March 5, 2023

A New Superintendent’s Emergent Entry Plan (Part 2 of 3)


The Superintendents’ Corner: 

In Part 1 of the blog on this topic (posted February 26) we talked about the “3Ps” — places, paper and people — as ways of gathering information on the school and on the communities in the superintendency.  Today we are going to look at the second “P” — paper.

This stage in my information-gathering was more traditional but just as revealing.  I decided I would look at three kinds of “paper” for each of my schools.  These included the files per school that my assistant kept, school profiles and the human resources files for each of the principals and vice-principals I had in my school.

I was a little surprised at the paucity of information I found in the human resources files.  It was, mostly, letters attesting to the status in a past competition or a letter confirming a transfer to a different school.  What surprised me most, however, was what wasn’t there in most of them — a recent appraisal of their performance.  There were exceptions, of course, but it’s fair to say that the vast majority of files showed no evidence of an appraisal document — despite the fact that the District had a stated policy that principals and vice-principals should be evaluated on a three-year cycle.  In addition the District did have a decent system for evaluation and the document itself was in keeping with best practice in terms of form.

I resolved then and there that I would not fall into the trap of my predecessors in not getting those evaluations done.  As a principal, I always felt by best work was done when I was in classrooms watching teachers teach and giving them feedback.  I didn’t see the difference for a superintendent.  I wanted to be a teacher of principals because I felt there was nothing more important than making sure my principals were given the best professional development we could offer — and that started with a recent evaluation of performance as the basis.  I am pleased to say that I did manage to complete all principal appraisals required of me for that year.

In regard to school profiles, I was interested in the information they included.  There were “hard data” with regard to performance on tests but there were also “softer data” entries that gave me a clue as to what other initiatives were being pursued.  Some of the schools had clearly made a point on focusing more on students while others stressed programs and the range of extra-curricular activities.  To some extent, the information was, in my opinion, “straitjacketed” by the form of the profile that the District had set for all schools, so I made a note to myself to raise the issue of flexibility in form to free the schools up and to avoid what might be seen as a “cookie cutter approach.”  I was not successful with my colleagues!

Finally, I looked at the school files that had been carefully assembled by my assistant.  There was a wealth of information in there in the form of records of interactions my predecessors had had with the local trustees, parents and individual principals — bus problems, issues with teachers, concerns about a new school or District policy, etc.  And just as important, I was able to get a handle on how my various principals and vice-principals handled their communities and what use they made of the superintendent’s office to help address the problems.  It wasn’t difficult to spot the ones who believed firmly, as I did as a principal, that the best place to solve a school problem was at the school — not in the superintendent’s office.

As I did with the tours, I kept running notes by schools on everything I was reading adding immensely to my information base.  At the same time, this information helped my gather questions I wanted to ask when I visited each of my schools for an extended interview with each of my principals.  By the time I was finished, I had a host of questions — too many, in fact — so I knew I had two tasks to complete before I started those interviews: 

  1. To reduce the volume of questions to a reasonable level
  2. To arrange those questions into a number of broader categories which would direct the conversation in a more organized fashion.

In our last blog entry on this topic (to be posted March 12), we’ll get to these two tasks and some sample questions in each.

Dr. Dan