The demoralized staff has heard the pep talk before. They have sat through the staff meeting that began with an acknowledgment of how hard things have been and pivoted immediately into the vision of what is possible. They have received the motivational email that was drafted with genuine care and landed with a flatness that…
The conversation about what comes after the principalship has a quality problem. It is mostly made up of success stories — the former principal who built a consultancy, the one who moved into higher education, the one who founded a nonprofit and is thriving. These stories are real and they are worth knowing. They are…
District politics are real. They affect schools in ways that are sometimes visible and sometimes invisible. Budget decisions that were made for political rather than educational reasons. Initiative priorities that reflect board dynamics rather than student outcomes. Leadership transitions above the principal level that shift the institutional terrain without notice or consultation. Alliances and rivalries…
There is a student you still think about. Maybe it has been a year, maybe longer. They are not in your building anymore — they moved on, or they moved away, or they are no longer alive — and you still think about them. Whether you did enough. What their life became. Whether the decisions…
You are surrounded by people for most of your working day. You are rarely physically alone. There is almost always someone who needs something from you, someone in your office, someone in your hallway, someone waiting for a response. By any external measure, the role of principal involves an enormous amount of human contact. And…
I was a teacher before I was anything else in this profession, and I want to be honest about what that means when I reflect on what moving into administration required. I was a bilingual Spanish teacher for seven years. Not as a stopping point on the way to something else — as the work…
Every veteran teacher in your building has an internal change initiative counter. They have been through enough cycles of the new program — announced with urgency, supported with professional development, monitored with accountability structures, and then quietly replaced by the next priority before the last one was fully implemented — that the counter has reached…
The call comes from HR, or the letter from district counsel, or the message from your supervisor conveying information in carefully neutral language that communicates unmistakably what has happened. A teacher has filed a formal complaint against you. The specifics of the complaint, when you receive them, range from a distorted account of a real…
The transfer is one of the most accessible career moves available to a principal in difficulty. New school, same role, same district, different context. The specific problems of the current building — the resistant staff who have been there since before you arrived, the community relationship that calcified into something adversarial before you had the…
I was a bilingual kindergarten teacher before I was anything else in this work. I still remember the first day with my first class. Backpacks bigger than the kids carrying them. Brand new crayons, unbroken, still smelling like crayons. Five-year-olds standing at the door of the next thirteen years of their lives, half excited and…