Students remember and respect principals who lead with integrity

Something about the girl shocked me. She was not impressed with the high school she had attended.

“If I were given another opportunity to join Form One, I would wish to join … High School,” she said.

She explained that the educational experience she and her fellow students had gone through was so stressful that she would not wish to repeat it.

“But it made you excel and enabled you not just to qualify for university education, but also to get an excellent grade for a course of your choice,” I told her.

“That is not the point. You don’t have to go through such a stressful educational experience to do well in the national examinations,” she said.

She cited long teaching and learning hours that began in the early morning and continued late into the night.

It is the ongoing KCSE examinations that have brought this conversation back to my mind.

Here was a student who should ideally have been happy with her alma mater. Instead, she harboured bitter feelings towards her school.

What does this teach us? What does it tell us about learners, education and life?

The simplest insight into this puzzle is that while getting an excellent grade is very important for learners who enter the doors of our schools, it is not necessarily what makes them remember their school fondly.

Admittedly, learners will be grateful to the school, the teachers and the principal for helping them perform well. However, this alone cannot make learners wish to repeat the experience or recommend the school to their peers.

Three things stand out in shaping how students remember their school, whether they perform well in examinations or not.

Firstly, students remember good teachers.

In a 2014 article entitled What Students Remember Most About Teachers, Canadian educator Lori Gard wrote:

“At the end of the day, most students won’t remember what amazing lesson plans you’ve created. They won’t remember how organised your bulletin boards are. How straight and neat are the desk rows. But they will remember you. Your kindness. Your empathy. Your care and concern. They’ll remember that you took the time to listen. That you stopped to ask them how they were. How they really were.”

This observation speaks to something fundamental about education. Students may forget many of the lessons they were taught, but they rarely forget how their teachers treated them.

The teacher who listens, encourages, corrects with understanding and recognises the dignity of every learner leaves an impression that may endure long after the learner has left school.

Academic achievement is important, but the human relationships through which learning takes place are equally significant.

Secondly, students remember how the principal conducted himself or herself and treated both teachers and learners.

The principal influences how students feel about being in school, whether in the principal’s presence or absence. They experience the principal's leadership through the values and practices that shape everyday school life.

Students may be children, but they are very discerning.

They collect and piece together the principal’s philosophy of life from prepared speeches and unguarded remarks.

They learn from speeches delivered during school assemblies, conversations in hallways and other informal encounters. They also glean important lessons from what teachers say about the values their principal demonstrates.

These values shape the instructional leadership the principal brings to teaching and learning, as well as the general administration of the school.

They also help determine whether the principal manages the administration of KCSE examinations with integrity.

It is impossible to legislate integrity into existence, let alone impose it through examination regulations alone.

Ultimately, students know, in their hearts, whether their principal is an honest or dishonest person.

A principal who facilitates examination cheating may escape detection by the authorities. However, students who witness such conduct know that they have been placed under the leadership of someone who has compromised integrity.

That knowledge matters.

A bright student who excels through genuine effort has no reason to thank a principal for facilitating cheating. Such a learner could have passed honestly.

For an average or struggling student, the consequences may be even more troubling. The learner may remain uncertain whether to respect a principal who helped secure an undeserved examination grade.

Such a student may obtain a deceptively excellent grade that exceeds the level of knowledge and understanding actually demonstrated.

Examination results should reflect learners’ genuine cognitive abilities, including their capacity to acquire, process, understand and apply information to solve problems.

Integrity in the organisation and delivery of academic programmes enables a principal to create a teaching and learning environment that nurtures, to the greatest possible extent, the innate potential of every student.

The strengths and interests of individual learners should ultimately be reflected in their educational achievements, creating pathways to careers, training or higher education consistent with their abilities and aspirations.

A principal with such moral rectitude gives students, in the words of William Wordsworth in his poem *London, 1802*, “manners, virtue, freedom, power” to go forth into the world and make a place for themselves.

Such a principal helps teachers feel empowered and students feel safe, valued and supported.

In doing so, the principal helps learners shape their own understanding of life's meaning and purpose.

A good principal does not make passing examinations the beginning and end of education, or even of life.

Instead, the principal helps learners focus on something greater than themselves and their immediate academic ambitions.

John W. Gardner, who served as United States Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under President Lyndon Johnson, observed in a commencement address at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC, on June 13, 1986:

“Life is an endless unfolding, and if we wish it to be, an endless process of self-discovery, an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves. By potentials I mean not just intellectual gifts but the full range of one's capacities for learning, sensing, wondering, understanding, loving and aspiring.”

It is the principal who helps students develop these capacities for learning, sensing, wondering, understanding, loving and aspiring whom students not only remember but also respect throughout their lives.