DESCRIPTORS:
Russian schools; school principalship; principal’s responsibilities; school departments; principal’s team; best Moscow schools.

SYNOPSIS:
What qualities should a school principal possess to create a really good school? What is a school team and how it works? School departments and their role in organizing school activities. Daily routine work with every schoolteacher is the primary focus of the school principal’s team. Main directions of the work of a principal:

• Explain to all teachers the primary goals and objectives of their personal work in connection to the work of the gymnasium.
• Provide help to every teacher in “constructing” professional activities in accordance with the above-mentioned connections.
• Do one’s best to explain what “any class creation” means.
• Teach every schoolteacher to view a child as a unique human being with his or her own inner world.

A few years ago, a group of teachers and vice principals from Estonia visited our school. They were a group of educators, primarily interested in pursuing a future career as school principals.

Considering that I had a great deal of school principalship experience, one of the visitors asked me the question: “What qualities should a school principal possess to create a really good school? Please formulate these qualities precisely and briefly.” I answered: “To create a really good school it does not require much from a principal. One should have smart and talented people around oneself (in some ways smarter and more talented than the principal) and give them a direction. Then, all the principal’s plans will be fulfilled, even better than one expected.” Certainly, my “simple” answer was sly enough.

On the one hand, in real life this short formula contains a huge amount of work for a school principal, work that is full of deep insights and that is not easy at all. On the other hand, my answer was absolutely truthful but quite vague.

Now I will try to clarify what kind of people I was referring to as surrounding the principal. First, I meant my closest circle or supporters who together with the principal comprise a united like-minded group. Don’t be misled by the words “like-minded”; I mean common goals and objectives but I don’t ever mean common ways of reaching them.

In our gymnasium[2] we have a few people similar to the ones I have described. They are my deputies, responsible for different parts of our general education: Humanities, Mathematics, Science, and Linguistics. The deputies have two primary and professional responsibilities: 1) analyzing theschool teaching process andcontrollingits state and 2) supervising methods of teaching – that is, helping teachers to improve their work, implement new teaching techniques, and accomplish in-service training. A big portion of this work is usually done through our subject area departments[3], which I will describe now in more detail.

What is a department at school? What does it do?

Every department is a structural gymnasium division, which is oriented mostly towards organizing and supporting (with proper methods) the process of teaching in a certain knowledge area or in a certain subject area. Every department is working in accordance with the approaches and strategies worked out by the pedagogical and administrative gymnasium councils and in accordance with strategic school documents.

The school principal appoints every department chair. Usually a candidate for this position is a highly qualified gymnasium teacher who possesses creativity as well as management skills.
Responsibilities of departments include:

• Discussing the results of administrative work that is oriented towards measuring a level and quality of children’s knowledge, defining children’s general and specific learning skills, and working out recommendations to improve the process.
• Organizing an exchange of ideas and methods among teachers, and creating all necessary conditions for generalization and dissemination of teachers’ achievements.
• Solving the problem of coordination between subjects.
• Developing and examining new teaching courses (mandatory and optional), adequate teaching programs, and educational technologies and methods.
• Bringing new teaching programs into the gymnasium integrated teaching process.
• Discussing, analyzing, and reviewing different teaching materials prepared by the chair members.
• Analyzing content and results of innovative activities.
• Organizing and fulfilling research and training in the area of teaching methods.
• Preparing and improving all-gymnasium documents within the limits of their competence.
• Offering ideas on how to improve research and methods in school.
• Developing and enriching “a bank of ideas” about certain contents and methods of teaching, and perspective innovations within the limits of their competence.
• Preparing all the materials and conducting entrance, current, and final exams.
• Managing students’ research.
• Organizing teachers’ extracurricular work: different students’ contests, intellectual marathons, subject area evenings, etc.
• Developing and strengthening teaching-material resources and teaching methods.

Departments should work with the gymnasium administrative council and report to the vice principal. Every department is responsible for quality and timely fulfillment of its own decisions. It also has controlling functions over these decisions.

As one can see, departments are similar to what regular public schools have in the form of teachers’ “methodical associations” but our departments have more power in school. Department chairs and vice principals constitute that united like-minded group of professionals previously mentioned.

As a school principal, I should, first, teach this group how to work in a totally new sphere, then, develop their interest in this type of work, and finally, show them that this work can be interesting in its own way, personally useful and, even fascinating.  But all of this can be possible if done without applying any strict formal rules.

Thus, daily routine work with every schoolteacher is the primary focus of our professional united like-minded group. Again, the difference in comparison with regular schools is that our vice principals and department chairs are highly professional; in our gymnasium most of them have Ph.D. or post-doctorate degrees in Education. Many of them are authors of school textbooks and teaching manuals, and many have worked in school for decades.  Therefore, they can provide our teachers with genuine quality advice.

