The Principal in the Teaching and Learning Process.

The Principal as Supervisor in the Curriculum To do well in supervision, the principal must develop good rapport with classroom teachers. Hostility and mistrust have no role to play when developing a quality curriculum. Negative attitudes toward others hinders interactions among the principal and teachers. A feeling of acceptance needs to be in the offing. The school climate needs to emphasize politeness, feelings of belonging, and honest praise for quality work performed. The latter helps individuals to meet esteem needs. Too often, teachers and principals come to school each day of the calendar year with little or no attention being given to that which is done well by any one individual. The routiness of these situations must be broken to bring in a school climate which encourages and welcomes faculty members as well as support personnel (Ediger, 2007). This sets the stage then for principals and teachers working together to develop the best curriculum possible for students. The stated objectives for pupils to achieve must be attainable. If the mandated objectives are too rigid and complex, the principal may assist teachers to develop enabling objectives which help pupils to achieve the desired end. These enabling objectives assist pupils to sequentially realize the original complex goal. Another approach for assisting teachers in teaching is for the principal to stress the concept of scaffolding. Thus, for example, the objective is too difficult for pupils to attain. However with scaffolding, pupils are aided with a series of sequentially arranged learning activities to realize the complex objective or goal. Thus, there are definite strategies for aiding pupils to achieve difficult learnings, either through enabling objectives or through scaffolding. The principal needs to guide teachers to study these two concepts in depth. Then too, the principal may use demonstration teaching to show how to put these two and other strategies into operation. When classroom teachers use either or both procedures, they need to report back to school professionals what they did to implement and how they felt the new procedures affected pupil achievement (Ediger, 2007). Teachers may need assistance in stressing knowledge (knowing about enabling objectives and scaffolding), as well as skills objectives (strategies to use in implementing the acquired knowledge in teaching and learning situations). Attitudes as objectives result from learning experiences involving knowledge and skills ends. If the following occur during teaching and learning situations, the chances are negative attitudes have been developed: * excess drill which takes the joy out of the ongoing experiences * pressure to achieve beyond what the learner can possibly attain * a lack of challenge * dull learning activities * inadequate explanations given within the learning activity (Ediger, 2008). Alignment of Learning Activities School principals must guide teachers to align learning experiences with the stated objectives. Learning activities need to be aligned with the chosen objectives to optimize pupil achievement. The objectives provide direction for changes to be made within the learner. The learning activities assist in bringing about the necessary modifications. Too frequently, the objectives have been stated too broadly and thus provide little help in knowing what the objective means. The other extreme is to write objectives which are too specific, resulting in facts, only, being taught. Thus, a happy medium must be sought whereby objectives are specific enough to agree upon what will be taught and, at the same time, possess adequate leeway to provide for higher cognitive levels of subject matter being taught such as critical and creative thinking as well as problem solving (See Guilfoyle, 2006). School principals need to help teachers choose learning activities which are varied to develop and maintain learner interests. …