I want to address something directly that I know some veteran principals are carrying quietly. The suspicion that the AI era belongs to younger leaders. That the comfort with technology, the native fluency with new platforms, the appetite for rapid change — these favor the early-career principal and leave the experienced one behind. I understand…
There is a specific kind of tired that principals carry that sleep does not fix. You know the one. You come home at the end of a week that was not even particularly difficult — no crisis, no dramatic conflict, just the steady accumulation of other people’s needs and fears and hard things that arrived…
A teacher has been given a clear, reasonable directive. They know the expectation. And they are not following it. Not because they forgot. Not because they misunderstood. Because they have decided, either explicitly or through passive non-compliance, that the directive does not apply to them. This is a test. Not of the teacher’s performance —…
There is a version of the school principal’s day that is almost entirely reactive. The calendar fills from the outside — meetings requested by others, crises that arrive without notice, staff who need five minutes that become twenty. By 10am the day you planned has been replaced by the day that happened to you. By…
Someone asked you recently how you are doing. Maybe it was a colleague. Maybe it was your supervisor at a check-in that felt more like a status meeting than a genuine question. Maybe it was your partner at the dinner table. And you said some version of: fine. Busy. Hanging in there. This post is…
I am going to tell you something that most educators in my position do not say publicly, because saying it requires the kind of honesty that professional culture does not reward. There were teachers who left buildings I led because of how I led. Not all of them. Not even most of them. But some….
There is a term in psychology — secondary traumatic stress — that describes what happens to people who are regularly exposed to the trauma of others. Social workers have it. First responders have it. Therapists have it. The research on these populations is substantial: repeated exposure to others’ trauma, without adequate support and processing, produces…
You know this person. They have an answer for everything. A reason for every missed deadline. A context for every performance concern. A circumstance that explains away every expectation that was not met. And here is the complicated part: sometimes the reasons are real. Life happens. Teaching is hard. Classrooms are complex. Not every missed…
Emotional labor is a term coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild to describe the management of feeling to fulfill the emotional requirements of a job. Flight attendants were her original research population. Service workers, nurses, therapists — these are the roles most commonly studied. Nobody studies principals. But if they did, the findings would be staggering….