Each school year must start out with a vision; a goal for the end of the year. The school leader profession is so engraved in servant leadership, it can be a challenge to remember that your school leadership goal must also fit into that plan. In addition to professional development, incorporating a personal spin to your professional development plan can increase your engagement with your plan and keep you grounded to your school leadership success. In this blog post, I'll share the best way to identify, plan, and ground your vision to lead your school leadership for the year ahead.
Principal Professional Development Planning
Planning for you school's success is only one part of your job as a school principal. You must also plan for yourself, and how you will define and measure your success as a leader. Many schools already require an annual, biannual, or triennial plan for principal professional development. Even if your district doesn't require it, or if your school district is inconsistent with professional development planning, going through the process on an annual basis will ground your work, keep you focused on your personal school year achievement, and fuel your engagement with your staff, students, and families.
You have probably all heard, and spent a fair amount of time writing SMART goals - whether for your school, your teachers, your students, or your personal life. A SMART goal, if you aren't sure, is an acronym for a goal that is S - Specific, M - Measurable, A- Achievable, R - Realistic, and T - Timely. For more information on SMART goals, there is a great resource you could check out this resource here.
I would enter a word of caution at this point, however. Even with how targeted and specific SMART goals are intended to be, many school principals and school leaders struggle to stay grounded to their goal. With the chaos, er, challenges, that come with the day-to-day life of school leadership, keeping track of YOUR own progress is probably the first thing that gets sent to the bottom of the list of things to do and be on top of.
Visualize your professional development plan to increase engagement and success
You need a way to stay grounded in your work toward your goals for the school year. There are many different ways that you can do this, but I will say here that simply writing it down is not enough. Yes, it is vitally important to write down the goals we are striving for, but writing them down in a journal that gets tucked away in a drawer isn't going to do you much good. As such, an electronic document that gets buried in an online Drive or database that you won't turn to on a regular basis won't have the staying power you need to reach that goal either. Not only should your goal be SMART, and documented, it also needs an engagement factor to keep you grounded and focused.
Vision boarding is an excellent way to engage with your SMART goal. Once you have gone through the process of defining and planning your goal, creating a vision board that you can hang in your office, or make your home screen on your computer, tablet, or phone is a simple way stay connected to your goal. You will naturally interact visually with your goal each time you sit down at your desk or open your technology. This visual interaction with your goal will help frame the way you approach your day-to-day work. Your likelihood of achieving your vision increases dramatically, as does the likelihood that you will indeed surpass your goal for that year.
Avoiding Initiative Fatigue in Professional Development Planning
Your goals are important to you. If they aren't then they shouldn't be your goals! While there will always be times when our school districts will require you to focus on a certain initiative, no one can make you strive for something that you don't want to do or don't care about. If your district requires that you tailor your goal to a specific initiative, it will be important that you spend some time reflecting on how you can make that goal your own while still meeting the criteria of your district.
School principals are at risk of experiencing initiative fatigue when they are not able to connect to the work that is being asked of them. There are four basic constructs to initiative fatigue, but the only one that we can most easily prepare for, and combat, is that of emotional energy. Whether it is because there are too many initiatives that you are trying to work toward, or if you are having a hard time connecting to the initiative because of pedagogical, personal, or other knowledge and beliefs, initiative fatigue is a gateway to school leader burnout and attrition - neither of which will benefit you, or your students.
Our mind thinks in pictures. It doesn't "see" words like "not" and "don't." It also doesn't automatically create pictures in your mind of things that you have read in the past that you are not currently connecting with. Pictures create sensations in our bodies and stimulate the brain in ways that words on screen or paper cannot. We also tend to remember pictures better than individual words. The brain files them away in a conceptual manner, making them easier to recall and activate your action threshold.
Next Steps
I encourage you to take a small amount of your time to create a vision board that aligns with your principal professional development plan. There are many tools available to you to help you do this. Online platforms like Canva are a great resource for electronic vision board creating. You can even do this with Google Slides.
1. Be sure you own your goal Remember, simply writing your goals isn't enough. You have to be able to connect to it emotionally for it to engage you in the way it needs to effectively move you forward.
2. Visualize your goal in pictures Activate your right-brain thinking and image your goals as pictures in your mind. For everything you write down, ask yourself, "What does that look like?" and actually visualize it in your mind.
3. Create a Visual Representation of your Goal What will it look like when you have met it? What do the steps you have to look like to achieve it? Post this visual representation in a place where you will see it as often as possible.
This resource might help you plan, and visualize your goal. You can also check out this free webinar for creating a visual representation of your goal.
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