Week 3 - Principals and Leadership

The Wallace Foundation article this week dealt a great deal with leadership.  In the educational setting the leader that we are typically talking about is the principal.  They are the ones that come in and set the tone for the entire school.  The article gave a great example of that in Dewey Hensley.  He came into an “impossible situation” and turned around one of the worst schools in Kentucky.  The characteristics and tactics he brought to the school really struck a chord with me because they rang true with much of the training I received and leadership I saw in the service.  L. David Marquet, a former Captain on the USS Santa Fe, wrote a book called “Turn the Ship Around!”  In it he tells a story, much like Dewey’s, about taking command of one of the lowest achieving ships in the fleet and turning it into one of the highest performing by empowering his crew and turning followers into leaders.  That crew went on to receive a disproportionately high number of promotions to upper ranks and leadership positions throughout the fleet.  My fellow business teachers out there may want to give this one a read, I have seen it listed on several “best” empowerment and leadership in business lists over the years.  It also has a companion workbook I was looking into to see if it might have some exercises that can be translated to the classroom.  Admittedly, I have a bias towards military sources of leadership because of my past experience, but I also believe that those methods and modalities are created with much slimmer margins of error.  Take Jocko Willinik for example.  He was a Navy SEAL and later a Navy SEAL instructor.  In that time he learned and embodied a particular set of leadership characteristics that allowed him to handle strong personalities, foster unity, and empower leaders at every level because in that environment a failure to do so could lead to the loss of life.  While the classroom is not that extreme, I believe that we have the same narrow margin for error if we want our students to be successful.  Jocko has also written several books on leadership (some, I believe, are focused on younger children), founded a leadership contractor called Echelon Front, and hosts a leadership podcast(The Jocko Podcast).  Luis and I had talked about using podcasts in the classroom and this one might be one to ponder.  The episodes are around 20 minutes so they might be a little long but I do think they have content that can be used in clips or even to pull out some quotes to reflect on.  One quote that comes from his partner Leif Babin, also a SEAL, is “it’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate.”  I liken it to Dewey’s “tolerance for truth board.”  On the truth board he posted the teacher’s faces with the progress of their students, displayed for every one to see.  It ultimately lead to a high level of turnover in his first few years but I think it helped him find the right kind of teachers.

I know I went on a slight tangent beyond the importance of leadership in principals to some sources and applications for the classroom, but I am hoping that maybe some of these are new and can provide some further insight to you readers out there.  I’d also like to touch on the teacher quote near the end of the article which said: “Principal’s have found talents in me that I didn’t know I had.”  This reminded me of some words I heard from David Foster Wallace, and have adopted in a fashion as my definition of leadership: “Real leaders are people who help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.”