Effective principals are integral to school, teacher, and student success. However, it can be difficult to create common definitions of principal leadership, develop hiring criteria for highly effective principals, and identify common metrics to measure principal effectiveness. Fortunately, the field is beginning to identify some promising markers of principal effectiveness, particularly from teachers’ survey-based feedback and practice ratings provided by supervisors as part of principal evaluations.
In this episode of Friday’s Focus, SCORE President and CEO David Mansouri leads a conversation with Erin O’Hara and Dr. Jason Grissom from Tennessee Education Research Alliance (TERA) on how school leader ratings and measures can predict other outcomes, such as student academic growth.
Erin and Jason present findings on how data can predict the effectiveness of school leaders and how schools and districts might use these findings to improve their ability to recruit, select, train, and place principals who are more likely to excel. They also share the work that is underway to understand more about predictors of effective leadership.
Watch this episode and learn:
- How school leader ratings and measures can predict other outcomes (like student achievement, attendance, school climate, and teacher satisfaction and retention)
- How replacing a below-average principal with an above-average principal can directly impact learning for every student in a school
- Why Tennessee has an advantage over other states because of the investment and prioritization of school leader evaluations and metrics
- Which leadership behaviors and skills may impact school leader effectiveness
- How research can help prioritize training needs for educator preparation programs and identify the resources, training, and preparation that effective school leaders need
- Why strategic management skills are critical for school leaders
- How TERA is working to create assessment tools that can measure the potential effectiveness of school leaders to aid with hiring
- What TERA hopes to learn and implement through a five-year study of effective school leader predictors