Use guidelines diagnostically—not just to assign grades. Acknowledging that school restructuring is inevitable, Maehr (1991) challenges school leaders to ensure that "motivation and the investment in learning of students will be enhanced" as a result of school reform. More specifically, this investigation was designed to study the behaviors and practices of elementary principals as it relates to student achievement in elementary school students in a large urban school district. Publish guidelines (rubrics) for high-quality work, and have students evaluate performance against the guidelines. On the face of it, that’s an impressive boost for student achievement, especially for something that indirectly trickles down to students. As school leaders, principals can influence student achievement in a number of ways, such as: hiring and firing teachers, monitoring instruction, and maintaining student discipline, among others. What do your teachers need to ensure students are successful? Principals are being asked to improve student learning by implementing mandated reforms that have consistently proven ineffective in raising student achievement. How Do Principals Influence Student Achievement? What steps must a principal take to develop a shared mission and. The National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) cited the Wallace Foundation in asserting that principals bring together variables that, when combined, can demonstrate a powerful effect on student learning. These questions have to do with Education and each of them need to be answered with 150 words or more. Principals are being asked to improve student learning by implementing mandated reforms that have consistently proven ineffective in raising student achievement. But even if we set the research aside, questions remain: Do principals have the time and This article from Educational Leadership is set in a US context, but it has relevance for New Zealand schools, and references research by New Zealanders.. At the start of the article DuFour and Mattos focus on issues particular to the US system in terms of what might “improve a school”, including whether principal “observations” of classroom practice have any value. Professional development is a comprehensive, ongoing, and intensive approach to improving teachers’ and principals’ effectiveness in raising student achievement. (The purpose of any assessment is to identify skills to target for aligning instruction to specific student needs in reading and math.) Grissom and Loeb (2011) use assessments of principal skills, as perceived by principals and assistant principals, to estimate associations with student achievement and find that organization management skills are associated with improved student outcomes. Yet the role of the principal is complex, and there are many ways that principals might potentially influence classroom instruction and student learning. vision? practices grounded in research. The current emphasis on using more intensive supervision and evaluation of teachers to improve school performance illustrates this irony. The current emphasis on using more intensive supervision and evaluation of teachers to improve school performance illustrates this irony. The research, by Vanderbilt University and Mathematica Policy Research, suggests that radically changing the job description of such supervisors to emphasize coaching and mentoring instead of operations and administration could refocus school communities on improving student achievement, retaining more teachers, and strengthening school climate. The quantitative data in this study laid the foundation for the qualitative portion of this study informing the on-site, semi-structured principal interviews and separate teacher focus groups that explored what effective principals do to improve instruction and increase student achievement. A research-based approach to school reform would not define improvement solely as higher scores on an annual standardized achievement test. this call for practices grounded in research. The four domains are strategic/cultural leadership, systems leadership, leadership for learning, and professional and community leadership (more on some of these later). 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