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…
Your family notices before you do. They notice the specific silence in the car ride home from school events that is different from the easy quiet of someone who has had a full day. They notice that you are present at the dinner table and not present at the dinner table at the same time…
Every principal who has tried to change something in a school has encountered this moment: the meeting where you present the direction, the new approach, the shift you are asking for — and you can feel the room dividing in real time. The enthusiastic nodders in the front. The quiet skeptics in the middle. The…
There is a particular kind of classroom that you know the moment you walk past the door. The noise that tells you instruction is not happening. The students who have decided that this classroom is a place where the rules do not apply. The teacher who looks up when you appear in the doorway with…
I want to talk about something that most principal professional development avoids because it is uncomfortable: the school improvement plan that does not improve the school. You know this pattern. The data review in August that identifies the priority. The goal that goes on the CIP. The initiative announced in September. The professional development in…
There is a version of this you tell people. The professionally managed version that shows up at district meetings. You are learning a lot. The staff is great. You are still figuring some things out. And there is the real version. The one that exists at 3am when you are running the Tuesday meeting through…
Here is what imposter syndrome in the principalship actually sounds like: not ‘I do not belong here’ — but rather ‘everyone is about to find out that I do not know what I am doing.’ It is the specific, low-grade dread of the qualified, experienced person who has stepped into a role where the competence…
There is a very specific kind of difficulty that comes with leading the people you used to teach beside — and it is different from every other leadership challenge you will face in the first year. It is personal in a way that most leadership problems are not. Because the person across from you is…
I am going to tell you something that most educators in my position do not say publicly, because saying it requires the kind of honesty that professional culture does not reward. There were teachers who left buildings I led because of how I led. Not all of them. Not even most of them. But some….