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Becoming a School Principal: Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn
The principal’s role is increasingly understood as a critical lever for school improvement. Yet the job can be a solitary one, offering few opportunities to reflect with colleagues. What does it take to manage the work of continuous improvement—to push staff members constantly to operate outside their comfort zones? What dilemmas and challenges must principals confront? How can school leaders learn from their mistakes and move forward?
In Becoming a School Principal , Sarah E. Fiarman describes her first few years as a school principal committed to enacting a powerful vision of leading and learning. Drawing thoughtfully on the literature of school reform and change leadership, Fiarman discusses a wide range of topics, including empowering teachers, building trust, addressing racial and economic inequities, and supporting a culture of continuous learning, as well as thornier issues such as learning to use authority skillfully, dealing with resistance, and managing supervision and evaluation. The book addresses common challenges and highlights missteps as well as successes.
A contributing author to several leading books on school reform and instructional improvement, Fiarman engages readers in a lively, frank, and revealing conversation about building the vision and capacity to provide effective instruction for all students and the intensely personal process of learning to lead.
In Becoming a School Principal , Sarah E. Fiarman describes her first few years as a school principal committed to enacting a powerful vision of leading and learning. Drawing thoughtfully on the literature of school reform and change leadership, Fiarman discusses a wide range of topics, including empowering teachers, building trust, addressing racial and economic inequities, and supporting a culture of continuous learning, as well as thornier issues such as learning to use authority skillfully, dealing with resistance, and managing supervision and evaluation. The book addresses common challenges and highlights missteps as well as successes.
A contributing author to several leading books on school reform and instructional improvement, Fiarman engages readers in a lively, frank, and revealing conversation about building the vision and capacity to provide effective instruction for all students and the intensely personal process of learning to lead.
- GenresEducation
248 pages, Paperback
First published October 20, 2015
16 people are currently reading
30 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 2, 2022
Ordered the book by accident. Thought I needed it for my grad class. Glad I ordered it and read it! Really great book with good perspectives. I found myself interested in all the wisdom, anecdotes, and challenges. I also appreciate her explicit focus on race as a white leader. Good wisdom for any aspiring principal; it might resonate more with white people, at least a few chapters.
December 4, 2018
Reading for my Master's of Educational Leadership Program
June 25, 2021
An insightful book about one woman's experience in educational leadership. Narrative-driven with plenty of memorable and useful anecdotes.
March 16, 2016
My child attended the "Douglas" school Sarah writes about so I thought it would offer interesting insights into the current state of education and teaching. I was dismayed instead to find a poorly written, petty, tell-all.
Sarah uses this platform to make excuses for her behavior and ignore reality, which is very similar to the leadership style she employed for the brief 41/2 years she was in our school. In the Forward for the book Harvard Professor Richard Elmore says Sarah is a "force of nature" and he warns of approaching her, like a hurricane, with a "degree of caution and alarm".
First it is shocking to me that Sarah blatantly tries to take claim for the reputation of the "Douglas" school which has had a long history of success in our school District for many years. It's strength and well earned reputation came from a tradition of Administrators, Parents and Teachers working to together to create one of the first "alternative" schools in the Country, devoted to creative and constructive ways to teach children with project based learning principles.
Sarah takes severe liberties in interpreting the standardized test scores of certain demographics of students and claims credit in closing the achievement gap, when in fact under her tenor the school experienced declining scores for those students for 4 out of the 5 years that she was accountable.
But the real injustice here is not her over reaching claims for the schools performance, but the insenstive way she includes very personal stories that really should not be told in a book purported to impart wisdom on becoming a new Principal. How completely unprofessional. The stories are not told to impart any wisdom, they are told for Sarah to make excuses for her behavior and a chance to clarify her actions.
She starts out the book by asserting that our school had lost a bit of it's "rigor and purpose". Even as the retiring Principal she replaced was still very active in our school District, and agreed to come back to "Douglas" so that Sarah could take a sabbatical in the middle of the school year to go back to Harvard. No thoughts for the children and families she was leaving to further her career, no mention of her Assistant Principal who constantly had to pick up her responsibilities. Sarah talks about feeling bad for the Teachers she has had to fire, yet shares very personal details about their lives that should never have been committed to print. "Every year I have fired people" she brags. She devotes very little of the book to how a Principal should train and coach teachers. In fact she states "teachers are born, not made" and devotes an entire chapter to "supervision and evaluation" instead of coaching and supporting.
My impression of Sarah during her short tenor at our Elementary School was that she was always overwhelmed and uncomfortable as the leader of an elementary school with it's high amount of emotions and stressors. So it is really concerning that Harvard would put her in the position of training the new consort of educational leaders headed to lead our public schools, and that they allow such a poorly written publication to pass through its Education Press.
Sarah uses this platform to make excuses for her behavior and ignore reality, which is very similar to the leadership style she employed for the brief 41/2 years she was in our school. In the Forward for the book Harvard Professor Richard Elmore says Sarah is a "force of nature" and he warns of approaching her, like a hurricane, with a "degree of caution and alarm".
First it is shocking to me that Sarah blatantly tries to take claim for the reputation of the "Douglas" school which has had a long history of success in our school District for many years. It's strength and well earned reputation came from a tradition of Administrators, Parents and Teachers working to together to create one of the first "alternative" schools in the Country, devoted to creative and constructive ways to teach children with project based learning principles.
Sarah takes severe liberties in interpreting the standardized test scores of certain demographics of students and claims credit in closing the achievement gap, when in fact under her tenor the school experienced declining scores for those students for 4 out of the 5 years that she was accountable.
But the real injustice here is not her over reaching claims for the schools performance, but the insenstive way she includes very personal stories that really should not be told in a book purported to impart wisdom on becoming a new Principal. How completely unprofessional. The stories are not told to impart any wisdom, they are told for Sarah to make excuses for her behavior and a chance to clarify her actions.
She starts out the book by asserting that our school had lost a bit of it's "rigor and purpose". Even as the retiring Principal she replaced was still very active in our school District, and agreed to come back to "Douglas" so that Sarah could take a sabbatical in the middle of the school year to go back to Harvard. No thoughts for the children and families she was leaving to further her career, no mention of her Assistant Principal who constantly had to pick up her responsibilities. Sarah talks about feeling bad for the Teachers she has had to fire, yet shares very personal details about their lives that should never have been committed to print. "Every year I have fired people" she brags. She devotes very little of the book to how a Principal should train and coach teachers. In fact she states "teachers are born, not made" and devotes an entire chapter to "supervision and evaluation" instead of coaching and supporting.
My impression of Sarah during her short tenor at our Elementary School was that she was always overwhelmed and uncomfortable as the leader of an elementary school with it's high amount of emotions and stressors. So it is really concerning that Harvard would put her in the position of training the new consort of educational leaders headed to lead our public schools, and that they allow such a poorly written publication to pass through its Education Press.
February 2, 2017
Read as part of a group - some great ideas and examples in here of strategies and thought.
October 1, 2016
A brilliant practical guide to becoming a school leader. Sarah Fiarman draws on her experience being a principal in the Boston area to illustrate powerful lessons for any principal. Invaluable lessons!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews