Welcome to SLN's Blog! Here you will find, based on our experience and expertise, our thoughts on what issues principals are facing, what tools they might need to develop their leadership skills and what's working and not working, nationally and regionally. You will also hear more about our work, our partners, our results, and some of our challenges. We hope that this blog adds to your knowledge and understanding of our nation's school leaders and the impact principals have on our kids and on our future as a nation. We welcome and encourage your feedback, questions and comments to further develop this important conversation.
Our first post is written by our Founder and CEO, Elizabeth Neale, Ed.D., and in it she shares the story behind why she started School Leaders Network:
As the school leader of a large, urban, high poverty school in Massachusetts, I was often struck by a sense of isolation from my peers in the district. Oftentimes, I felt like I was in a time warp. I was drowning in concerns and challenges in my school, yet the focus of official meetings was on issues such as what type of electronic program to use for attendance tracking, technological learning, schedules, rules, events, and data ruled our meetings when what I really needed was help with adaptive decision making and how to use my strengths to increase student achievement. I did research, and was discouraged; I found few opportunities to learn how to be a stronger and more successful school leader.
I read and absorbed everything I could about leadership and dug deep to develop my own leadership skills. My school flourished, but I still felt terribly alone, the lack of access to peers and support on an ongoing basis was stinging.
In 2000, I was invited by the Clinton administration to participate in a national summit about what principals need to do in order to be great leaders. It was there that the idea for a professional learning community of, by and for principals, began to take shape. Upon leaving the summit, we were all challenged to go forth and explore making our ideas a reality. Several school leaders took up this challenge with me and shortly after, with the help of the Education Alliance from Brown University, we held our first northeast event. We worked very hard to make sure to think out of the box about how school leaders really needed to learn: no didactic lectures, no presentations, just rich opportunities for school leaders to meet and reflect and challenge each other to increase each and every child’s potential in their schools.
Through this experience, as well as through my involvement with the Harvard Principals Center Advisory Board and the Brown University Principals Leadership Network, I began to see and understand that my silo-like experiences were identical to those of my national peers. We needed opportunities to accelerate our leadership skills, learn how to make better adaptive decisions, have an inquiry-based format to solve intensely difficult instructional challenges, and find support and encouragement to nurture our sense of urgency, feed our drive to transform schools and support our beliefs that all children will be successful in our schools.
One pilot we developed and supported at the Brown University Principals Leadership Network was a group of urban school leaders in the northeast who came together to discuss leadership challenges. These principals worked in challenging schools in Worcester, Methuen, Lawrence, and Lowell; Massachusetts schools hard hit by a decaying mill economy and a new immigrant student body that arrived at schools with no English and tremendous poverty. It was plain that these dedicated school leaders needed a tremendous amount of development and support to maintain the ability and courage to do the work.
The Rainwater Charitable Foundation, a generous foundation which had previously supported my school, became very interested in supporting work such as this on a national level. Their Program Director observed our pilot network and saw the promise and possibilities of a program like this for urban school leaders across the nation. She saw the reality that an inquiry-based, problem solving experience on a regular basis could be just what principals needed to increase their skills and those of their faculty, thereby boosting student success. The principals themselves saw the experience as an oasis in the desert. Attendance was high; enthusiasm and energy exuded from the group, and these principals formed a strong sense of community, solving instructional and climate challenges in their respective schools.
SLN was born very soon after with Rainwater funding to pilot networks of urban school leaders across the nation. In 2006, School Leaders Network became the first national organization to develop and lead inquiry-based networks of school leaders determined to create transformational changes in their urban schools. I am humbled by the tremendous challenges facing urban school leaders today and I passionately believe that SLN can make an enormous difference in the leadership capacity for each and every principal willing to give their all to the work. If we can change the national conversation about what school leaders REALLY need to increase their leadership capacity, and also offer these leaders the opportunity to learn together, while holding each other mutually accountable for every child’s academic success, we can increase the skills of our teachers, change the culture and climate of our schools so that we truly can achieve the vision and mission that all of us have for the children of this nation.
Thanks for reading and letting me share with you the story about how SLN was started. You can look forward to more posts from me and from others at SLN. We would love to hear from each and every one of you.
