Domain 3: Organizational Leadership is comprised of four standards integral to successful school operation.
Standard 8: School Management. Effective school leaders manage the organization, operations, and facilities in ways that maximize the use of resources to promote a safe, efficient, legal, and effective learning environment.
How do you identify areas in need of improvement and monitor continuous growth of subordinates?
A key element in cultivating and sustaining a culture of shared leadership involves ensuring continual personal and professional growth of the school leader himself. In addition, it is crucial to ensure the continual growth of all subordinates. Each year (at minimum), the school leader should sit down with teachers and staff members and set goals. These goals must be data driven and must be accompanied by targeted plans to ensure their attainment. At the end of each school year (or more ideally, intermittently), the status of each goal should be examined. Open dialogue needs to take place for this process to be effective. All goals must be focused on increasing student achievement and must be accompanied by data.
How do you manage the organization, operations and facilities in ways that maximize the use of resources to promote a safe, efficient , legal and effective learning environment?
As described above, a school leader must prioritize decisions based upon what will promote and ensure student and teacher success. Additionally, as Covey (1998) impressed, leaders must “schedule their priorities.” A key element to a successful school involves consistent monitoring. Often times, as school leaders, we have the best of intentions but “things” get in the way. Expectations are not monitored with fidelity and in turn, processes are not implemented with fidelity and the results reflect this. Systems need to be in place for progress monitoring. The process needs to be thorough and consistent and needs to occur often. The most successful organizations are those with strong monitoring systems in place. Effective monitoring not only ensures the process is implemented effectively but also gives validity to the process. If it’s rolled out as a valuable process but no one bothers to monitor it, what does that say about it’s value?
As discussed previously, delegation and shared leadership assures that things run efficiently and effectively. School leaders should also be well versed in the legal policies governing the school district as a whole. All policies can be found on any SBBC computer by simply typing the word “web” into the URL bar when navigating the internet. The policies can be searched by name and/or number. Having this link bookmarked as a resource is an invaluable tool in ensuring all decisions are made according to SBBC policy.
