Essential Lessons for School Leaders: Tips for Courage, Finding Solutions, and Reaching Your Goals

By Joseph Murphy

This gold mine of wisdom from top education researcher and the bestselling author of Turning Around Failing Schools and Connecting Teacher Leadership and School Improvement contains key tips and strategies every school leader should know. Award-winning professor and former school administrator Joseph Murphy’s concise and instructive lessons will help you stay focused on what matters most as you navigate the hectic world of high-stakes testing and accountability:

It really is all about the kids
Optimism is essential
Caring counts a lot
Listenlet people finish talking
Don’t confuse excuses and explanations

Each lesson is coupled with context in a few sentences taken from Murphy’s extensive real-world experiences. This collection is ideal for use in daily reflections, speeches, staff meetings, presentations, or as a gift to anyone who works with children.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Release date: Aug 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781629141237

Joseph Murphy

Joseph Murphy wrote, taught, counseled, and lectured to thousands of people all over the world, as Minister-Director of the Church of Divine Science in Los Angeles. His lectures and sermons were attended by thousands of people every Sunday. Millions of people tuned in his daily radio program and have read the over 30 books that he has written.

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Cover Page of Essential Lessons for School LeadersTitle Page of Essential Lessons for School Leaders

This book is dedicated to everyone with

whom I have worked throughout

my career who has helped

me learn these lessons

Title Page of Essential Lessons for School Leaders

Copyright © 2011 by Corwin

First Skyhorse edition 2014

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-62873-754-7

E-book ISBN: 978-1-62914-123-7

Printed in China

About the Author

Joseph Murphy is the Frank W. Mayborn

Chair and associate dean at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of Education. He has also been a faculty member at the University of Illinois and The Ohio State University, where he was the William Ray Flesher Professor of Education.

In public schools, he has served as an administrator at the school, district, and state levels. His most recent appointment was as the founding president of the Ohio Principals Leadership Academy. At the university level, he has served as department chair and associate dean.

He is past vice president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and was the founding chair of the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC). He is coeditor of the AERA Handbook on Educational Administration (1999) and editor of the National Society for the Study of Education (NSSE) yearbook, The Educational Leadership Challenge (2002).

His work is in the area of school improvement, with special emphasis on leadership and policy. He has authored or coauthored nineteen books in this area and edited another twelve. His most recent authored volumes include Understanding and Assessing the Charter School Movement (2002), Leadership for Literacy: Research-Based Practice, PreK–3 (2003), Connecting Teacher Leadership and School Improvement (2005), Preparing School Leaders: Defining a Research and Action Agenda (2006), Turning Around Failing Schools: Leadership Lessons from the Organizational Sciences (2008), The Educator’s Handbook for Understanding and Closing Achievement Gaps (2010), and Homelessness Comes to School (2011).

YOU ONLY GET ONE HAND TO COUNT WITH

Educators are adept at expansion. If we can find 5 ideas, we can quickly turn them into 50 and then 500. Before long, we have shelves of binders. The problem is that no one is going to hang on to these lists. And even when a miracle occurs and someone does, no one is around to inform her or him what is really important. No one is going to pursue 16 goals or a dozen professional development ideas. No one is going to believe that 20 dimensions of anything require action. Become fluent with the one-hand rule. If you only get two fingers to count, what is important—for goals, areas of work, valued outcomes, and so forth? If you have four fingers, what makes the cut? If you start counting on your second hand, you may be in trouble. If you have to take your shoe off to count, it is likely that you have lost everyone.

LEAVE YOUR EGO IN THE CAR

Good leadership is not about you. It is about what you leave behind. When leaders with big egos leave, improvement often walks out the door with them. Good leadership does not depend on personality, certainly not on the big personality in the school.

HAVE THE COURAGE TO ADDRESS PROBLEMS DIRECTLY

I once had a colleague who told me about a problem that was vexing him at his school—a certain fifth-grade teacher who arrived to school late on a not infrequent basis. At our next meeting, I asked him if he had gained any traction on his problem. He replied that he had. In response to my inquiry, he informed me that he had sent a memo to all teachers about district policy about when teachers were to be at school and in their rooms at the start of the school day. What he told me was this: Rather than having the courage to talk to this single teacher whose behavior was inappropriate, he angered the entire rest of the faculty who were already doing the right thing. Not a wise piece of leadership.

TALK LESS

Most leaders