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Sustaining the Journey Archive
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May 10, 2010
Case Study: Hannah, the Principal of a New School
During May, "Sustaining the Journey" will offer you an opportunity to apply your knowledge in assessing States of Mind. A short scenario will be presented and you will be offered some questions to consider as you analyze the situation.
Hannah is a principal opening a new school. She prefers to do things for herself, but knows she must involve her planning team in the decision-making. For hiring, she is paper-screening all candidates and then having the planning team do interviews and make recommendations to her. She then makes the final decision after extensive interviewing and observations of the candidates. As teams get hired, Hannah selects one person to lead each team. Now that the teams are almost all hired, decisions about instructional materials need to be made. Some of the team leaders have expressed frustration with Hannah's micromanaging their team's decisions. When approached about the concern, Hannah said she needed to make final decisions so that there would be consistency and so that the budget was carefully watched.
Hannah has begun meeting with parents of children coming to the new school. She is open to all questions and is articulate in describing the vision for the school. In meeting with parents, there are some requests regarding the bilingual program that are going to require some staff training and different use of funding. Hannah is trying to explain the difficulty in meeting those requests to parents, but there seems to be growing concern that she is not valuing parent input.
What might you infer about Hannah's cognitive style? Which States of Mind seem to be in high and low resource for Hannah?
What kinds of data might be useful to Hannah? What kinds of coaching questions might you ask her?
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