Finding the principal within

The two men are "relaxed practitioners who know what they're talking about," says Mary Thomas, one of the teachers participating in this year's program. "This is the hands-on stuff."

After 26 years in the classroom, Ms. Thomas says, "I've been on the job too long" for instruction that fails to be practical.

*Customization. Rather than training urban, suburban, and rural principals in the same fashion, district-level programs permit a specific focus.

"The examples given in class are situations you wouldn't see in a suburban setting. They're really preparing us," says Nancy Coddington, another of this year's participants.

*A sense of community. About 30 candidates a year are scheduled to move through the Rochester program over the course of three years, each group of 30 working closely as a team.

"We're training 90 principals in three years," Dr. Murphy says. "They will soon be the majority of principals in the system. They will share attitudes and orientations, and will have each other."

Typically, he points out, the job of principal can be very lonely. Training together can create a network to ease the solitary nature of the work.

*Better internships. Because the district is involved in organizing the training, it's easier to free these teachers for meaningful internships within the district.

"The internship has been around for a long time but has not been handled in a systematic, detailed way," says Michael Usdan, president of the Institute for Educational Leadership in Washington. "The field elements of the program are getting at long last the kind of attention they really need."

A key part of the Rochester program is an internship directly linked to the course work that teachers do. The hope is that relationships created during the internship might endure as long-range mentoring.

*A more proactive selection process. In Rochester, principals were asked to name teachers in their schools whom they viewed as potential leaders. These candidates were then invited to apply for the program. "I never would have thought of [becoming a principal] if I hadn't been invited," says Victoria DiMatteo, one of this year's participants.

Leslie Fenwick, a visiting fellow at The Principals' Center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Mass., warns, however, that offering places in the program by invitation can also become a narrow process that overlooks good candidates. That could mean failure to deal with another serious problem - the lack of gender and racial diversity among school principals.

Women, for instance, are 75 percent of the teaching force in this country but still only 35 percent of its school principals, Ms. Fenwick says. And African-American teachers tend to have higher credentials than their white peers, yet they still hold only 11 percent of the principals' positions. The Rochester program currently appears to include a good mix of women and men, minority and nonminority candidates.

Recognizing a drive to serve

But there's another group that Columbia's Dr. Sobol worries may have been overlooked in the scramble to fill jobs: the idealists. Too often, he says, teachers are offered only one incentive to become principals: a salary hike. "We're failing nationally to recognize that the drive to be of service to other people is an important motivational force," he says.

Instructors like Murphy and Mr. Walton, he points out, are well positioned to present the job of principal as a means of wielding genuine influence for good in a school community.

Sobol hopes these programs tell gifted teachers, "You are very good at what you do, but you have an even greater contribution to make."

*E-mail marjorie@csmonitor.com

(c) Copyright 2000. The Christian Science Publishing Society

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