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…
You are not at the end. That much is clear. The retirement horizon is still years out. There is professional energy left — real energy, not performance — that wants to go somewhere meaningful. You are not done with work. You are specifically, precisely done with this. Done with the principalship as it has been…
I have said it more times than I can count. In staff meetings when the news was bad and the work needed to continue anyway. In conversations with teachers who were exhausted and needed direction more than sympathy. In my own head in the car on the way to school on the days when I…
You have a headache that showed up on Tuesday and hasn’t fully left. Your shoulders have been carrying tension for so long that you’ve stopped noticing it except when someone points it out or you catch yourself mid-roll trying to release it. Your jaw is tight more mornings than not. Your back hurts in that…
It’s 3:17pm and you just realized you haven’t eaten since 6:45 this morning. Not because you were dieting. Not because you forgot food existed. But because the day happened — the conversations and the crises and the emails and the decisions and the people and the problems — and somewhere in the middle of all…
The guilt arrives almost the moment the intention does. You decide — genuinely, concretely decide — that you are not going to check email after a certain hour, or that you are going to take one real day off this weekend, or that dinner with your family is going to happen without the school occupying…
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…
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…