Principalship I -EDUL 635 - 004

Michael Johnson
Given all the changes seen in the past few years in the field of education, a
single leaders vision for their school is just not going to make the changes desired. It is
clear in the two readings that finding the leaders in several disciplines throughout your
school are needed to make a common vision work. The old, my way or the highway
method of leading is only going to take the organization to places it cannot recover from.
I look at this concept of teamwork to a greater vision and purpose as the very reason I
am pursuing this educational opportunity.
As stated in the article The Principles of Leadership, once people get a taste of
an effective team, they may spend the remainder of their career looking for the same
chemistry with other teams. I am fortunate to have experienced this very feeling over
the past ten plus years. I work with a team that is hungry to better our craft so student
outcomes improve. If that very goal is not reached, reflection and improvement is the
next step.
The teaching profession is so different today from what it was when I first started.
I began my first job in 1993, working for what I thought was a great principal. At the
time, I just got to teach. Year after year I would plan and teach my lessons with very
little if any concern for student performance. I look back now and see that he was not a
very effective leader, but he was a really nice guy. I look at the leader in my current
teaching situation and I believe her ability to share leadership within the building is what
will make our school continue to improve on the encouraging results recently achieved.

The five concepts of a learning organization covered in the readings all are
spelled out separately, but I feel they are so overlapping that success in one or two
really would show fragmentation as opposed to success.
Personal Mastery as a component is simply feeling comfortable with your
decisions and allowing your staff to carry those decisions into the school environment. I
believe a key component in this endeavor is to encourage and facilitate learning
opportunities for your staff related to the ideas which support your vision. Through this
process I would suspect that more and more staff members would join in to the shared
vision that you are trying to create.
Shared Vision, another key concept within learning organizations would take
shape through the discussions and outcomes from learning opportunities provided.
Staff that come back from opportunities and share what they have found can fine tune
and improve the original vision, getting to the point where they are a very real part of the
improvement in the direction the school is heading. Breaking down some of those
mental models created over time about people or groups of people within your
organization through real professional development opportunities tied to your vision will
help move the needle.
A couple years back I was talking with a custodian about how many students
were getting sick and having to stay home from school. I mentioned that it might be a
good idea to disinfect the table and desks each night as opposed to every week or two.
His comment back was, why would we do that when they are just going to get dirty
again. His Mental Model in this example was keeping him from doing something
simple that could have really had an impact on student performance. With students

able to stay in school, performance should improve. Those assumptions about staff and
students that often are far from accurate, do little to help us move forward as a staff. I
feel PLC work over the past few years has helped in this regard. It takes time for
everyone to feel that comfort level or willingness to open up and learn together. Once
that comfort is reached, mental models can be changed from negative to positive.
At this stage of the game, teams are really learning together. Another key
concept, Team Learning can be so powerful. In my PLC work, working through the
many personal differences to find that common ground can be difficult at times, but
once address and recognized, the synergy can be contagious. In reading the articles
and agreeing whole heartedly that the talent lies in the building, it just needs to be
directed in a way that will be powerful. I find that current leaders shy away from giving
staff the time needed to build that relationship needed to learn together. It almost feels
like administration doesnt trust their own commitment to team learning.
The System Thinking component is one that I get truly frustrated by in my
profession. Often times the people that are last to find out about the way the system is
supposed to work is the classroom teacher. Over the past few years, administration
has said, you are doing RTI, you are doing PLC, your are doing PBIS. These
statements came with little personal mastery on the administrations part which clogged
up the shared vision, empowered the mental models and stalled the team learning.
The articles do a nice job of sharing all of these key concepts separate, but as I
read through them, I kept thinking that they are all connected. The dominoes fall
together as works of art when one leans on another and they fall flat, alone when
unable to connect with another. I enjoyed the two articles and feel that they both shed a

lot of light on my personal goals as a future administrator. You cannot lead alone in this
day and age, you must work to educate your staff in a shared direction to improve on
decisions that need to be made together.

Reason, C. (2015). Establishing Vision Clarity. In Stop Leading Like it was Yesterday
(pp. 17-32). Solution Tree Press.

Grogan, M. (2000). The Principles of Leadership. In The Jossey-Bass reader on

educational leadership