I am not going to tell you the specific circumstances. Not because they are not real and not because protecting them serves me in some way. Because the specific story matters less than the experience it names — which is the experience of a professional life built so thoroughly around the performance of competence that…
One semester. That is the realistic window in which a principal can move a school from a state of visible, pervasive behavioral chaos to a state of discernible, stable consistency. Not perfection. Not the school culture of their full vision. Consistency — the specific condition in which the expectations are clear enough and held through…
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 professional decision to leave school leadership almost never stays entirely professional. It eventually moves from the car on the commute home to the kitchen table, from the internal deliberation to the conversation that the people who live with you have been waiting for, in some form, for longer than you realize. Because they have…
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…
At some point this week, something will happen that would produce a genuine emotional response in any human being. A conversation that carries real weight. A situation that is sad or frightening or infuriating under the surface of its professional framing. A moment where the stakes are high enough and the human cost real enough…
When was the last time you were genuinely excited about something at work? Not satisfied. Not relieved that something went well. Not the functional okay that comes at the end of a day that didn’t produce a crisis. Actually excited — the feeling that brought you to this work in the first place, the feeling…
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…