Do You Have Leadership Presence?
School administrators need to be seen. They need to be out talking with parents, teachers and students before school at drop off, supervising recess and lunch breaks, and helping ensure that all students leave campus safely in the afternoon. During the school day, administrators should be in and out of classrooms, monitoring instruction, student engagement, and assisting teachers in any way they can.
Unfortunately, many administrators are stuck in their office, completing mundane forms, reports, and compliance documents that will never be read, reviewed or processed. They are bogged down by piles and piles of work that does not serve the schools, students, teachers, or parents any service. School transformation takes action and hard work, not paperwork. An administrator must be actively involved in the day to day operations of the school, not secluded in a back office, hunched over at their desk, trying to meet deadlines.
William Hague, the current British Secretary of State wrote, “To the teacher weighed down with paperwork, I say: you've been messed around too often. You came into teaching to spend your time teaching children not filling in forms”. This statement couldn’t be truer. The same also should be said for administrators.
So how do we fix this problem?
Administrators need to prioritize their day and decide what actions they will take that day that are in the best interest of the school. Here is my list:
1. Be in classrooms. This is the most important aspect of the day. You get to interact with students, see they work they are doing and monitor first-hand the learning process. You get to watch the masterful instruction of teachers so that you can share their practices with others around the school. Best of all, it’s just fun being a part of the process.
2. Engage with the Community: Be visible and accessible to parents several times throughout the day. Don’t hide out in your office. You all have walkie-talkies so that the office can get a hold of you if needed. Be out before and after school and at every recess. Be out for Kindergarten drop-offs and pick-ups. Setup a school Twitter account. Throughout the day, take pictures of the great work that happens at your school and send it out to the community. It is great PR and helps parents who work fulltime feel engages in their child’s school.
3. Serve as the School’s IT Department: We are all putting in thousands of dollars of instructional technology into our schools. However, most of us do not have an onsite IT person. That’s where you come in. As you rollout different devices, plans, and programs, ensure that you can troubleshoot each one so that you can go into classrooms on the spot and get things up and running. Teachers and students will appreciate this and you will help keep the momentum moving forward. Let’s be honest, it will take a centralized IT person several days to make it out to your site.
4. Complete Administrative Tasks: Getting fired for non-compliance will not get you anywhere and it will rob a school of a great administrator. However, advocate using your administrator’s meetings to complete these tasks. As I have pointed out in previous posts, most of these meetings are filled with information points that could be easily sent out in an email. This time could be used more wisely.
