50 Success Tips minus 47

Photo Credit: PHOTO ♥ BOOTH

Just saw this post on twitter, 50 Success Tips for Principals, and got to thinking.  How do I remember 50 tips about anything?  I mean do I need 50 tips to be a good dad?  How about 50 tips for saving energy.  You're lucky if I remember one thing to do.  Since, I've written before about focus, here's my list of successful tips for principals and I'm going to distill them down  to three.

Here we go.

1.  Have a Positive Attitude - Now, if you went to the 50 tips link above you may have noted that this is also #1 on their list, but I promise I did think of it before these guys.  A Positive Attitude does a world of good.  One of the parents in my son's boy scout troop was reading a book on wilderness survival, and you'll never guess what the most important thing you can do to survive - that's right - Have a Positive Attitude.  A positive attitude has a profound effect on you and everyone you lead.  You will face many challenges in the Principal's seat and you only have control over one thing - your response.  A positive attitude will help you absorb the challenges of the work both small and great and encourage those around to pursue the most positive course for students.

2. Make the People Around you Better - A former Principal I worked with years ago once said, "The job of the Principal is to do nothing".   Now, that is not an incentive for lazy administrators, but an acknowledgment that the people who actually run the schools are the teachers, secretaries, custodians, parents, and students.  The Principal's job is to create the environment where all of these folks can do their job to the best of their ability.  You'll need to get resources in their hands, build collaborative structures so they can work in teams and highlight their accomplishments every step of the way.  It's also good to remember that when you finally leave that school, they will not remember the things you did, but how you made them feel.  Did you make them feel competent, supported, encouraged, challenged?

3.  Be a Student of Learning - Study your school.  Study your curriculum.  Study your teachers, students, and community.  Read research.  Read for pleasure.  Listen to complaints, criticisms, and compliments.   Learn, Learn Learn.  The Principal should be the CLO (Chief Learning Officer) of the school.  Model a willingness to change (isn't that learning?) and constantly look for new insights, ideas, and strategies to make your school better.   Having a vision for your school comes from thinking about what is working and what could be better.  It also involves looking outside your school for inspiration and ideas.  The Principal as a learner is a powerful force for adult and student learning.

The principal job is extremely complex and sophisticated and can hardly be reduced to any list of things you can do.  In fact, I was tempted to put as #3 Never make a list like this!  However, some things are more important than others, and here is a great place to start.  If I can learn something new every day, help one member of my staff get better today, and keep a positive attitude no matter what comes my way, success is sure to follow.  If not, go back to that list of 50 things and try another one of those.   They're actually pretty good.

Being Positive about Positive Deviants

There exists a system where data on performance was not collected regularly. Then, one fine day, a group of practitioners got the go ahead to allow data collection on their performance so long as they remained anonymous. To the surprise of the professionals working in this field, not every entity was a high performing enclave. In fact, the performance of all of these centers rather followed the traditional Bell Curve with a few very poor performers, a whole lot of performers in the median range, and a small band of high performers leading the field. Does this sound like your school district, your grade levels, your group of teachers? In fact, this data was collected on the centers for treatment of Cystic Fibrosis and you can learn all about it in Atul Gawande's excellent book Better.

We come to find out that the medical profession has much in common with the education profession. Sharing data on performance is not as enthusiastically embraced as one might think for a field of scientists. Likewise, getting medical teams to rethink their performance by comparing to those who are getting better results is not so common, and hardly the norm. Gawande says, "What we're not used to doing is comparing our records of success and failure with those of our peers".

Imagine for a minute your child has cystic fibrosis and you learn that the children being treated at your child's center lived on an average just over 30 years. Then you find that the children at the most successful centers were living on average to 46. Where would you want your child to be treated?

The good news in Gawande's research is that the center that he highlighted did indeed seek out the highest performing center to observe and learn what strategies, attitudes, and practices they had in place to get such stellar results for their patients. Of course, the journey from mediocre to highly successful is not as easy as making some simple observations, tweaking a few practices and rejoicing at your new found success. There are so many intangibles that are difficult to replicate, much like the art and science of teaching!

So how can we in education take advantage of the Positive Deviants in our field in a way that is respectful of our teachers, yet insistent on learning from those teachers, schools, and districts who are outperforming the rest? Here are a few thoughts from my experience.

1. Be crystal clear about the reason for sharing data. Having landed on a few land mines of my own, I know that the purpose of data comparisons must be made clear and repeated often. It's about the learning.

2. Allow teachers to have input on what data should be compared. You can make a case for a lot of data to be compared that might give a distorted view of end results. Were the classes evenly created at the start of the year? Are there formative data that would contribute to positive end results? Discussion and debate about what data matters is healthy and will lead to a more enthusiastic response to the numbers.

3. Celebrate those who are humbly taking risks to learn from colleagues. Those who are willing to seek out learning from their colleagues need lots of encouragement and praise for their efforts. They are learners who are proving that they are open to any ideas that will help their children learn at higher levels.

If you are interested in seeing the data reports on the Cystic Fibrosis centers across the country they can be found here: http://www.cff.org//CCNP/CareCenterSelector/index.cfm *requires free registration I encourage you to compare your local center with the center at Minneapolis, Minnesota.