The importance of a Principal: The most powerful agents in the education chain

Have you ever contemplated why some schools do well and others don’t? Why can the school down the road be so different from the next? Principals, my friends, are the reason why such differences occur. Rightly or wrongly, schools are judged by what they offer and how they perform academically.

Compliance issues and political correctness are two branches of the principal’s role that place great demand on them. The great joy, however, is the tremendous influence they have in shaping the type of learning students receive.

Personal well-being needs to be at the heart of the education process. But schools and school systems continually place academic needs at the top of the pillar. Pay attention to Stephen Covey in The Leader in Me when he mentions the four basic needs of all kids:

Physical – safety, food, hygiene, health.

Social / emotional – acceptance, kindness, friendship, being loved.

Mental – intellectual, creativity.

Spiritual – meaning, character, moral fiber.

Successful academic outcomes are a result of having the other dimensions of human development in place.

What should we offer in our schools?

If one of the fundamental goals of education is to develop self-directed learners, then how well are we doing? We know that an effective work place, home, school or any organization is self-correcting, self-managing and self-accountable. When these qualities are missing, governance, supervision, laws or monitoring are required. Working in these environments is exhausting.

All schools should be offering a thinking framework that helps young students make sense of what it means to learn. The true nature of learning has nothing to do with being intelligent, but for so long, and still today, many young people equate being good at school as being intelligent.

Good approaches

Multiple schools throughout the world are doing great things with various frameworks. Wherever you find a passionate principal who has developed a thinking framework, the students in that school community are getting something of great value.

So what is available?

Guy Claxton does great work using the “Learning Muscles.” Throughout the UK and other parts of the world, BLP schools are doing a fine job educating students about the 4R’s – resilience, resourcefulness, reflectiveness and reciprocity. Within these four areas, subsets of habits have been refined and related to other dispositions helpful to successful learning.One of the finest resources on human intelligence is a book by Lucas and Claxton called New Kinds of Smart: How the science of learnable intelligence is changing education. The authors refer to eight types of intelligence. They give educators a language and freedom to develop the learning process with students. All educators need to be informing students about the nature of intelligence on a daily basis and helping them assess themselves as learners against a framework.Stephen Covey’s Leader in Me program has spread across the globe and builds on the seven habits of highly successful people. These are: be proactive, begin with the end in mind, put first things first, think win – win, seek first to understand, then to be understood, synergise, and sharpen the saw. Once again each of these habits can be unpacked into smaller subsets of dispositions.

Then there are the Habits of Mind developed by Art Costa and Bena Kallick. The Habits describe cognitive and affective aspects of human behaviour. There are 16 Habits of Mind that stand alone without subsets of other dispositions:

• Thinking flexibly
• Creating, imagining, innovating
• Remaining open to continuous learning
• Listening with understanding and empathy • Wonderment and awe
• Gathering data through all sense
• Questioning and posing problems
• Applying past knowledge to new situations • Working interdependently
• Persisting
• Taking responsible risks
• Striving for accuracy
• Thinking and communicating with clarity and precision
• Metacognition
• Managing impulsivity
• Finding humour

A recent framework that gave educators more scope for reporting student achievement was Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences. His research suggested eight intelligences for which students could be benchmarked against. The multiple intelligences theory gave the education community an alternative way to value students’ talents and abilities. The role of teacher shifted somewhat toward coach and implied a nurturing. The eight intelligences:

• Lingustic
• Logical
• Musical
• Aesthetic
• Bodily-kinaesthetic • Spatial

• Interpersonal • Intrapersonal

Robert Sternberg suggests three intelligences that make up successful learners: academic, creative and practical intelligences. Sternberg states that traditional education discriminates against students who may be bright, creative and practical, but who don’t shine academically.

I believe the Habits of Mind give educators the language and skills to develop the dispositions of an intelligent mind that supports the work of all the frameworks mentioned.

The new Australian curriculum has scope in the general capabilities section for the development of a thinking framework, but at present the quality of how well students think is left to chance. Teaching our students from a young age about the how and why of learning is critical. Imagine a society where thinking dispositions were a mandatory part of the learning environment from a young age?