An Injury to Ourselves: no formal system for training our leaders

I was at a conference recently that hammered home a relatively obvious point (once I took the time to think about it)--unless pushing new administrators into the deep end of the pool with 100 lbs of weight strapped around their neck and screaming, 'swim', at them counts, education has no formal system for training its leaders.

Compared to the system for teachers (which everyone loves to attack despite how thorough it is), there is no cohesive, comprehensive training system for educational leaders.  Even more problematically, a significant number of administrators have significantly less experience in education than the teachers they are leading.  So there also isn't really a systemic way for leaders to arise. Most dream, stumble or are pushed into leadership roles.

And then are abandoned.  A supervisor of mine monologued recently about the perils of admin--leaders get more sick, overweight and have higher divorce than their staff.  Um, no wonder!

Let's fix this folks; leadership is too important to leave to luck and/or perseverance:

1. Identify experienced teachers for their leadership characteristics: 

  Building roles and participation
  Ability to influence
  Instructional leadership
  Ability to vision
  Passion for adult mentoring

2. Then let's make an initiative to give leaders experiences and mentoring while they are still in the classroom: 

  Shadow administrators
  Lead committees
  Run PD
  Lead student discipline cases

  Receive direct instruction on how to: communicate, give instructional feedback, have an       administrative mindset

3. Have coursework and practicums built around difficult conversations and managing stress. The job of an administrator is CONFLICT. There is no equivalent for it in the classroom experience and so conflict training and resolution must be taught.  My Eds didn't even whisper about this. 

4. Have practicing administrators communicate directly with colleges like mentor teachers do.

Ultimately, the student teacher model is hard to fault when it is done well--a mentor teaches, guides and then transitions the mentee into the role with significant feedback.  Let's do the same for our leaders.