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What It Means To Be a Principal: Your Guide to Leadership By John Daresh
Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, Inc., 2001. 188 pages, $29.95 (paperback).
In What it Means To Be a Principal: Your Guide to Leadership, author John Daresh provides powerful insights into the real issues and concerns school or district-level administrators are likely to experience. Each chapter begins with the experiences of a first-year building principal and offers additional readings and activities for further exploration. Readers interested in hearing the straight scoop about school administration, including some of the actual challenges of these jobs, will enjoy Daresh's realistic introductions.
This book asserts that to serve effectively, an administrator needs to know about budget and finances, effective school-community relations, personnel issues such as staff evaluation and supervision, legal aspects of education, school facilities, best practices related to teaching and learning, and more. The author asks readers to complete a "Beginning Principal's Critical Skills Survey" to ascertain how critical they believe each skill is for a beginning principal's success. Through a process of writing out an "educational platform" (similar to platform statements issued by political candidates) the reader solidifies his or her beliefs about education. Because administrators set the moral and ethical tone of a school or district, it is essential that they clarify their deepest beliefs, attitudes, and values concerning the mission of schooling and education. This activity is...