[Editor's note: This is the fourth post in our latest blog series by John Chubb, "Building a Better Leader: Lessons from New Principal Leadership Development Programs." See here, here, and here for prior posts.]
Our fourth lesson takes its title from a hit song by George Harrison, which doubles as an apt summary of the operational philosophy of all of the exemplar leadership programs explored earlier in this series. Conventional principal preparation programs take time, too—the time to earn sufficient credits for a master’s degree. But alternative programs are all about practice, practice, and more practice. Practice cannot be rushed. Practice takes time. Practice is in addition to whatever course requirements may be necessary for licensure as a school administrator.
Each of the examined programs in this series is based on a residency model of training. Much like medical training, they emphasize supervised practice for honing leadership skills. The New York City Aspiring Principals Program (APP) places candidates in residencies for a full academic year in a single school, with a one-month stay in another city school. Chicago’s Urban Education Leadership (UELP) also lasts a full year, with candidates playing different roles in receiving schools depending on their level of leadership experience. Building Excellent Schools (BES) Fellows spend two years preparing to open their schools, with much of the first year devoted to working in numerous outstanding schools. Knowledge is Power Program’s (KIPP) residency is ten weeks long, divided among six schools and with stays of longer and shorter duration; the duration of the fellowship is a full year, as the candidate makes plans to lead his or her new school. The Get Smart Schools (GSS) residency includes multiple schools and occupies the academic year.
Each program includes classroom instruction as well, usually in the summer before the residency—though GSS coursework is spread throughout the year. The course work is not like conventional degree-based fare; it’s intensely practical. KIPP’s six-week program devotes each week to a distinctive requirement of building a high-performing school: instructional leadership, mission, vision and values, managing people, best business practices, performance management. The final week is with the founders. As D.C. KIPP Discover Academy principal Philonda Johnson highlights, “If you asked any of the past fellows, they would probably laugh first and tell you how amazing that week was, because it was full of role-plays and case studies and experiences that are intended to wrap everything that we learned in the six-week institute into one piece.”
Conventional programs can certainly have engaging instruction, but they are not designed to prepare principals for specific roles in specific settings—like being a transformational leader. Hence the theoretical emphases for which conventional programs are roundly criticized. The exemplar programs are explicitly unconventional, getting principals ready to lead in tough circumstances. The New York City Leadership Academy’s summer program is called an “intensive,” and for good reason. As Kathy Nadurak, director of APP, explained, “It’s really designed to get people’s heads around the principalship and how difficult it is. And how exhausting it is....[A]ssignments are either acceptable—up to high standards—or not. And if they’re not, you just have to keep working on them until they are. Because if you’re a principal and you can’t figure out a problem, that’s too bad. You have to go back until you do.”
Every exemplar program has practically focused course work, but it is not the main course. The residency is where leadership is developed. Ultimately, every program believes that leadership is a practiced skill more than a learned one. Matt Brunell of BES contrasted their residency with degree-based programs. “The key to our program is not ‘here are the theoretical underpinnings of why schools are the way they are,’” he explained. “Instead, we are going to spend day after day in these schools….[W]e are going to pull out what are the key elements of these schools, after engaging in these meticulous exercises of what are the building blocks. It’s that pragmatic approach that…runs counter to so many principal-preparation programs that are out there. There is so much time that is spent in the classroom.”
Matt’s colleague, Susan Walsh, used a medical analogy to explain the residency:
A surgeon in their training will actually watch very closely, very small, precise actions and will give feedback themselves. They will give very small, precise feedback and they will make very small, precise observations of practitioners in the field doing their work at a high level of success. We do that with leadership. We will get very close to: How did they run that staff meeting? Let’s look at everything in that staff huddle, from the way the leader walked in, to the way they interacted with others, from the message they gave to the message they didn’t give—thin-slicing the characteristics and actions and attitudes of the leader in just the same way the surgeon in training would thin-slice watching another surgeon.
Residencies even approaching this level of observation and practice need excellent coaches and mentors to serve as models for the candidates, as well as excellent schools to observe. BES aims to provide “deep, deep exposure to twenty, thirty, forty of the strongest leaders,” according to its own leadership team. KIPP sends its fellows to gain experience in six strong schools across the country, including KIPP schools and other charters and private schools. GSS places its fellows into three residencies in outstanding autonomous schools throughout Colorado. New York’s APP and Chicago’s UELP programs put potential coaches and mentors through rigorous selection processes before matching candidates to leaders and schools best suited to meeting the candidates’ individual needs.
The residencies are designed to give participants tiered practice. Candidates are not merely shadowing principals or doing an administrative job. They are there for structured learning experiences. Philonda Johnson described assignments that began with providing professional development to a grade-level team of teachers. Later residencies exposed her to leadership work up the chain of command. Rictor Craig, a graduate of New Leaders, spent his residency in the charter school he would lead the following year. The first few months he concentrated on teaching teams. By mid-year he took on school-wide responsibilities. In May, the principal stepped aside and let Rictor run the school.
Which brings up an even more fundamental point about time. None of these programs believes that a year, no matter how carefully designed or intense the practice, can produce an effective school leader. This is why so many of them work on cultivating leadership.
The UELP program, for instance, is not just for assistant principals or sitting principals. UELP recruits new teachers who might consider leadership. This is the way programs clearly wish to proceed. As Gina Ikemoto of New Leaders so frankly observed, “A fundamental problem with our field is that we do not give people, teacher leaders, stepping stones to the principalship. We take people straight from the classroom and say, OK, now you’re in charge of thirty people. No other industry does that.” School leaders need to practice their skills level by level, honing the ability to win the trust and cooperation of others, building teams from smaller to larger, and taking on expanding school-wide responsibilities. This cannot be done in a single year, even though the programs here provide as much purposeful practice and feedback as seems possible. As Ikemoto put it, leaders “need more at-bats.”
Likewise, KIPP runs a teacher-leaders program that identifies and grooms teachers early in their careers for school leadership. New Leaders created an Emerging Leaders program to strengthen its core Aspiring Leaders effort. The original program struggled to identify candidates who were ripe for the final stage of New Leaders preparation. The “Emerging” program allows New Leaders to observe prospects for a year before placing them into the core program and an imminent principalship. GSS recently started an aspiring leaders program, aimed at giving future fellows better grounding.
All of this practice takes time and money. Much practice takes place during residencies during which candidates do not hold school jobs. Candidates must be compensated—or scrounge to find jobs or philanthropic support. Course work is costly. Travel for school observations has a cost. So too does the army of coaches, mentors, and facilitators. With the exception of the UELP, which leads to a Ph.D., and GSS, which offers licensure, programs do not free candidates from the expense of earning advanced degrees if they want or need them. On the other hand, these programs would not exist if traditional degree-based leadership programs provided the extended and intentional practice that leaders—by all accounts—need.
Stay tuned later this week for lesson five…
John Chubb is the president of the National Association of Independent Schools.