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.

Get-to-Know-You Student Survey

1. What do you want to know about your new principal?

2. What do you want me to know about you?

3. What is your favorite song and who performs it?

4. When is your birthday?

5. Share three of your favorite traditions at [Name of Your School].

6. Share the name of one teacher you know cares about you.

7. Share your top three strengths as a student.

8. How can I support you more at school?

9. If you were me, what would be your biggest priority?

Set Goals

Imagine that you’re trying to hammer through a piece of plywood. As you swing the hammer down, the force of the blow is strongest wherever the hammer hits, but it gets dispersed fairly quickly throughout the rest of the board. You might make only a dent in the wood.

Now imagine that you hold a sharp nail on top of the plywood and use the same amount of force to bring the hammer down onto the head of the nail. This time, the nail pierces through the wood with no problem because all of that force has been concentrated into a much smaller area. It took the same amount of effort, but the impact was much greater.

The same analogy applies to the priorities and initiatives we take on in school. When we try to apply our efforts to too many initiatives, we disperse our force and end up making small dents here and there. But when we focus our attention on just a few strategic priorities, we can maximize our impact.

The philosopher Seneca said something similar: “If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.” This is why you’ll want to pick no more than just three to five priorities to focus on per year.

Most leaders get this; it makes sense to us intuitively.

But that’s not the hard part.

The hard part is sticking to those priorities throughout the year, even as other problems and issues rise to the surface. The temptation will be to start playing Whac-a-Mole again. You have to resist it, and you have to help your teams resist it. You simply don’t have the mental capital, human resources, or time to tackle all of those problems. Taking on too much is the fastest path to a mediocre (or worse) school.

Obviously, there are going to be times when unavoidable problems come up. No one had “transition our entire school to distance learning” on their strategic priorities list at the start of the 2019–2020 school year—but a pandemic happened anyway, and we all had to adjust. There are certain issues that simply cannot be ignored. Thankfully, those are the exception, not the rule.

Learn to say no to even good opportunities so you can continue to say yes to what  is most important.

The other constraint on your goal-setting is that you might not have the autonomy to choose all of your goals; sometimes certain priorities are set for you at the district level, and you have to work those in. But as you’ll learn in Part 6, constraints can be powerful motivators for creativity.

Make sure that all of your department or grade-level teams agree on the priorities early on in the year. Then, as new problem areas arise, you can pause to ask:

• Have we solved our other priority problems yet?

• Should we de-prioritize another problem in order to focus on this new one?

Getting buy-in on the strategic focus right away will be critical to empowering your team to later take the appropriate action.

John Unger, the principal of West Fork Middle School, shared that one of the wins his team experienced from the five-day challenge was building a Response-to-Intervention (RTI) system throughout the building, starting with Tier 1 Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS). John’s team modeled positive communication weekly to all of the staff, and soon, they saw that teachers followed suit, giving students handwritten notes offering encouragement and positive feedback.

The school had been trying to get an RTI system off the ground for years, and they were finally able to make it happen with the focus and clarity their 90-day entry plan gave them.

Empower Your Team

Your job as the instructional leader of your school is to lead your team’s learning and then empower them with as much decision-making autonomy as you can to implement what they’ve learned.

Based on the feedback and data you’ve been gathering, you’ll have set your priorities. Now is the time for you to prepare PD experiences throughout the year around those core areas. Identify your in-house experts and lean on them to help guide the rest of the team. Where you have gaps, consider hiring outside help to partner with internal team leads.

Invite your staff into the creation of a PD calendar for the year, and send that calendar out as early as possible so that your staff and teachers know what to expect. Check in with internal leads often to make sure they have what they need. After every PD meeting, send out a quick survey to invite feedback on what was discussed and make sure that you’re staying committed to your strategic goals for the year.

Measure Impact

Project managers at companies typically look at two types of indicators to assess their progress: lead and lag indicators.

Lag indicators include information about the outcomes; they help identify where progress still needs to be made. Most leaders focus their energy here, which is a mistake. Lead indicators, on the other hand, refer to ideas that can help close the gap between where you are now and where you want to be. They are future-focused, action-oriented, and within your control.

Because lead indicators are within your control, they are what matters most. If the right actions are taken, the outcomes will happen anyway.

Progress trumps performance every day.

Finally, don’t forget to measure the intangibles. You can do this in your after-PD surveys, during classroom visits, and via individual check-ins with staff. How much joy and investment do you see in your team? Are they happy to show up to work everyday?

Remember, often the smallest details can make the biggest impact on your school’s culture. That’s what we’ll discuss in Part 4.

Take Action: Plan for PD

• Start collecting any quantitative data available to you, like grades and standardized testing scores.

• If you already know your team, start identifying your in-house experts who might be willing to lead PD throughout the year.

If this landed for you, here are a few ways to keep going.

Build your 90-day plan with Digital Danny. Work with him over the next 90-days or for the entire year. Two paths. Once choice.

He’s always available, never forgets, and evolves with you.

Listen to the Better Leaders Better Schools podcast. You’ll find over 10 years of conversations with the most interesting people doing the most interesting work in school leadership. Every episode is a Mirror Person who knows more than you about something you care about. Start anywhere.

Read the Part 4 in this series below.