Educational Leadership - February 2011

message communicates your real work.

Delegate. Send an assistant or a teacher to meetings where your presence isn’t essential. (However—if the superintendent calls the meeting, attend!) Your administrative assistant can be a great help with writing letters, returning phone calls, managing your calendar, sorting and recycling mail, and organizing meetings. Develop clear, consistent, and fair codes of conduct and consequences that teachers can enforce without having to send students to the office for minor infractions.

Remembering the Essentials

As we streamline our days, some essentials must not be sacrificed on the altar of efficiency.

Continue to learn. Principals absolutely must be head learners. Carve out time— however painful—for professional learning. Build a community of learners with other principals. You will quickly become an anachronism if you don’t vigorously pursue your own learning.

Slow down! Dig deeply into who you are and what you are about. When the walls are caving in around you, shut the door, sit down, breathe deeply, and find your center. Continually running faster leads to poor decisions, mistakes, and forgetfulness—and ultimately wastes time.

Build relationships. Strong relationships with students and colleagues bring success and meaning to your work. Enjoy students. Laugh with them. Celebrate their joys and sorrows. This, more than anything else, brings us back to essentials. Our work has always been and always must be about children.

Tired we may be, but the meaning and joy of our work moves us forward. We have the power to energize teachers and form the hearts and minds of students. That is our “north star” and, at the end of those long days, the point of it all! EL

Joanne Rooney is codirector of the Midwest Principals’ Center; joanne rooney@comcast.net.

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