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…
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…
The classroom walkthrough is simultaneously the most powerful instructional leadership tool available to a principal and one of the most consistently misused. Misused not through bad intention but through the failure to distinguish between two fundamentally different reasons for being in a classroom: evaluation and partnership. When teachers experience classroom visits primarily as surveillance —…
You knew about them before you officially arrived. The information travels — in the way that information about significant building dynamics always travels — through the colleague in another school, the district administrator who phrased something carefully in a way that communicated more than the words said, the file that contained performance documentation that stopped…
There is a version of staff conflict that principals can legitimately stay out of. Two colleagues navigate a professional disagreement, reach some workable resolution or agree to disagree professionally, and the building culture absorbs it without lasting damage. The principal does not need to be the mediator of every interpersonal friction in a building full…
The first fifteen minutes of the school day are the most leveraged fifteen minutes a principal has. What happens in those minutes — in the tone, the physical environment, the quality of the first human interactions students and staff have — tends to compound through the morning. The school that starts in chaos takes hours…
This is a harder situation than the incompetent teacher or the resistant teacher or the teacher whose performance problems are visible and uncomplicated. This is the teacher with the fan base. The one whose classroom students fight to be assigned to, whose hallway interactions are warm and genuinely connected, whose name comes up in parent…
It arrives in January, or February, or the week you come back from spring break having just gotten your staff aligned and your momentum building. A new priority from above. A reversed position on something your school has been implementing. A restructuring of the approach to something your teachers have been developing since August. An…
There is a particular kind of principal legacy that cannot be captured in a school improvement data report. It does not show up in the metrics that get discussed at board meetings or referenced in district newsletters. It shows up years later, in the professional trajectories of teachers who stayed in this profession past the…
Every teacher who has been in education for more than three years can tell you, with precision, what a waste of time looks like in a staff meeting. It looks like an hour of information that could have been a two-paragraph email. It looks like a presentation that the principal prepared and the staff received…