What It Means to Be a Principal: Your Guide to Leadership

Author, educator, and leader John C. Daresh leads you on that journey in a unique and important book that combines self-exploration and career planning in a powerful new way.

Now you can look at every facet of the most important career decision you can make. You′ll ask yourself if you really want to be a principal . . . you′ll discover what the job truly entails and how it matches up with your real career goals and personal plans.

By examining a series of critical issues, this book can help you make that all-important decision by showing you what it′s really like to be a principal on a day-to-day basis. Issues include:

• Differing views of administration
• The role of superintendents and district personnel
• Visions of leadership
• Conflict as part of the job
• The frustrations of leadership
• What it means to be in charge
• Options for principal professional development

What It Means to Be a Principal is a work of insight and action ― a challenging real-world framework that will help you make one of the most important decisions of your career.

John C. Daresh has worked as a professional educator for more than 30 years in public schools in Iowa and Illinois and in universities across the country, and has served as a consultant to school districts, state departments of education, and universities. Currently he serves as a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Foundations at the University of Texas at El Paso. Daresh has been a frequent contributor to the literature on principalship, and is the author of the best-seller Beginning the Principalship from Corwin Press.

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.