The moment you tell your district you are leaving, the professional relationship changes. Not always dramatically. Not always immediately. But the change is real and it begins the moment the information is known by anyone other than you. The political calculus around you shifts. The decisions about resources and investments and initiatives begin to be…
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…
Let’s be honest about the sleep situation. Not the occasional bad night. Not the week before a major evaluation cycle or the first week of school when everything is in motion. The baseline — the number of hours you are actually sleeping, the quality of those hours, the frequency with which you wake up in…
At some point in your career, you needed help. Maybe you needed someone to talk through a situation that had no clean answer. Maybe you were overwhelmed in a way that was affecting your work. Maybe you were carrying something personally that was making the professional weight harder to hold. Maybe you just needed someone…
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…
There is a version of principal coaching that is widespread, well-intentioned, and genuinely insufficient. It follows the post-observation conversation format: the principal shares what they observed, names what went well, identifies what could be stronger, and describes what better practice would look like. The teacher listens, agrees where they can, pushes back where they feel…
The question gets asked quietly and rarely in public because the answer carries professional weight before it is even given. Can I go back to the classroom? Would that be a retreat or a return? Would the people who know me professionally see a demotion story or a deliberate choice? I want to separate two…
There are things you are accountable for that you cannot fully control. This is not a complaint. It is the structural reality of the principal role — and it is one of the most quietly exhausting aspects of the job, precisely because it is almost never named honestly. Your school’s funding can be cut at…
You left the building. Your body is in the car, or on the train, or walking to wherever you go at the end of the day. But you are still there — in the 2pm conversation you’re rerunning, in the email you’re composing in your head, in the situation from this afternoon that doesn’t have…