Tuesday, 15 November 2011 12:51
On Friday, DMC held its annual Leadership Development Meeting in Boston on Principal Effectiveness: Aligning Evaluation, Accountability, and Support for a Changing Role. The meeting focused on key leadership and managerial tactics school districts can use to implement systemic approaches to improve principal effectiveness. The emphasis was on aligning diverse functions, systems, and data to improve overall management and coordination of principal effectiveness components, including evaluations.
Research has shown the relationship between a great principal and student achievement time and time again. Of school-based factors, the principal’s effect on student achievement is second only to classroom teaching. With over 90,000 principals in public schools in the United States, efforts to improve principal effectiveness can have a tremendous impact; indeed, many states are looking to create principal evaluations tied to student achievement. Nationwide, almost two thirds of states (31 states plus Washington, D.C.) currently require, or will soon require, the use of student achievement data in their principal evaluation.
DMC believes that crafting an effective principal evaluation tied to student achievement is an important step, but managing principal effectiveness demands a broader effort. Much of the discussion during the meeting was focused on DMC’s 8-Step Framework for Strengthening Principal Effectiveness. Read more about the framework and access meeting materials here: http://www.dmcouncil.org/ldm-2011-recap.
After working through exercises designed to help participants think about the current role of the principal in their district, DMC introduced its Guide for Developing a Coherent and Aligned Principal Evaluation System. The workbook guides leaders through the steps of developing a principal evaluation that is aligned with the district theory of action and combines student achievement measures with other measures of principal practice to create a development-oriented evaluation system. It is ideal for districts at the beginning stages of developing a principal evaluation, as well as districts that have already defined the role of the principal and are looking for ways to refine what to measure and how to do it.
DMC’s Best Practices Library contains a number of articles that provide more information on developing principal effectiveness in your district, including:
