You left the building. Your body is in the car, or on the train, or walking to wherever you go at the end of the day. But you are still there — in the 2pm conversation you’re rerunning, in the email you’re composing in your head, in the situation from this afternoon that doesn’t have…
Your district knows your evaluation score. It knows your school’s data. It knows whether you respond to emails promptly and whether you attend the meetings you are required to attend and whether your school improvement plan was submitted on time. Your family knows something different. They know the version of you that arrives home after…
There is a window in the first year of a principalship where systems can be built without the resistance that comes after patterns have set. When you are new, people expect change. They are watching to see what kind of leader you are. The norms are still forming. The history with you is short enough…
It is the Monday morning phone call that you already knew was coming. Or the Friday afternoon text. Or the pattern — visible to you, visible to your staff, visible to the students who have had eleven different substitute teachers in one classroom since October — that has been sitting in your consciousness for weeks…
There is a type of principal burnout that does not look like burnout from the outside. It looks like energy. It looks like presence. It looks like someone who is fully invested in the work, constantly moving, always available, perpetually in the middle of something important. From the inside it feels different. There is an…
The conversation about principal sustainability almost always comes back to resilience. Build more of it. Develop it. Practice it. The resilient principal, the narrative goes, is the one who weathers the storms better — who bounces back faster, absorbs more, recovers quicker. The research does not entirely support this story. And the principals who have…
There is a decision you made — maybe last week, maybe last year, maybe further back than that — that you still carry. Not because you made the wrong call. You may have made the best call available to you with the information you had. You carry it because it involved a child. Because somewhere,…
Think about the last time a teacher came to you struggling. Maybe they were overwhelmed by a difficult class. Maybe they’d made a mistake they were beating themselves up about. Maybe they were just having a hard stretch and couldn’t see the end of it. Think about what you said to them. You probably said…
Here is something that nobody in educational leadership policy talks about, but every principal knows from the inside: the principalship is structured for isolation. Not accidentally. Structurally. The principal is responsible for everyone in the building, which means they cannot be fully a peer to anyone in it. The principal is evaluated by the district,…
There is a version of accountability culture in schools that makes the building feel like a surveillance operation. The principal observing constantly, writing things down, following up formally, communicating expectations with the energy of someone waiting for a violation. Staff who are performing rather than teaching. A culture of compliance rather than one of commitment….