The summer provides an opportunity to reset, reflect, recalibrate, and if necessary, find opportunities to reignite your passion for leadership and serving schools. While August is typically the time when educators return to the school building, the first few weeks are a prime time for principals to collaborate with their assistant principals to establish the focus for the upcoming year and a shared lens of operations and leadership. Operating from shared understanding increases organizational effectiveness as it provides clear expectations and communication. When individuals are clear about what is expected of them and the parameters around their roles, it reduces anxiety and confusion about how to enact responsibilities. Clarity in expectations increases confidence in one’s ability to believe that one can be successful.
As a school principal, ensuring that you and your team have a common lens and language for approaches to the work and the foci therefrom is essential to laying the foundation for collective efficacy. Your assistant principals contribute to leading the change within your school in both formal and informal ways. How they operate and message to staff within their respective departments and teams determines whether your work advances or stalls. Grappling through and norming your lenses ensures consistency in messaging and is critical to promoting belief in the possibility to do this difficult work—it is necessary to move the needle forward.
During August, here are some actions you can take to norm your work with your assistant principals and amplify collective efficacy in your building.
Conduct a Vision/Mission Audit
Your vision and mission represent your school’s driving purpose (why) and practical commitments (how) toward improving outcomes for your students. To that end, these statements must live within your school and be realized through your staff and community. Not only must they be referenced repetitiously, but as leaders, we must find ways to measure these definitive statements about what we are collectively seeking to accomplish. One way to do this is to conduct a vision and mission audit as it will provide the opportunity to align what is said versus what is done. In this process, leaders engage learners in pulling apart the important components of the mission and vision to ultimately identify the next steps of focus.
Here’s how to do it!
- Take your mission/vision statement. For example, the vision statement for my school reads: EEJMS, in collaboration with all stakeholders, will provide a safe and supportive learning environment that fosters the socio-emotional well-being of all students while promoting academic success, creativity, and social responsibility.
- Make a list of the important phrases that make up the mission/vision statement. For example, using the vision statement above, our list will be: collaboration with all stakeholders; safe and supportive learning environments; socio-emotional well-being; promoting academic success, creativity, and social responsibility.
- For each statement, identify the evidence you currently have that proves the mission/vision is alive and well in your school building. For example, our school offers quarterly grade distribution PDSA cycles and tracks GPA data, and this is evidence of supporting academic success.
- Identify the additional evidence you may need to bring your vision and mission closer to actualization. For example, we need to create a profile of an EEJMS AVID-Ready student.
Conducting this audit will allow you to receive perspectives from your team, collect evidence to identify potential focus areas, and assess the state of your vision and mission.
Establish Priority Areas for The School Year
There are tons of data points to consider when identifying your priority areas of focus for an upcoming school year. There are mission/vision, attendance, academic, behavioral, climate, and AVID CCI data as well as any mandated focus areas from the district. Your established areas of focus must not only be communicated with your assistant principals but must also be nurtured and examined for implementation.
Having the opportunity to think through the focus areas and the commensurate leadership behaviors and practices, such as establishing purpose for staff and necessary implementation expectations, is critical to planning while the demands of the roles are not yet pressing. In August, school leaders and teachers alike are at their most ideal states of thinking and learning as the rigors of the year have yet to descend.
Collaborating to identify thought processes and plan activities is necessary to ensure that deliberate actions and intentions are set for the year. As the year unfolds, it will be necessary to place these plans back in front of your assistant principals for revision and monitoring because ultimately they lead to measurable outcomes for your school.
As the adage states, “Inspect what you expect.”
Calibrate for High-Quality Instruction
As leaders, our hallmark is the ability to influence the growth and development of others to advance our organization towards its goals. As you plan out your activities for the start of the school year, consider including time to work with your assistant principals to establish a lens for high-quality instruction (WICOR), leverage the knowledge capital, and determine instructional expectations.
There is power in determining what quality instruction looks like and sounds like among the members of your team. Examining data from informal and formal observations, learning walks, and the AVID CCI grounds the understanding of instructional needs in evidence and can lead to clarifying upgrades to your program. Where do the areas of growth lie in your data? Sharpening this lens for instructional expectations and the aligned ‘look-fors’ builds consistency with your team and can accelerate improvement. Some examples include leading your team in establishing a common definition of rigor, unpacking what standards-aligned instruction means, defining schoolwide routines and instructional strategies you will adopt, or even developing a high-level understanding of culturally responsive pedagogy.
Taking the time to calibrate expectations promotes operational efficiency by focusing the off-stage planning components that will drive your year. When teachers and students return, your team will be clear-minded and ready to serve, moving with purpose and deliberate speed.
