For Principals

• To Honor and Cherish: A Call for Encouraging Principals (2002)

  Principals hold positions of enormous power and influence in the lives of their teachers. Their attitudes, their words, and their behavior can make the difference in a teacher’s decision to stay in a particular school—or in the teaching profession. Positive, caring, encouraging principals who are concerned about the personal welfare and happiness of their teachers have a greater impact on their school’s climate and their teachers’ performance than they may know.

• Why Teachers Resist Change (And What Principals Can Do About It) (2002)

  Since A Nation at Risk attacked our schools’ unsatisfactory performance in 1983, educators have been scrambling to find a formula for improvement. They have tried a vast array of programs and innovations, mostly with disappointing results. Schools desperately need to change, yet many teachers are resistant to change. Have you ever asked them why?

• What New Teachers Value Most in Principals (2004)

  There is substantial research to indicate that administrative support is one of the most important factors affecting teacher job satisfaction and morale. Relationships among a school faculty can feel like a warm, cooperative family or a cool, resistant war zone. In a time of high stress testing and school accountability connected with our current No Child Left Behind mandate, doing what you can to ensure that your teachers experience job satisfaction and fulfillment has become imperative.

• How Effective Principals Encourage Their Teachers (2007)

  In a time of high educational stress, teacher burnout continues to be a troubling problem. You are probably feeling its effects in your own school, where some of your best teachers may be having doubts about whether they want to keep going. . . . .The constant influx and necessary training of new teachers each year makes the principal’s job more difficult. It’s in your best interest (as well as the best interest of your students) to find a way to keep good teachers in your school. What can you do to strengthen, empower, and encourage them?

• Emotional Intelligence: Key to Leadership Success (2007)

  We have all known leaders who exert a kind of quiet power and influence that we admire. They demonstrate a high level of what Daniel Goleman (1995) calls emotional intelligence, a quality he believes is twice as important as IQ in predicting career success.
  Assuming that emotional intelligence is directly linked to leadership success, we must consider these three questions:

  1. What is emotional intelligence?
  2. Why is it important?
  3. How can you increase it?