Beginning the Assistant Principalship: A Practical Guide for New School Administrators

Effective school leaders are critical to successful schools. Your service as an assistant principal may be one of the most challenging jobs you will ever have. Rarely are you able to predict what you will be doing each day, even from one moment to the next.

John Daresh′s Beginning the Assistant Principalship provides you with excellent tools to navigate your way as a new administrator. Full of ideas for you to use in your work, this valuable resource helps you ask yourself the important questions, find answers, and develop strong plans of action. Some significant topics to help you in your new job include:

• Building a platform
• Developing leadership skills
• Carrying out management skills
• Maintaining balance and perspective
• Knowing your job
• Using effective disagreement to your advantage
• Building your profile as a leader
• Listening, listening, then listening some more

Whether your intention is to eventually assume the principalship using your current job as a kind of internship, or if you have decided to make the assistant principalship a career, this excellent book considers a wide variety of topics to help you succeed!

John C. Daresh is professor of educational leadership at the University of Texas at El Paso. Over the years, he has held faculty or administrative appointments at the University of Cincinnati, The Ohio State University, the University of Northern Colorado, and Illinois State University. He has also worked as a consultant on high school reform and administrator professional development for universities, state departments of education, national and state professional associations, and individual schools and districts across the United States, and also in Barbados, Canada, France, Holland, Israel, Turkey, South Africa, and Taiwan. By far, the bulk of Daresh’s international service has been in the United Kingdom where he served an advisor and trainer for the School Management Task Force that developed and promoted support programs for beginning headteachers, the National College for School Leadership, the Welsh Office of Education, the North West Network for Diploma Development in Cheshire, Manchester Metropolitan University, the University of Lincoln, the University of Hull, CREATE Consultancies, and literally dozens of Local Education Authorities and individual schools across England and Wales.

Daresh recently completed three years of service as the lead consultant on principal mentoring programs for the Chicago Public Schools as that megadistrict was faced with the challenge of bringing in mostly inexperienced principals to serve in nearly of the school system’s elementary and high schools.