Challenges in School Leadership

School leadership is tremendously complex. Local schools are maintained by the principal, assistant principal, secretary, and counselor. Ultimately, assistant principals wear more hats in a day than they confiscate hats from students. First, they support the principal in the administrative operation of a school.  Often, assistant principals are responsible for leading supervision and evaluation of professional and classified personnel, cultivating an environment that fosters collaboration and continuous improvement, managing school physical and personnel resources, conducting routine administrative duties as assigned by the principal, and communicating effectively with students and staff.  Currently, assistant principals lead the use of technology in the teaching process and professional development to improve technology integration.


Technology Integration


Building a Culture of Trust
Assistant principals often have to juggle a number of high priority tasks that require them to be organized in order to be successful.  From keeping track of the school calendar to evaluating teachers, they are the disciplinary arm of the administrative staff keeping the main goal of helping students achieve their greatest potential.  Students and teachers need to see that the assistant principals are involved in the school in order for them to have the type of authority that makes others want to listen to them.

https://www.nais.org/magazine/independent-school/spring-2015/the-role-of-the-assistant-principal-in-leadership/

Enhancing Instruction
But a review of all cases does not indicate that such differences existed. All schools had goals focused on a) improving their curriculum and instructional programs, b) identifying the most effective instructional practices, c) organizing teachers into collaborative work teams that used student data to plan instruction and interventions, d) providing a variety of extra help services to students struggling to learn to standards, e) engaging both administrators and teachers in instructional leadership, and f) creating a cohesive and collaborative culture in which school staff took responsibility for the results of their actions on student achievement.

Welcome to the New Year at Hatch.  I spent the first week motivating to my teachers to want to change how we teach and re-learning standards that students did not master on the Scantron Performance test in August.  The first week back for students was spent focusing on basic computation skills (adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing) that we felt they needed.  We had a math vertical team meeting Jan 2 to discuss areas we needed to focus at the beginning of the semester. The consensus agreed to teach basic skills for one week then reconvene Jan 15.  

I am not sure what we will find other than our students have not mastered computation