principals

Do hospital administrators need to be doctors?
It is a whole different skill set that not everyone has whether they were a teacher or not. The main thing is that a good principal should have administrative, management, and leadership skills AND they have to understand teaching.

I too was an administrator and returned to the classroom. Without question a principal should not only have been a teacher, he/she would be most effective by returning for at least a short stint to the classroom.

This is a "no brainer" in my opinion. Of course principals should have teaching experience! This allows principals to be strong instructional leaders; to empathize with her/his staff; and to more effectively evaluate what is taking place in the classroom.

Principal's should definitely have teaching experience and more than just 1 or two years. It takes a minimum of five years to even become a good teacher, in my opinion. A person should not have another person's professional life in their hands unless they have actually done it for a significant time.

But if you haven't taught, you don't understand teaching, except from reading a book.

I don't think a Principal can be as effective as needed without spending time in the classroom. It doesn't mean that being in the classroom necessarily makes you an effective Principal either. However, teachers see through leaders who don't know what they are talking about when it comes to matters of instruction and classroom management.

Definitely. A principal needs this experience to fully appreciate the many layers of teaching and the depths of responsibility a teacher has to integrity in teaching, managing students, engaging with parents, and continuing to develop in one's subject area and pedagogy. I feel the closer to the teaching experience a principal is, the better leadership she can offer. Ideally, a principal is still actually teaching a class to stay grounded in the realities and joys of the classroom.

Yes, I believe principals should have teaching experience; not only do they need to have teaching experience, they NEED to have teaching experience at the elementary school level so they are in classrooms where they have to teach ALL SUBJECT areas! They also need to be required to return to teaching in the classroom for 1 year periodically throughout their principalships to remember how difficult is is to be IN the classroom ALL the time!

Principals not only need to have real classroom experience (7 years or more) - but in the school district they are in...moreover, principals should be required to teach at least one section of classes each year. Just so they realize the challenges being faced by the teachers in the building day to day.