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…
Someone asked you a question last month — or maybe it was a few months ago — that you still think about sometimes. Not a hard question. A simple one. Someone who knows you, in a non-school context, asked: so what do you like to do? And you paused longer than you expected to. Not…
You used to work out. Or you used to walk. Or you used to have some kind of physical movement that was yours — not a commute, not walking the building for monitoring purposes, but actual intentional movement that you did for yourself because it made you feel better. And then the school year happened….
I want to say this carefully and then directly: at some point during my administrative career I started therapy. Not because I was in crisis. Not because something dramatic had happened that required professional intervention. Because I had been doing one of the most emotionally complex and relationally demanding jobs that exists, for years, without…
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…
The story that gets told about school leadership recovery usually involves a new location. New school, new community, new beginning. The reset narrative tends to assume that change of context is the primary vehicle for change of practice. This post is for the reset that happens in place. The principal who has looked honestly at…
You have looked at the initiative. You have read the accompanying research, which is either thin or contextually irrelevant to your specific school population. You have mentally mapped the implementation against the reality of your building and identified at least three ways this is going to create more problems than it solves. You have attended…
You slept eight hours. You know you slept because you checked the clock when you woke up and did the math. Eight hours. And you got up still exhausted — not the groggy kind that clears after coffee, but the deep kind that coffee doesn’t touch. The kind that has been there when you went…
There is a specific feeling that most principals know and almost none of them have a name for. It is the feeling of never fully landing. Of being technically at rest — sitting down, at home, not actively doing anything — but still somehow not off. Still alert. Still listening for something. Still a half-second…