A Duty to Prepare Tomorrow's Leaders - vocational guidance programmes for future school administrators - Brief Article

School Administrator, Nov, 2001 by Don W. Hooper

Remember when you first decided to become an educational leader? Odds are good that your principal or a teaching colleague spotted leadership potential and encouraged you to obtain the credentials needed for an administrative position.

Perhaps you were a self-starter who just decided that you wanted to make your contribution on a grander scale than the classroom.

Those of us who have been in key leadership roles know, educational leadership is a demanding, sometimes thankless job. Our contributions and their rewards may be intrinsic rather than extrinsic.

The joy of making plans that come together is one that is hard to describe. The work we do everyday is demanding yet exhilarating. As we go about this work, we surely notice other individuals who should and could be successful in educational leadership. What are we doing about it?

A key responsibility of leadership is to develop other leaders. We must constantly be on the lookout for those who will succeed us. In the coming years, an increasing number of leadership opportunities will be available. Depending on the size of our school districts, we can approach this differently.

If our size and resources permit, we can offer our own leadership development academies. Or we can work collaboratively with neighboring districts to build such programs. At the very least, we should encourage outstanding educators who show promise to begin leadership training at the university level.

This idea inspired the Architecture of Leadership training and the Future Principal Academy in the Fort Bend Independent School District in Texas, where I have been superintendent for seven years.

The Architecture of Leadership training series brings the district's leaders--building principals and assistant principals as well as central-office administrators--together twice monthly to focus on leadership strategies that empower both the stakeholder and organization. I started this process out of the belief that leadership is a critical component in improving schools.

The series explores classic aspects of leadership balanced against the "new leadership" skills required today, which emphasize the importance of community, relationships, vision and developing leadership capacity throughout the organization. The goal is to keep our organization competitive and to create a social architecture capable of generating intellectual capital beyond the normal expectation.

Through the use of interactive training techniques, district leadership identifies best practices through educational experts such as Warren Bennis, Willard Daggett, Doug Reeves, Spence Rogers, Alan November, Carl Boyd, Stephen Covey and others. We try to apply their thinking to the district as a whole, to individual campuses or to individual leaders.

Meanwhile, the Future Principal Academy gives an extra immersion of leadership training to Fort Bend's assistant principals. Every assistant principal from elementary through high school meets seven times over the year to discuss issues pertinent to their role and their quest to become principals. Panel discussions involving sitting principals and central-office leaders are a popular activity. Sometimes the group has extended discussion time with an expert, and sometimes the assistant principals visit neighboring districts to examine best practices. This allows a cross-pollination of ideas from other leaders not necessarily in the same chain of command. In this way, an assistant principal is not stuck with just one mentor and doesn't get lost in the vast numbers of a large organization.

The assistant principals gain valuable visibility as well as specific training to further prepare them for the principalship in ways that far exceed credentialing. We find that our assistant principals interview better in most cases than sitting principals from other districts when we have job openings to fill.

Each of us must continually seek ways to develop leaders. The process I described has worked for us in Fort Bend. I hope you can find ways to develop the next wave of leaders in your district.