Let me name the conversation that most principals are not having with their district yet but should be. AI tools are entering the teacher evaluation process. In some districts they are already there, generating rating recommendations from observation data, flagging patterns in walkthrough notes, summarizing evaluation portfolios. In most districts they are coming within two…
There is a version of this you tell people. The professionally managed version that shows up at district meetings. You are learning a lot. The staff is great. You are still figuring some things out. And there is the real version. The one that exists at 3am when you are running the Tuesday meeting through…
Every week, someone publishes something about what AI can do for school leaders. The scheduling it can optimize. The communications it can draft. The data it can analyze. That conversation is useful and mostly accurate. What I rarely see is the other half of the conversation. Not what AI can do — what it structurally…
Let me give you a number. The average principal works 58 hours a week. Research on AI’s impact on knowledge work tasks suggests that 20 to 40 percent of that time is spent on tasks that are now automatable with current tools. That is 12 to 23 hours per week. Call it 17 hours at…
Let me tell you what I know about the question in the title. I know it gets typed into Google late at night. I know it gets asked in whispered conversations at principal conferences when someone brings up the word AI and the room gets a little quieter. I know it is sitting underneath a…
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 —…
Here is what imposter syndrome in the principalship actually sounds like: not ‘I do not belong here’ — but rather ‘everyone is about to find out that I do not know what I am doing.’ It is the specific, low-grade dread of the qualified, experienced person who has stepped into a role where the competence…
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 By 10am the day you planned has been replaced by the day that happened to you.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…
There is a very specific kind of difficulty that comes with leading the people you used to teach beside — and it is different from every other leadership challenge you will face in the first year. It is personal in a way that most leadership problems are not. Because the person across from you is…
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…