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Invest in interpersonal skill development and coaching for school leaders.
Providing skillful instructional leadership for a school community is a complex task. Too many leaders fail not because they lack the content knowledge associated with great teaching, but rather because they lack relationship skills necessary to support effective change. Every day in our lowest-performing schools, principals are faced with countless choices about how to spend their time and resources. These principals must find new ways to produce dramatic, long-term academic gains in their schools, as well as possess the moral conviction and stamina to confront the barriers often associated with making significant changes.

Resources required
Principals who complete interpersonal skills leadership training can identify, implement, and evaluate the specific strategies and tools they need to fulfill their commitment to higher levels of student performance. To implement these skills successfully principals require 10-12 days of training and weekly follow-up coaching sessions conducted via the telephone.

Outcomes

• Documented improvement of abilities to establish goals, create powerful action plans, and work successfully with others to produce intended results;
• Results from implementation of action plans to improve teaching and student learning;
• Evidence of improvement in teaching and learning that results from the development of high-performance cultures;
• Higher retention of valued teachers;
• Established norms of continuous improvement and evidence of staff adherence to the norms; and
• Higher levels of trust in the workplace.

NSDC in the field

Twin Tiers Principals Coalition, Corning NY
The Principals Coalition is a leadership development initiative utilizing research-based strategies to enhance the leadership skills of principals and assistant principals. Participants in the program have made a three-year commitment that includes summer institutes focused on the key aspects of building learning communities; four full-day follow-up sessions throughout the school year; small-group study teams that meet twice a month; and book studies, school visitations, and observations. The goal of the program is reflected in the belief that, as principals develop competence in leading learning, the learning of everyone in the school accelerates.

Fort Wayne Community Schools, IN
Utilizing the fundamental tenets of NSDC’s Results Skills for School Leaders program, NSDC worked with 20 principals from Fort Wayne Community Schools to develop or strengthen their leadership capacities. In both one-on-one and group sessions, the collaboration focused on strategies including clarifying intentions and goals, identifying multiple pathways to achieve goals, and building healthy cultures of learning within their schools. This work continues into the 2009-20 school year.