9 Principles of Courageous Leadership for 21st Century School Leaders

A common requirement of leaders at all levels is having the courage to make tough decisions and take difficult actions, write authors David Cottrell and Eric Harvey in their book Leadership Courage: Leadership Strategies for Individual and Organizational Success. A big part of courage in 21st century leadership is standing up for what is right. As Cottrell and Harvey correctly describe, The true measure of leadership is the ability to look in the mirror and know that you had the courage to do what you felt was the right thing to do. Our ability as school leaders to look at ourselves in the mirror each morning and feel that the actions we took the day before regarding our students and staff is a measure of our own 21st century leadership ability. This contrasts starkly in an American culture that wants to turn schools into clones of businesses where maximization of self-interest is a virtue, often at the expense of many others. The problem is, these philosophies are at cross purposes in educational establishments. Ultimately though, as a school leader, I feel at my best when I have successfully passed a test of courage with integrity intact. What are some Guiding Principles for Courageous School Leaders in 21st Century"? No doubt we all have core values we hold dear, but heres some principles I have taken the liberty of modifying a bit from Cottrell and Harveys book. I think they accurately describe what we have to be willing to do in order to be Courageous 21st Century School Leaders.

Accept responsibility courageously. This includes accepting responsibility for all the actions of our schools from students to teachers and our own. When an unfortunate event happens under our leadership, we publicly accept our responsibility.Looking for places to cast blame is a weak, short-term strategy. If you want your school to be one where responsibility is important, then be responsible yourself. Implement change courageously. Courage comes from being able to step away from the status quo and enter into new possibilities. Courage is demonstrated in convincing others to move beyond their own comfort zones to stretch toward new horizons. Courage comes from leading change in the face of fierce resistance and even potential political peril. Change takes courage, and 21st century school leaders act courageously when leading change efforts. Hiring people using strict standards. Lowering ones standards to just fill a position does not promote excellence. A weak person on your school staff can pull down the entire team. Hire only those who fit your schools standards and principles. Surrounding yourself with talent makes the school or district successful. Hiring out of political expediency, or due to friendship connections is a recipe of organizational weakness. Also hiring only those who will rubber stamp your ideas or agenda is a recipe for long-term failure. Courage comes from hiring people who often are smarter and better equipped than you are, and who aren't afraid to express their opinions. Courageous hiring means getting the right people in place is a much higher priority than scoring political points or returning political favors. Keeping everyone focused on whats important. Cottrell and Harvey call this Keeping the Main Thing the Main Thing. Courageous 21st century school leaders fight to keep the focus on whats important: the learning of students. Real courage is demonstrated

in those school cultures where this is lost, and the school leader courageously reminds everyone of what they are truly about: "Keeping the main thing, the main thing!" Communicate for understanding. The purpose of communication in a 21st century organization is understanding. This means making sure what you have to say is clear, concise and on-point. There's not room for murky, unclear messaging. Courageously saying what needs to be said means there's only room for understanding, not misunderstanding. Coaching others. School leaders have a responsibility of coaching those within their schools or districts. This means setting aside the title of "boss" and giving your organizational members the information necessary to improve their performance. It means inspiring those within to reach for higher levels of performance and providing them with the direction to do just that. Coaching is not playing "gotcha games." Coaching means you genuinely want others in your school organization to be successful, and you work hard to help them improve. Effectively address conflict. There is no room in 21st century leadership for avoiding conflict. Minor conflict can paralyze a school or district so that nothing is accomplished. Effective 21st century school leaders take conflict head on. Courageous school leadership means having the difficult conversations. It means not passing the task of addressing a performance issue to a subordinate, or waiting on someone else to say something. Courageous leadership also means not sending "nasty-gram" emails instead of sitting down, face-to-face and talking with someone about an issue. Keep focus on the positive. This can be difficult. Trying to get everyone to see that things are still positive in a toxic environment is quite a challenge. Keeping the focus on the positive isn't about lying to people and building up a false sense of the positive. It is about fostering a "positive" belief that together we're going to succeed. School leaders who keep the focus on the positive, don't dwell on the negative and drag others down. Instill a culture of ethics and integrity. An organization without integrity that has as its purpose educating children is a frightening thought. Twenty-first school leaders work diligently to foster ethics and integrity in their schools or districts. Principles are never sacrificed for political reasons or any other reasons. Organizations educating children that lack ethics and integrity have no business teaching children.

In the fast-paced environment of the 21st century, school leaders, from principals to state education leaders, courage must be a part of our leadership practice. These guiding principles make an excellent starting point to begin fostering that kind of leadership.

