Читать книгу The Assistant Principal 50 - Baruti K. Kafele - Страница 9

When I ask you how you define the assistant principalship, I'm asking, "What does the assistant principalship mean to you?" In the Fall of 1994, I enrolled in graduate school to earn my M.A. in Education Administration to secure the position of Principal, not Assistant Principal. The graduate school courses that I took over the course of two years trained and prepared me to think as a principal. Although I was clear on the sequence of becoming an assistant principal first, quite frankly, the assistant principalship was not on my radar because it wasn't discussed in my graduate school courses. The focus of the graduate school program was the principalship. The assistant principalship didn't fully make it onto my radar until I began to apply for positions. Even in the interviews, I vividly recall thinking as a principal, although I had the correct responses for the assistant principalship. Ultimately, I landed the position of Assistant Principal at a middle school and mid-year transitioned from my 5th grade classroom to the assistant principalship. My first day as an AP was January 2, 1998.

I went into the AP position completely "blind." Having since 1988 served as an elementary teacher, my only frame of reference of an AP was the four APs under whom I served in the two schools in which I taught. They were so different from one another and none of them practiced true instructional leadership. From my standpoint, what they had in common was that they were disciplinarians. Therefore, my definition of the assistant principalship was rooted in the leadership demonstrated by those four individuals. As a result, I entered the assistant principalship without a solid model of effective AP leadership.

How do you define assistant principal leadership? What does effective assistant principal leadership look like to you? When you think of the title Assistant Principal, what thoughts does it generate? A good starting place toward effective AP leadership is a clear and consistent definition of Assistant Principal based on what the position means to you.