Anthony Muhammad

What is the most important role of a principal?

The most important role of a principal is to be a teacher of teachers. It’s to feed the capacity and the skill level of the teachers who actually do the real work of educating children. I was blessed to be named the Michigan Middle School Principal of the Year in 2005, and I gave all of the credit to my staff. Because I didn’t teach one math lesson – student achievement went up, but I wasn’t directly responsible. I was indirectly responsible. So my investment in them brought about a return in our students. So I would advise a new principal to not try to walk around being Superman or Superwoman. But figure out how you can empower people, and how you can build their capacity. Then you will build leaders, and they will educate students who we can be proud of.

What roles do teachers play in helping or hurting change initiatives in schools?

The first thing a new principal has to realize is that when he or she is dealing with a staff, they’re not coming into a homogenous environment. People come from different backgrounds, with different perspectives, different norms, different values, different beliefs. It’s difficult to try and synthesize all of that into one functional way of thinking and behaving.

• The first group we call the Believers. The Believers are those educators who understood the call to duty, understood that improvement had to take place, and put the students best interest first.They were willing to go through some personal discomfort, some letting go of some of the things they traditionally believed or practiced, in order to do something that was potentially better for students. They put the students best interest before their own.
   
• The second group we found we called the Tweeners. The Tweeners are the new educators to our campus. When the new people come, they don’t know what the culture is like. It’s kind of like a honeymoon period. They’re loosely coupled in the beginning. They’re not very political. They’re trying to find their spot. But they’re very influential – they can be influenced very easily. What we found is that a campus’ ability to hold on, to develop and nurture their Tweeners was directly tied in to the future of their school. The schools that had toxic cultures are the ones that had the highest turnover among this group, because they don’t build organizational memory. The data shows us nationally that 50 percent of new educators leave our field the first five years. So if half the workforce is walking out, all of your experience is walking out, all of your team work, all of the investment that has been placed in these people. When new people come in, that school, that team, and that department are starting all over again. So schools that have a high number of Tweeners are kind of like mice in a treadmill. They were just spinning their wheels. Because they couldn’t keep a team together long enough to make the long-term improvement that the school needed.
   
• The third group we call the Survivors. The Survivors are those educators who have been adversely affected by not having the capacity to deal with our environment. Our environment can be very stressful at times. There’s a lot of demands. And Survivors are those who have reached the point of burnout, and burnout has been identified in the literature as a form of depression. So these aren’t people who don’t want to do any better, but they have reached a point where they are absolutely ineffective, and they no longer have the ability to be effective unless an intervention is done. The only thing we found that worked with Survivors was some sort of removal for treatment purposes, as you would do for a physical ailment, because they weren’t going to get any better on their own. And the real victim of the Survivor is the student. The research shows that if a student has a burned out teacher for a year, it takes three years of exemplary make-up instruction to make up for the one year of bad instruction.
   
• The fourth group is one that has caused quite a bit of turmoil as we look at school reform, and that’s the Fundamentalists. A Fundamentalist is an educator who has found a certain comfort zone, and some solace in the status quo. They have some investment in keeping things the same. So a Fundamentalist is nothing like a Survivor – this isn’t a person who doesn’t like what they do. But they like it only under the conditions that are best for them. To make a long story short, a Fundamentalist is a person who puts his or her best interest above the best interest of students.
   
   

What we found is that we all walk in as Tweeners. But over time, based upon the conditions that we inherit, we can end up being a Believer, a Fundamentalist, or a Survivor. Based on the leadership they inherit, how they were socialized as a Tweener,  how they were mentored, could really determine how they practice for the rest of their career. So Fundamentalists are not bad people, but they are people who have taken a political stance that is not productive to what the organization or school is trying to do.

As a new principal, how do you best shape a school culture that engages your many diverse staff members?

Dealing with human beings is a very complicated process, but I’ll give you a couple of themes. There are three high-leverage behaviors that help transform school culture:

• The first is an institutional focus on learning. When the institution said that learning came first, and it was articulated through their policies, practices and procedures, and organizational expectations, it did a lot to keep people focused on the right things rather than on things that were selfish or self-serving.
   
• The second area was institutional celebration of desired behaviors. We found that organizations that celebrated the behavior that they wanted instead of condemning the behavior that they didn’t, the culture tended to become more healthy.
   
• And last but not least, is a focus on a support system for Tweeners. When the schools got serious about retaining and developing their new teachers, it made a tremendous difference. The NEA has come out against the one-on-one teacher mentor system. And two of the 34 schools in our study used the NEA model of a multi-faceted approach to teacher mentoring. They had a team of mentors who had specific areas of proficiency, so they take the person in school who is best in classroom management. And she would mentor all the teachers on classroom management. You take the person in the school who is best in organizational skills and lesson planning, and they would mentor all the new teachers on those skills. So the Tweener had a committee or team of proficient or master teachers in specific areas of focus, rather than depending on a one-on-one mentor who may or may not be present, and if they are present, their presence may or may not be helpful.
   

So those are the three high-leverage areas that we found, if schools take them seriously, they can make a lot of progress.

What are your thoughts on building and sustaining true Professional Learning Communities?

Because the initiative has become so popular, we’re in a phase right now where we have to do quality control. The effective schools movement and other movements have started, but when people grab hold of something, they put their own spin to it. It’s like a recipe. If my mother makes cookies, and you want your cookies to taste like her cookies – you can’t leave ingredients out. You can’t add something that’s not supposed to be there. So we’ve seen this recipe kind of get regional and local flavor to it, and then people say,‘Well this doesn’t look like the cookies …” Well, you didn’t follow the directions. So what I’m trying to do today is helping to solidify with the interns (in the RPLA) what a real PLC is, from having direct access to the architect, Dr. Rick DuFour, and building an actual PLC myself.

A Professional Learning Community is not a meeting that takes place once a week, to talk about God knows what. It’s an entire school reform initiative that is very in depth and is very comprehensive. If people think that PLCs are simplythe department sitting down to look at some data every once in a while – that’s one component of the total concept. But what I’m strivingto do with the interns today is to really focus on: What does the whole package look like?