How to create the perfect principal entry plan [Part 3 of 6]

If you're leading academics like a game of Whac-a-Mole, you're reacting. Not improving. This chapter shows you how to slow down, focus up, and build momentum that lasts.

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Part 3: Focus Your Efforts for Academic Impact

Remember playing Whac-a-Mole at the arcade when you were a kid? Armed with a soft pleather mallet, your goal was to smack down the plastic moles as they popped up randomly all over the mechanical game board. You could only win on pure adrenaline, whacking around at the board in a frenzy, hoping you were fast enough to put a stop to the madness.

As fun as it was, I think that game did us all a great disservice; it trained us to attack problems reactively in frantic spurts of adrenaline. We’ve learned to take action only when problems appear instead of seeking out long-term solutions by identifying the root of the problem.

Academics is the business of school. It’s likely that when the new year starts (or even earlier), you will be overwhelmed with urgent academic issues. What’s more—new urgent-feeling priorities and problems will arise throughout the year. Decisions will need to be made across a broad spectrum of academic concerns, including:

• Standardized testing

• Curriculum development

• Intervention and enrichment

• Acceleration

• MTSS

• RTI

• PLCs

• Grading

• And much, much more

Many of us have experienced what’s often called initiative fatigue—the constant churn of projects and priorities as leaders react to the newest issues that come up during the year. Initiative fatigue is what happens when we’re playing Whac-a-Mole with the academic needs across our school building.

As the leader, it’s your job to stop this madness by bringing a more focused, thoughtful approach to setting academic priorities and establishing a process for academic improvement. Once you do that, then your job is to trust your team. So many leaders get addicted to the adrenaline rush of playing Whac-a-Mole that they find it hard to let go of the responsibility to be the ultimate problem-solver in their school.

News flash: You’re not the only person who can make good decisions about how to serve your students. You’re not the only person who can solve these sticky, complex problems. You need your team.

In Part 3, we’ll talk about the four steps of instructional leadership that will get your academics off to a strong start this year: gather data, set goals, empower your team, and measure impact. These four steps will become a cycle that you can implement over and over again throughout the entire year.

© Better Leaders Better Schools™, 2023

Gather Data

Hopefully you’re picking up on a theme for these first 90 days: Listen first, act second. Before we can set goals or start to take any action, we have to get to know the students in our buildings and understand our school’s academic strengths and weaknesses.

If you’re a veteran leader or have been at your school for multiple years, it’s likely that you already have a good sense of where the pain points are. New principals—whether new to administration in general or just new to a particular school—will need to spend more time listening and learning before setting priorities.

You’ll want to collect annual standardized assessment data, formative assessment data across different departments and grade levels, and qualitative data such as surveys. (You’ll already have one piece of qualitative data from the Get-to-Know-You Survey you’ll be sending to your staff.)

I recommend empowering your department leads and grade-level or discipline-specific teams to not only gather relevant data, but to analyze it. Join as many of these meetings as you can, but let your teams take the lead.

First, teams should look at and discuss what’s going well. Often, what your school is doing right isn’t being celebrated like it should be. As you see things that merit celebration, make note to bring them up at the next PD meeting.

Next, teams should look for trends in the data to identify potential problem areas. Using disaggregated data can help schools spot the challenges for specific groups of students that may need additional support and attention.

After you’ve done your staff survey, consider conducting a similar Get-to-Know-You Student Survey as well. Relationships are the foundation of learning. All kids need to feel that at least one adult at the school cares about them, and you can get a sense for whether students in your building are feeling this way through a survey.

Below, I’m including some of my favorite questions to ask kids as a starting point, but you’ll need to adjust this for your own student population. If you’re serving elementary students, think about making an emoji survey or asking simple yes/no questions. Alternatively, you can meet with students individually throughout the first 90 days to interview them personally.