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Multi-School Leadership: Tools to Extend Excellent Principals’ Reach

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An Opportunity Culture extends the reach of excellent teaching—what about doing the same for excellent schoolwide leadership? Public Impact, which founded the national Opportunity Culture initiative, today releases a set of practical materials on Multi-School Leadership: How to extend the reach of excellent principals by having them lead a small group of schools, for more pay, funded within the budgets of their schools.

Multi-school leaders (MSLs) are excellent principals with a record of high-growth student learning who lead a small group of two to eight related or closely located schools. They lead a collaborative team of their schools’ principals while typically continuing to lead one school in the group directly.

The cornerstone of Multi-School Leadership is instructional leadership within each school by multi-classroom leaders. Together, these create a leadership career path with multiple levels, all focused on instructional excellence, frequent guidance and support for teachers and principals, and keeping great educators working directly with students.

These new roles also allow paid, full-time residencies for both aspiring teachers and principals—entirely within schools’ regular budgets. (Public Impact will be publishing more on residencies in the near future.)

 

New Multi-School Leadership Materials

Multi-School Leadership model; summary

Job descriptions: Multi-school leader, principal, instructional assistant principal/principal resident, operations manager\Other tools: MSL Schedule Specifications, MSL Critical Design Decisions

More: Look for selection guidance, tools for managing multiple schools, and more—coming soon!

 

Benefits of Multi-School Leadership

  • Reach more teachers and their students with excellent leadership
  • Let outstanding principals advance with higher pay, while continuing to lead instructional excellence
  • Help all principals and teachers continuously improve their leadership and instruction
  • Retain principals longer by helping them handle the job well and succeed with students
  • Build a strong pipeline of excellent instructional leaders, with a career path for development

 

How Do Multi-School Leaders Lead?
Multi-school leaders:

  • Lead their team of school principals to review data for each school and for the schools overall to identify the best approaches to achieve student success.
  • Guide each school’s top instructional leader in key elements of instructional and administrative leadership.
  • Observe and give feedback, coach, and lead performance data analysis and problem-solving throughout the multi-school team.
  • Rotate working in person in the schools they lead, connecting personally with teachers, staff, and families.
  • Take accountability for student learning, teacher satisfaction, and other outcomes in all schools led. Multi-school leaders earn supplements above principal pay, typically 10 to 40 percent, depending on spans and budgets. All pay supplements are funded within the total budgets of the schools in the group.

 

The Foundation: Multi-Classroom Leadership
Multi-classroom leaders:

  • Are teacher-leaders with a track record of high-growth student learning and leadership qualities.
  • Lead a small grade or subject team: co-planning, coaching, co-teaching, and modeling instruction and data analysis for and with the team.
  • Continue to teach part of the time, often by leading small-group instruction.
  • Work with other multi-classroom leaders as a team to help principals lead instruction, behavior policies, and other critical activities affecting learning in each school.
  • Take accountability for student learning, teacher satisfaction, and other outcomes in all classrooms led.

Because multi-classroom leaders co-lead instruction schoolwide, other changes in schoolwide leadership roles to allow multi-school leadership become possible. Research indicates that multi-classroom leadership helps teams of teachers produce substantially higher student learning growth than in typical schools, forming a strong foundation for adding multi-school leadership, too.

Opportunity Culture now includes more than 20 districts in nine states. See the Opportunity Culture Dashboard for more details.

How to Radically Improve Teacher & Principal Preparation

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How can new teachers and principals start their jobs prepared for educational excellence, and how can the schools that hire them know they’re ready to excel? In today’s preparation systems, no one is fully getting what they need—not aspiring teachers and principals, not schools, not students. There is a better way.

In Opportunity Culture schools, Multi-Classroom Leadership creates the potential for aspiring teachers to experience paid, full-time, yearlong residencies led by excellent teachers who lead instructional teams. Similarly, Multi-School Leadership, in which excellent principals lead two or more schools, creates the potential for paid, full-time residencies for aspiring principals—particularly ones who have already led instructional teams as multi-classroom leaders. New school models allow both teacher and principal residents to be paid for a year within existing budgets.

In a new brief from Public Impact, we show how to create such residencies. The teacher residencies are nothing like typical student teaching, in which schools—largely as a courtesy to teacher preparation programs—allow any teacher to supervise aspiring teachers on a part-time basis for a single semester, sometimes rotating among classrooms in unaccountable roles. Similarly, most new principals today lack substantial instructional leadership experience.

Instead, we envision a future in which every aspiring teacher and principal works as a paid, full-time, full-year resident coached by the nation’s best educators, while being screened for potential hiring.

[Read more…]

How to Lead a Schoolwide “Team of Leaders”: Tools for Principals

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In the most successful Opportunity Culture schools, principals lead a team of multi-classroom leaders—strong teachers who lead small teams and are accountable for outcomes in each grade and/or subject—to ensure instructional excellence schoolwide. Successful principals say this schoolwide “team of leaders” approach is crucial to their students’ success and to providing teachers with deep support throughout the school.

A new set of tools from Public Impact can help other principals emulate their approach.

[Read more…]

Every School Can Have a Great Principal: A Fresh Vision for How

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This column first appeared on Education Next.

Great teachers matter—we all know that. But great principals matter nearly as much. We recently profiled three principals who achieved strong student learning growth in their schools in tough circumstances. Forming and leading a team of teacher-leaders proved crucial to all. But then what?

Can great principals take their leadership to the next level and stay connected to teachers and students? Could they reach all schools, not just the fraction they reach today?

We asked just that, and here’s our answer: yes.

In An Excellent Principal for Every School: Transforming Schools into Leadership Machines, we share our vision for how districts and charter networks can reach a lot more students and teachers—potentially all—with great principals, for much higher pay, within regular budgets.

You might recognize this concept, since we’ve floated—and implemented—similar ideas with teachers in Opportunity Culture schools in several states already (including unionized districts). We’ve now extended our thinking to principals.

[Read more…]

Opportunity Culture in the News: How to Transform Education

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How can state and district leaders transform education by extending the reach of great teachers and their teams to many more students, for more pay, within budget? Read our latest thoughts this week:

  • On EdNC.org, Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan C. Hassel exhort North Carolina’s leaders to focus on the destination–giving all students access to excellent teaching, consistently–and set the guideposts districts need to get there. “State leaders can transform North Carolina by funding a diverse set of districts to design financially sustainable, scalable advanced pay systems that reward excellent teachers for reach and leadership,” write the Hassels, co-directors of Public Impact and founders of the Opportunity Culture initiative.
  • On GettingSmart.com, the Hassels write about the challenges–and a possible solution–to the need for great school leaders at a time when schools must achieve deeper learning, not just learning basic skills. They call for a new model–one that combines Multi-Classroom Leadership with multi-school leadership.
  • And EducationNext.com highlights our video about the Opportunity Culture choices of Ranson IB Middle and Ashley Park PreK-8 in Charlotte.

Coming Monday: All about our latest Opportunity Culture video!

Hiring Top Principals: Lessons from 5 Urban Districts

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Lacking Leaders thumbnail 2 smallIn Lacking Leaders: The Challenges of Principal Recruitment, Selection, and Placement, Public Impact’s Daniela Doyle and Gillian Locke took an inside look at the hiring processes of five urban districts around the country–and came up with six steps districts can take to hire the best principals for each school.

Written for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Lacking Leaders discusses the need to make the job more appealing, manageable, and appropriately compensated; the need to actively recruit and evaluate high-quality candidates and match schools with candidates’ strengths; and the need for ongoing evaluation of hiring efforts.

[Read more…]

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