5 Suggestions for 21st Century School Leaders on Web Presence Management

According to Kitty Porterfield and Meg Carnes, in the book Why Social Media Matters: School Communication in the Digital Age, school leaders should Think of your website as home base for your school information platform. A great deal is written about school leaders engaging in the use of social media. I myself have done the same. But, most of us have a more powerful way to communicate information and image to the broader world than social media, and that is our school or district web presence. My own experience is that most districts do not spend a great deal of time deliberately thinking about their web presence. They simply post a web site because either everyones doing it or theres some written or unwritten mandate out there that says they must. The result of this often means a school or district has a web site, but it is highly underutilized and poorly updated, and that is a shame. A web site is an opportunity for a school or district to get its message out to the world. I am going to propose a new idea: 21st century school leaders need to take charge of their web presence. In other words, school leaders need to make their web sites purposeful places of information and news about their schools and districts, make it a tool of public relations and organizational promotion. To do that, heres some simple suggestions: 1. Do not delegate updating the web site to someone else. I can already hear the protests on this one, especially from those not-so-tech-savvy school administrators, but hear me out on this one. Too often, school administrators have no clue about how web sites work, and how important web presence is. If a school leader takes on the role of updating and monitoring their school web site, then what goes on it matters. They also know whats on their school web site. I am afraid there are probably administrators out there who dont even know everything that is on their web site. By taking on the role of managing your web site, you know what is there. You can also make sure it projects your school mission and vision to the world. In a word, when you take on the job of managing your school site, you take its content personal, and that is important. 2. If you do delegate your web site management and maintenance to someone else, make sure you are involved. Too often, web presence is delegated to someone who knows how to do it, then the school administrator rarely assists in its management and maintenance. If a school leader is going to delegate this task, she needs to meet periodically to review the site and examine it for content, style, aesthetics, etc. This periodic review also needs to look at the sites statistics. By looking at analytics such as web traffic and traffic sources, school leaders can tell if they are getting the most out of their web presence, and look for ways to increase traffic to their site, after all, why have a web site if you arent interested in its traffic?In the 21st century, just having a web site isnt enough. To utilize that web presence to fullest, school leaders need to be involved in its management and maintenance even if the mechanics are delegated to others.

3. Use social media tools to direct traffic to your web site. While social media can be used to make announcements, which I do myself, it can also be used to promote your web site. This is especially important for those longer announcements and more detailed information that cant be shared on Twitter in a 140 characters, or on a Facebook page. Using social media tools to direct traffic to your web presence, simply means posting using social media tools when theres significantly new information, or just important information on your web site. Ultimately, my personal goal is to get parents, and the larger world, to visit our web site regularly without prompting, even getting them to subscribe to changes with RSS, if thats possible. Ultimately, social media is a means to call attention to our school or districts web presence. 4. Update and revise your web site often. If you want people to visit your school or district web site often, then you have to give them a reason to do so, and this can be done by constantly providing new and engaging information. If you take a moment and visit some school or district web sites today, and you return to them a year from now, you will probably see little change. Maybe the calendar widget has changed, or the little announcements box has new items in it, but if you click on the principals message button you are treated to the same message he posted last year. If you want people to return to your site again and again, you have to give them a reason to do so. This means updating and providing new and engaging information about your school on a regular basis. 5. Carefully and deliberately select your web presence manager. Too often the role of web presence manager is simply dumped on someone with the tech savvy to operate the software. This is a big mistake. Instead, 21st century school leaders should delegate their web presence management to after carefully and deliberately selecting the person who will take on this role. Yes, the person needs to tech know-how, but they also need to be expert communicators, knowing how to make the most of the medium. They need to be able to do more than just update the web page with latest announcement. They need to know who to make the most of web presence in promoting school or district. Simply selecting someone who knows how to work the tools makes little sense in a digital age when you are projecting a global image by your web presence. The reality is, a number of school leaders view just having a web presence as enough. The truth is, those who think that are missing out on using an effective tool to get their school or districts story out to the world. To get the most out of our web presence, you have to start looking at our web site as information central about your school and district, and take an active role in its management and maintenance.

Turning Your Classrooms into 21st Century Learning Spaces

Where a school is located and how it sets up internal structures determine its possibilities, writes Heidi Hayes Jacob in the book Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World. As she argues in this book, we have inherited spaces in our buildings that were designed for learning of another era. Tearing down and rebuilding our schools is hardly a tasteful option in an era of tight budgets and a total lack of funding. What can we do then? We can start by redesigning our classrooms from places where knowledge is imparted to more of place where knowledge is found, discovered in a collaborative manner. We can turn the physical environment into places where authentic learning is the classroom business, not sitting in rows, listening to lectures. This may mean simply getting rid of desks and moving in tables and chairs that are portable and can be rearranged quickly according to the needs of the students and the teachers. It means we can change our physical spaces in our schools into 21st century learning environments without breaking our budgets. The building we currently occupy was constructed around 1929, so you can imagine its limitations. Yet, each teacher in our building has consciously worked to create learning spaces that capture the philosophy and spirit of our school: collaboration, engagement in authentic learning, and using technology. Heres a photo of one of our English classrooms.

I know, you can see chairs stacked on the tables. Even 21st century classrooms need vacuuming, but if you look closely, you see tables arranged along the walls, and on those tables are laptops. Students work seated at the tables and the teacher has room to move about to assist students and monitor what theyre doing. Two tables are placed in the center of the room both for students who bring their own laptops, and for meetings among collaborative groups. It is not your normal English classroom arrangement. In this case, students can turn their chairs to attend to the teacher at the beginning of the class, then turn to their computers when its time to engage in whatever their projects ask them to do. The space is arranged to facilitate, not lecturing, but engagement in using 21st century tools in authentic learning tasks and maximize collaboration. How a classroom is arranged tells a great deal about what happens the most in it. Lets look at another classroom.

Tables, tables, tables everywhere. No desks in rows. In fact, we do not have a single old-fashioned desk in the building and that is by design. In the 21st century students need to work collaboratively and having highly portable tables allows for maximum collaboration. This is a science classroom. Students are purposefully seated at tables in this room so that they can work on collaborative science projects. The chairs and tables can be turned and used in multiple configurations, depending on the needs of the class. Out of the picture, is a small lab of desktop computers that students can use, along with their own personal laptops and devices as well. So, what does this say about our school? Even though we inhabit an older building designed for 20th century pedagogy, we can purposefully redesign our spaces for 21st century learning. But keep in mind, we all know that just changing spaces does not necessarily mean a change in pedagogy. We should know that from the Open School debacle back in the late 60s and early 70s. Still, purposefully redesigning spaces for 21st century learning in your school does not have to be an expensive undertaking, but you can tell how a school conducts the business of teaching by how its learning spaces are designed.