I had an impromptu conversation with LaShante, a new Leadership Fellows cohort-member. She is a high-school math teacher who has worked in district, charter, and private schools over her decade of classroom teaching. Despite her experience, this is the first year LaShante has a coach she meets with regularly. Seeing her high potential, her coach encouraged her to join the program. LaShante shared with me:
“I love teaching, but sometimes I want to explore how else I can make an impact. When I’m in these groups and practicing these skills, I feel like I really could make a really good school leader. I’ve just never been exposed to what [principals] actually do.”
This reflection came as we were processing the work her group had been doing to apply practices from Elena Aguilar’s The Art of Coaching:
“As we were practicing the teacher observation in our groups today, I was just thinking: I can do this.”
At this point in the year, we are only through our second Leadership Fellows session. I can’t guarantee that LaShante will decide to pursue school leadership; what’s important is that she knows her value, her options, and has accessible opportunities to grow her skills.
Though some, like LaShante, are early on their paths of exploring school administration, we run Leadership Fellows for the long game. We recruit high-potential candidates from a diversity of backgrounds to build a heterogeneous cohort so we learn from and push each other. Many of the best school leaders I have met over my career are fellows who just needed an invitation, a nudge, to see that school leadership could be for them.
Many, like LaShante, envisioned being in the classroom their entire career until they uncovered and practiced new skills they didn’t know they had. Just as powerful leaders can unleash the latent capacities of schools, we strive to help Fellows develop the untapped potential in themselves.
We run Leadership Fellows to prepare a diverse set of future school leaders for the complexity of running equitable schools. We intentionally built the program as a cohort experience because trust, community, and solidarity are important in our work. Never has this been more true than today, as schools navigate remote instruction, reopening, learning loss, new social-emotional and wellbeing challenges, and seek to foster a sense of safety, inclusion, access, and belonging for all learners. Every student deserves amazing teachers; our teachers deserve amazing leaders.
So, what’s next?
▸ If you are a teacher and want to stay in the classroom:
Then you are exactly where you need to be! We need high-quality, powerful teachers for every student. I honor and respect you. Nothing is more important than your daily contributions to our students.
▸ If you are a teacher who is interested in school leadership:
Know that school leadership is worth exploring. You may have many options beyond traditional principal preparation programs that may be more relevant, time- and cost-effective, and give you more authentic exposure to what the job is really like. Has the core program curriculum been updated in the last decade? Are there authentic opportunities to apply what you are learning in your current school community? Will the program intentionally build a community of practitioners who support and challenge each other?
▸ If you are a school, CMO, or district leader:
I know that budgets are tight and time is scarce. I encourage you to consider that your next best Dean or Assistant Principal may already be a teacher in your community. Have you considered how to develop their leadership and management capacities? Are your traditional leadership training pipelines aligned to the needs of your school? Have you not just waited for future leaders to come to you, but tapped and encouraged a diversity of those in whom you see potential?
If the answer to any of these questions isn’t a strong yes!, I encourage you to start to do the research to make the best investment in yourself or in your school leader pipelines. Making the right training decisions now is worth the time investment, and a necessary step to equip our future schools, teachers, and students with the leaders they need in the future.
Greg Ponikvar is the Founding Executive Director of the Marshall Leadership Institute at Marshall Street Initiatives, a K-12 solutions lab that tackles persistent challenges in American public education. He moderates the Leadership Fellows Program, a fellowship that prepares educators for the complex challenges of school leadership and co-leads monthly Professional Development for 70+ leaders within Summit Public Schools.
If you are interested in learning more about how Leadership Fellows is helping individuals and schools build affordable and inclusive pathways into school leadership, he can be reached at gponikvar[at]summitps.org.
