Self-Assessment and Survey Reflection

Principals are usually referred to as visionary individuals but their successes as leaders are not just simply due to their visionary strengths and execution. The self-assessment along with the online survey has truly helped me identify other important leadership characteristics that increase student achievement. The self-assessment was more straightforward and simply required a 1-5 ranking. While the online survey seemed a bit more complex because it extracted the 21 characteristics from a series of questions and then applied a numerical value from multiple responses; overall, my results were very similar. The minor differences were no more than one point for each characteristic, this illustrated that my perceptions for leadership characteristics are consistent.

The assessments were both interesting for me to fill out. From my personal experiences, I tried to gauge how much each characteristic plays into the success of a principal. Based off the online survey and self-assessment my top seven strengths as a school leader are: communication (r = .24), culture (.25), ideals and beliefs (.22), input (.25), outreach (.27), relationships (.18), and visibility (.20) (Marzono; 2007; McRel; 2010). My average correlation for strengths was r = .23. This shows that not all my strengths have been proven to be highly effective (visibility and relationships) while some are considered more effective like input and outreach. However, when evaluating how each of the 21 characteristics are measured to their 95% CI the most accurate measurements are culture, focus, input, involvement CIA, monitoring, and optimizer; of these I have two (culture and input).

The two assessments also revealed to me some areas of improvement. My seven top areas of improvement are: affirmation (r = .19), change agent (.25), discipline (.27), flexibility (.28), intellectual stimulation (.24), involvement CIA (.20), and order (.25) (Marzono; 2007; McRel; 2010). My average correlation for improvement was r = .24. Unfortunately, this correlation shows that my weaknesses have a higher impact on student achievement than do my strengths. Yet, when comparing my areas of improvement to the strongest correlated characteristics based off their 95% CI, I have only one (involvement CIA).

Overall, I am not taking these results too seriously because I have never even attempted to be a principal before so I truly have no idea if I am effective or not. However, based off these results it shows that I do have characteristics that will impact student achievement and even though I have areas of improvement neither assessment had any characteristic ranked lower than a three. This experience has been insightful and I look forward to doing it again in the future, especially once I have become an administrator.

References

Marzano, R. J., Waters, T., & McNulty, B. A. (2005). School leadership that works from research to results (pp.42-63). Alexandria: ASCD.

McRel balanced leadership (2010). Retrieved July 31, 2010, from https://www.educationleadershipthatworks.org/Default.aspx