Our administrative council is slightly similar to the principal’s council in other schools, but this similarity is quite indistinct. Our council includes two more deputies, one responsible for extracurricular activities, and the other for research and experimental work, added to the group of department chairs and vice principals.

The administrative council is responsible for the following activities:

• Plan, organize, and manage the whole teaching-educational process and its results.
• Plan the current work of our teachers.
• Define forms and numbers of intermediate and final attestations.
• Compose school norms and documents that formalize different working aspects of the teaching staff.
• Discuss different pedagogical problems and providing recommendations.
• Define the number of class groups in every school grade, making decisions to open new school specializations or new class groups.
• Decide how long school vacations should be, dates of starting and finishing a school year.
• Recommend to the school principal the termination of a teacher’s contract due to his or her professional inadequacy or discipline violations.

Teachers and other members of our staff can be invited to any meeting of the administrative council. The council has consultative functions as well as administrative functions.
Earlier I mentioned that a school principal should give his staff a direction in their work. I was speaking about the school’s primary direction. In this sense the principal is the main strategic figure at the school, a person who works out its pedagogical ideology. This is critical for every principal to realize as his or her main duty and function.

Fifteen years ago when we changed the status of our school and became a gymnasium, as a school principal I made some serious decisions. I came to an understanding that the whole “school team” and every teacher in it can do their work rationally and wisely only if they understand the team’s primary logic and sense. People should be united on the grounds of certain common ideology or philosophy.

What do we want? What goals are we trying to achieve? What kind of education are we going to give our students? How is our education different from other schools? And finally, how is our gymnasium different from any other educational establishment? These questions demand clear and precise answers.

We first formulated some strategic educational ideas that should become guidelines for all teachers in their work:

• Humanizing and humanitizing[4] education in our gymnasium, orienting all the activities towards the personality of the child, towards the development of his or her own unique capacities and talents, making the values of personality and humanity dominant among other social values and in any social sphere of activities.
• Harmonious and comprehensive education, which allows every person to understand the world as a whole in all its diversity and controversy.
• Teaching with the main aim to develop and educate a student and form a personality oriented towards one’s own development. This is contrary to the standard teaching process usually oriented towards knowledge and basic skills as its final aim.
• Variability and freedom of choice, which allows everyone to select one’s own type, contents, and form of education.
• Cooperation, informal communication, and joint creative activities of educators and students.
• A creative approach, constant search, and verification of contents, forms, and methods of teaching and educating our students.

Formulating these ideas became for all of us, including vice principals and department chairs, the first step in clarifying the essence of our work in a gymnasium. These ideas became a solid foundation for working out basicconcepts in different subject areas. Gradually under the supervision of our vice principals we managed to prepare original concepts of Literature, History, Mathematics, Biology, Chemistry, and Geography Education.

After being prepared, these concepts had to pass our administrative council, and only after their detailed analysis were they introduced to the entire school council (as the primary school body) for adoption.

This is how, step-by-step, we created our professional philosophy or ideology, which has become basic for every staff member. Through the “lens” of this philosophy our teachers look at their daily activities, and vice principals and department chairs look at their work with teachers.

We need certain teachers who are able to understand and accept our ideology, and what is more, to use it in their practice. These teachers should have a creative mind and a very creative attitude towards their work. To find such people and to help them grow takes many years and is one of the most complicated and difficult management tasks.

The teaching profession today is experiencing, due to a number of reasons, a very deep and systematic crisis. Fortunately for our gymnasium we have built a strong “core” of talented and highly qualified teachers. We are also trying to develop every possible potential in our new teachers but not always with great success.

In summary, the following are the main directions of the uneasy work of a principal:

• Explain to all teachers the primary goals and objectives of their personal work in connection to the work of the gymnasium. Without understanding such connections a teacher’s work becomes senseless and useless.
• Provide help to every teacher in “constructing” professional activities in accordance with the above-mentioned connections.
• Do our best to explain what “any class creation” means. In our understanding, any class is a unique form of a teaching-educational process and a self-prepared independent pedagogical “product,” similar to a literary novella with its opening, culmination, and ending.
• Teach every schoolteacher to view a child as a unique human being with his or her own inner world. We explain to teachers that they should be absolutely honest in their work with children, and honesty pays back with mutual trust, which many schools lack and without which schoolwork cannot be considered complete.

We trust that only this type of work with our teachers will allow them to become true professionals who can have a positive influence on children, and can give children a solid knowledge foundation that will serve them well now and in the future.