Educational Leaders Should Double-down on Key Skills
Educational leadership is tough. I have always had a lot of respect for leaders of school districts and other organizations that are willing to step in and do whatever work needs to be done for their organization.
I’m talking about a superintendent demonstrating effective educational leadership by picking up trash that escaped from a garbage can as she walks a campus. Or a leader who pitches in at a company concession stand or fills in on the mail run when a staff member is absent.
Or this – during blustery early spring days in a pandemic, a superintendent works beside other district staff including school food service workers, greeting parents, providing breakfast and hot lunches, and giving additional learning activities, as parents drive through a pick-up line.
Educational Leadership Playbook?
During the COVID-19 pandemic, uncertainty has been king. While district leaders handle some ambiguity daily in education, certain things have always seemed inviolate.
Until this past spring, most educational leaders would have said that the school calendar remained relatively stable throughout the year without long-term closures. And state and federal testing? No way would a district be able to eliminate that piece of accountability.
But both of those things happened for most school districts in spring 2020.
And through the summer months, most principals and central office administrators worked feverishly to develop reopening plans that covered various scenarios.
While we wrestle with the puzzle of pandemic reopening plans, we can take a tiny bit of consolation knowing that every district leader is experiencing the same challenges and uncertainties.
While we don’t have a tried and true educational leadership playbook to help us (though we will have some by the time we work our way through this pandemic), our North stars can help us lead through these challenges.
So how do we provide the leadership that our districts need right now?
I wrote about leading during a pandemic in Navigating Our Work in the Age of Coronavirus. You can also find the article on Medium.
Educational Leadership and Safety Above All
School is about education, right? But even in pre-pandemic times, before teaching and learning, a district’s primary goal is to keep its students, faculty, and staff safe.
During a pandemic, district leaders must double-down on health and safety. If you have at-risk staff members, find a way to minimize exposure. Remote working, while not ideal, maybe the best option.
Work with local health officials to determine what is best for students. Should you plan to bring all students to school with certain safety protocols in place? Will you need to reduce the numbers present each day by implementing a hybrid (A group day/B group day)? Are the local indicators pointing to a remote-only option?
Determine your metrics and protocols. Share widely, and do not be afraid to revise as new information is made available. We are learning organizations, after all, so educational leaders should model how new information can refine a district’s perspective.
Don’t forget the psychological safety of your staff and students, too. Be upfront about the decisions being made.
Do everything you can to keep your campuses safe, ensuring the well-being of students and staff. This doesn’t mean that no one will contract COVID-19, but we must take what steps we can to keep everyone safe.
Many districts are about a month or so into the new school year, and some of them are already transitioning between plans. For example, some districts that began the year as remote-only are now moving toward a hybrid plan.
Educational Leaders Maintain Focus
Keep your attention targeted on your true North.
- What is the district vision? How has it changed because of the pandemic (if it did)?
- What is the next milestone? (closing year, developing summer programs, re-opening schools)
As a district leader, you still have the responsibility to work toward your district’s vision. The pandemic probably hasn’t changed the vision, though your mission may have altered slightly.
Effective educational leadership mans maintaining focus on the district’s vision and mission even during difficult times. Especially during tough times.
The key is to determine if your mission (how you are going to achieve the vision) needs to be adapted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Do that by reviewing your milestones and tasks.
What do you need to accomplish next to keep your vision real?
For example, at the messy end of the school year, what does the district need to have in place to keep the vision of the district in focus? Perhaps you need to look at your summer programming.
What needs to remain? What needs to be tossed? Where can you pivot? What can you do now to help with reopening in the fall?
In my district, we pivoted one program to a virtual environment, we postponed one program, and we added a new virtual program.
These decisions have helped position my district to have a stronger remote reopening plan for the fall. And we were able to maintain the district’s focus – even if how we worked toward the vision changed.
Form a Response Team
Tough times often cause the best leaders to forget a basic tenet of effective educational leadership. One thing that has been obvious to me through the pandemic is that we can’t do it alone.
The COVID-19 situation is a complex one. Complex problems need a team.
A complex problem means that there are many moving parts. One person can’t corral all the parts.
Districts have had to work through foodservice and distribution issues, pivoting to remote learning, developing hybrid plans (A/B days), working with local health departments, participating in emergency management meetings, purchasing sanitizing supplies, adding temperature stations and kiosks, creating signage and direction markers, closing areas of buildings, and the list goes on.
