 | Intensifying Leadership Through Professional Learning Community
 | | P. Fred Storti, MESPA Executive Director |
May 2009 --
Report from MESPA Executive Director P. Fred Storti
“Intensifying leadership: deliberately broadening meaningful involvement through job redesign and permanent redistribution of work.”
As a principal for 27 years, bombarded daily with e-mails, memos, mail, and an ever-increasing pile of professional journals to be read, I always looked forward to summer when I could select at least one good professional book to read. “Building Strong School Cultures: A Guide to Leading Change” by our own Karen Seashore Louis at the University of Minnesota and Sharon D. Kruse is one you should consider.
As principals, you realize that effecting positive, long-lasting change requires support both within your schools and in the broader school community. Understanding your individual school’s culture is just the start. A strong, vibrant culture cannot be mandated, nor can it be sustained without concerted effort on the part of many people. Experienced, successful principals know that to strengthen school culture you need all “hands on deck.” You involve both professionals and students in the work, and by create new connections outside the school.
The authors (Seashore Louis and Kruse) call this intensifying leadership: deliberately broadening meaningful involvement through job redesign and permanent redistribution of work. You accomplish this by deepening collective responsibility for finding and solving problems, selecting the focus and tasks, and engaging your people in becoming more accountable for meshing the larger goals and vision of the school with the smaller tasks of daily leadership, and management.
Principals are capacity builders! Intensifying leadership suggests that when organizational members work in concert with each other they can pool individual knowledge and expertise, resulting in better outcomes.
Our goal at MESPA is to make our statewide association your professional learning community (PLC). We know resources are tight and you have limited time, so we are striving to find multiple ways to facilitate intensifying leadership within the association, your PLC. This year our collaborations with the National Association of Elementary School Principals, MN Association of Secondary School Principals, MN Association of School Administrators, University of MN, and Minnesota Department of Education yielded successful programs such as: RtI Leaders, Emerging Leaders Conference, Learning Leaders of MN, the MN Principals’ Academy – and the upcoming Extraordinary Leadership, national principalship standards seminar.
While we will continue to grow our multiple relationships, we want to provide more cost-effective and efficient ways to serve our members. Over 200 of you have been using Colleague to Colleague, our online forum (blog) to problem solve. We are exploring webinars and a statewide book read that would involve quality content with a minimum of cost and travel time and more.
I hope you have a successful end to the school year, and plan some much deserved reflection and recharging this summer. Don’t forget to read what will help you succeed!
As Colin Powell said: “Have fun in your command. Don’t always run at a breakneck pace. Take leave when you’ve earned it: spend time with your families.”
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