Powerful Partnerships: A Handbook for Principals Mentoring Assistant Principals

"This much-needed handbook is an excellent resource for principals and assistant principals as they face the challenges of school improvement together. The exercises focus school leaders on building their collective strengths, expanding their learning opportunities, providing schools with strong succession plans, and enabling leadership teams to address differences while building the capacity for effective teamwork."
―Sandra J. Stein, Chief Executive Officer
NYC Leadership Academy

Nurture the development of future school leaders through effective principal–assistant principal partnerships!

Assistant principals represent the next generation of school principals, so it is critical that schools and districts address the professional development of these key administrators. In this essential resource, Gary Bloom and Martin L. Krovetz demonstrate how principals and assistant principals can use their collaborative relationships to prepare assistant principals for future leadership roles.

This resource views the partnership between principals and assistant principals as a coaching-based relationship that benefits students and schools. Through this apprenticeship approach, assistant principals receive the mentoring and support they need to become tomorrow′s school leaders, and principals benefit from a more effective leadership team. The authors offer discussion questions, activities for the assistant principal, and shared activities that help principals and their assistants to:

• Develop a shared vision for their relationship and their school
• Design a plan for communication and professional development
• Build assistants′ skills in school management, instructional leadership, and personnel management

Addressing a critical yet frequently neglected topic, Powerful Partnerships helps principals mentor assistant principals, promote their professional development, and prepare them for challenging new positions in the future!

Gary Bloom is the lead author of Blended Coaching: Supporting the Development and Supervision of School Leaders. Gary has 40 years of K–12 education experience, having served as a bilingual teacher, principal, director of curriculum, and assistant superintendent. He served as the superintendent of the Aromas-San Juan Unified School District, known for its innovative programs, such as graduation exhibitions, a teacher-led high school, and teacher peer review. More recently he served as superintendent of Santa Cruz City Schools. He was a founder and Associate Director of the New Teacher Center at the University of California Santa Cruz. Gary is a Kellogg National Fellow, was adjunct faculty to San Jose State University’s Educational Administration graduate program, and has consulted, trained, and presented on a variety of topics throughout the United States and in Latin America. He is the primary author of a number of professional development programs for leadership coaches and school principals. He has published articles in a variety of journals, most recently on the topics of teacher leadership, principal development, professional learning communities, new teacher support, and the appropriate use of technology. He authored, with his friend Marty Krovetz, the book Powerful Partnerships, a guide for the development of assistant principals in collaboration with their supervising principals available from Corwin Press. Gary currently consults with school districts around the United States, provides executive coaching to superintendents and principal supervisors, does volunteer work in California and Central America.

Martin L. Krovetz is the director of the Leading for Equity and Achievement Design (LEAD) Center, a regional center of the Coalition of Essential Schools. From 1991 to 2006, he was a professor of educational leadership at San Jose State University. During this time, he developed and coordinated the Master’s in Collaborative Leadership Program. From 1977 to 1991, he was a high school principal in Santa Cruz, California.

In addition to being the author of the Fostering Resillience, he is the author with Gilberto Arriaza of Collaborative Teacher Leadership: How Teachers Can Foster Equitable Schools, published by Corwin Press in 2006. He has published in numerous journals and presents at national conferences, including ASCD and the Coalition of Essential Schools.

He received his PhD in social psychology from the University of North Carolina and BA from the University of Florida.