It’s always pretty interesting to me when I notice the clear deficits I had when I was a campus principal.  I always thought I did a great job of laying out a vision for the campus, having attainable goals, setting clear expectations, taking calculated learning risks, and ensuring the campus culture was conducive for great learning to occur,.  I worked pretty hard at those things and I have always been pretty proud of that.  Through many discussions with a good friend it became evident to me that I had one glaring deficit as a principal that was a pretty big problem.

I didn’t work hard enough making the teachers better teachers.

Through all of the great things we did for our students, not much focus centered on improving teacher efficacy in the buildings I led.  I do want to be clear, every campus I was fortunate to lead had many great teachers that did amazing things for students.  However, we can all get better!  Especially because the achievement of our students is on the line!

You may be wondering right now, “Herbert why didn’t you work to continually improve the teachers in your building?”  Well, I think it was a combination of things.  The biggest reason may have been because I simply didn’t fully understand how to coach teachers.  Sure, I knew how to tell a teacher that they weren’t doing a great job.  But it required more than that.  It required an effort on the part of all to ensure that we would all get better in order to raise student achievement.

We have to stop being random!

One of my biggest mistakes was being random with how we helped teachers.  This should never be random.  Through our instructional walk-throughs and observations there should have been short coaching sessions with each teacher.  As I said earlier, all of us can stand to get better.  As long as you are random with how you help and coach teachers there will always be nervous teachers in your building.  However, when everyone knows they will be given feedback and have to discuss it each time then the teachers in your building will not feel like there is a bulls eye on their back.

Of course it takes time to make all of this happen.  There are also many other steps within this process to make it happen.  Just never forget as a campus principal you have to do all you can to make the teachers better in your building.  Our students depend on it!