Motivate Youth focuses on one key aspect of principal development: their ability to motivate teachers through assessment. Principals are under a lot of pressure to succeed, and that pressure often leads to strict, authoritarian, and intensely negative teacher assessments that discourage autonomy and personal growth. For teachers, this can be a motivation killer.
- Principals may account for up to 25 percent of a school’s impact on student learning. Among school-related factors, principals are second only to classroom teaching when it comes to impact on student learning. In fact, a 2013 Education Next report found that “highly effective principals raise the achievement.”
- A principal’s impact is even greater in high poverty schools. The impact on achievement can be even greater in schools serving disadvantaged students, according to the same article above, which means it’s even more crucial to attract and retain high-quality principals in schools where the need may be greatest.
- Highly effective principals can increase student scores by up to 10 percentile points in just one year. Research strongly suggests that principals are key to improving a school’s performance.
- 91% of teachers say leadership is key to improving student achievement. And effective principals recruit and retain effective teachers. Effective teachers – the most important in-school factor on a child’s educational success – tend to leave under ineffective principals, while poor quality instructors have been shown leave under high-quality school leadership.
Instead, the best principals think of themselves as coaches, guiding teachers to adopt new strategies while respecting their input and autonomy. These coaching skills are rarely taught in any principal education program, so Motivate Youth is proud to step up and fill this critical need.
Aaron Romens is an education consultant based in Madison, Wisconsin.
