Evidence-Based Leadership as a Grade School Principal

Evidence-Based Leadership

As a grade school principal evidence-based leadership requires that I implement learning strategies that have been adequately researched and proven to be successful and effective with the population my school serves. Evidence-based leadership also requires that I continuously gather feedback and data regarding my leadership activities and my effectiveness within my school's environment. As a grade-school level principal in an underperforming urban school I have many opportunities to use evidence-based leadership to improve our school's instructional design and to monitor and enhance my own performance as the lead administrator. Two areas in which this has been particularly useful is the development of literacy programs in our school and the improvement of internal communications between the administrative team and the staff at our school.

When I entered as the lead administrator at my school site I was charged with the project of assessing our reading and English Language Arts (ELA) program. Test scores have been below average at this school site over the past 3 years, and a major part of my work at this school is to work in partnership with an instructional coach who is assigned to the site to provide new curriculum and teacher coaching for our ELA department. Our district has used a variety of evidence-based leadership approaches to select and implements a new literacy program intended to help below standard student improve their ELA skills. The district chose a highly researched program, Read 180, because it has been carefully studied and shown to exact noteworthy improvements in the reading skills of students with Below Basic and Far Below Basic test scores. The district's decision to review a variety of intervention programs and select a program with evidence-based results is an example of how schools and administrators apply the concept of evidence-based approaches.

When I entered my position as a new administrator at this school site I was also charged with developing new organizational systems to work with my teaching staff. The staff had major concerns regarding the communication and organization of the previous principal. As such, I decided to create a questionnaire regarding staff concerns about meetings, organization, communication, and the school's instructional priorities. Using the results of these surveys I was able to develop a new meeting format and schedule and institute new forums for staff communication such as use of email and shared Google documents and calendars. According to follow-up surveys and my own observation as the lead administrator, our workflow and internal communication within the school improved markedly in the following 6 months. Continuing my used of evidence-based leadership practices I also completed 3-month and 6-month follow-up surveys to get staff feedback on my performance. This approach of using evidence-based interventions helped improve our overall workflow and gave me very valuable insight on my overall administrative performance.