I see you. And I need to tell you something that most of the people around you are not going to say, because saying it complicates the narrative about how this role works and what it requires. You do not need to work harder. I know that feels wrong. I know the gap between where…
The problem has a face and the face belongs to the person above you. Not a vague institutional dysfunction — a specific supervisor whose specific decisions, specific leadership approach, or specific political agenda is creating conditions in your school that make effective leadership more difficult, or in some cases close to impossible. This is one…
You have been in this meeting before, or you have been in the version of it that exists in your rehearsal. You know how it will go. The feedback lands. The interpretation arrives immediately: you are saying I am a bad teacher. Or worse — you are attacking who they are as a person, as…
The principalship is structurally located in the middle. Not metaphorically — architecturally. Every principal operates between the institutional direction coming from above and the professional reality being lived below. Between the district’s priorities and the building’s capacity. Between the policy as written and the classroom as experienced. Between what the mandate says to do and…
How to Lead With Integrity When the System Around You Does Not The gap between what the system says it values and what the system actually does is one of the most professionally corrosive experiences available to a school principal. It is the specific experience of being asked to communicate an institutional commitment to equity…
The IEP meeting that goes badly does so in predictable ways that every principal who has been in enough of them can narrate before they happen. The family arrives having prepared — having talked to an advocate, having documented their grievances from previous meetings, having reached the meeting with the specific expectation that this one…
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…
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…
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…