Leading the Change
Six Guidelines for Principals

2—Model Instructional Leadership

(Iowa Core Curriculum Outcome  Four - “District leaders and other educators monitor and use data to increase the degree of alignment of each and every student’s enacted curriculum and other relevant educational opportunities to the Iowa Core Curriculum.”)

Fullan believes that a system-thinking principal should put all resources (budget, structure, professional learning, and monitoring) toward improving teaching and learning for each and every learner.  Most importantly, principals should directly participate with teachers in formal and/or informal professional learning.  He also believes that principals should model instructional leadership with “specificity-not with general symbolic stuff.”

A practical way to get specific with instructional leadership is for principals to model the pedagogies that teachers are being asked to use in their classrooms.  For example, inservices and trainings that are teaching staff about the ICC’s “Teaching for Learner Differences” will have more impact if administrators model differentiated instruction in teacher training.   Allowing teachers to critique their principal’s use of the strategy goes one step further in setting a “safe-to-risk” environment that de-privatizes teaching and makes instruction open to improvement for everyone.

Using data to plan professional development also models using formative assessment to plan classroom lessons.  This congruency of tapping each educator’s prior knowledge and each student’s prior knowledge sends a strong message that job-embedded instructional leadership is expected to be used by all members of the system.