[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on School Principals and Their Leadership
Strong leadership is essential in order for school reform to be effective and sustained. The leader is one of the most important cogs in the school machine. School districts that have been most successful in improving student achievement have visionary superintendents who develop district policies that focus on both adult and student learning. They recognize the need for effective staff development.
For principals and teachers vision is about being focused on individual student needs and the improvement of teaching and learning. Principals and teachers used terms such as identify individual needs and meet the learning style of students, which reflected a focus on individual student needs. Both principals and teachers use words such as improve teaching; develop learning and lot of professional development to describe the emphasis on teaching and learning that was part of vision.
Building an inclusive school community can be difficult, especially for principals in high schools in which traditional structures are deeply embedded in the secondary school culture. How does a principal lead a high school with a tradition of teachers working in isolation according to their particular disciplines toward an inclusive learning community in which diversity and collaboration are valued?
Leadership is based on a compact that binds those who lead and those who follow into the same moral, intellectual, and emotional commitment. Principals develop this compact through purposing. Purposing as what principals do to bring about a cohesive, shared consensus to bond people together in a common cause and to define them as a community, in a way sufficiently loose to allow for individual expression. Purposing lets the staff know where the school is going in terms of inclusive practices, why it is going in that direction, and some ways of getting there.
Principals must always project the vision of inclusive education and continually reinforce with teachers and staff............