To lead effectively during a crisis with these different aspects of a situation, a leader needs a good team. And members of the team will have their own leadership skills tested during this time.
From this team designate a point person to stay on top of official updates. This person might be an Assistant or Associate Superintendent or she might be a PIO (Public Information Officer) if the district is lucky enough to have one.
During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, information was flowing quickly from some sources. A point person to attend to official communications from the CDC, local health departments, emergency management teams, and departments of public instruction are critical to a district’s successful response to the situation.
New and Junior Educational Leaders
If you are a new or junior central office administrator, then you are likely to be a member of the response team. While you will undoubtedly have specific tasks assigned to you, remember three things to help the district through the crisis.
- Support the team. You support the team by doing your part AND helping others when you can.
Most of us have found ourselves out of our regular lanes during the past several months. It’s fine if you are now hopping on a bus to deliver meals, even if you normally would be working on the academic side of things.
- Volunteer. This item goes along with working outside your normal lane as I mentioned above. Undoubtedly, the COVID-19 pandemic has created new and interesting tasks for districts – activities that had never been assigned to a department or staff member.
Volunteer to write the report or the protocol. Volunteer to tape up the water fountains or hang signage.
Take the initiative and volunteer for whatever needs to be done.
- Encourage others. At the beginning of the pandemic, I saw many people who were frightened and confused. And rightly so.
Life turned upside down overnight, and we had no answers to most of our questions. We need to take care of our people by encouraging them and extending grace.
Now that we are several months into the pandemic, we have acclimated to some degree to all the changes. But we are still wrestling with questions that have no good answers, we are still nervous and unsure, but most of all, we are tired!
We must be encouraging to others in our district, even when we don’t feel so upbeat ourselves. This is a great time to lead by example.
For more information on educational leadership, see 3 Educational Leadership Lessons for Beginners.
Communication and Educational Leadership
All organizations should communicate with their employees about major events and shifts. School districts are no different; we should be communicating with our faculty and staff on a regular basis.
Where we do differ from many organizations is that we have more stakeholder groups, namely parents, students, and the community. Effective educational leadership means that district leaders communicate regularly with all these groups, especially in a time of crisis.
Districts that communicate often and with clarity build trust with their stakeholders. During the early days of the pandemic, it was helpful to our community to share district information AND other pertinent information from local emergency management, health department, and the CDC.
During the spring closure, one district’s Public Information Officer took to Facebook Live EVERY day to keep in touch with its students and families. Some days he might have lots of information to share. Other days, he might only have the drive-through lunch menu to relate.
But he shared consistently. And the community learned to expect his announcements. It kept them in touch with the school during a time when most people felt cut off from their communities.
Use your lines of communication (e.g., social media, texts, newspaper) to support district policies and procedures. Many districts developed new procedures during the pandemic in the spring and these lines of communication kept everyone informed.
Don’t get too reliant on one means. For example, don’t push your communication only on the district’s Facebook page. While most people have Facebook, many do not use it. Older grandparents who may be a student’s guardian sometimes prefer a phone call.
Know how your stakeholders would prefer to receive information from the district and push it through those communication channels.
Practice Two-Way Communication
It is also important to remember that communication needs to be two-way. Districts are usually excellent at pushing information out, but do you have the means to receive communication and feedback?
Don’t waste a good opportunity.
Remember the example above of the superintendent who carried meals to parents in a drive-through pick-up line? He did not waste this opportunity.
No. Instead he used it to gather information from parents about how they were doing as a family, how students were doing with remote work, and if there were any issues facing the families where the school might be poised to help.
It was also a time for the superintendent to learn whether any new procedures were unclear and how to improve messaging.
Educational Leadership Amid a Pandemic Recap
Leading during a pandemic or other crisis is not easy. Leaders keep moving forward, chipping away at what must be done for students and staff.
There isn’t a new skill set that has to be learned (Okay, maybe Facebook Live isn’t your thing….yet). Rather it is time to double-down on those skills that will allow you to navigate the crisis and build trust and goodwill with your community.
- Health and safety first
- Focus on the vision (the what) and how the mission (the how) may have changed
- Form a response team
- Know your role on the team
- Communicate consistently
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