If you have been a principal for any real length of time, you have a graveyard. Not a literal one. But a professional one. The initiative that arrived with a district-wide rollout, consumed two years of professional development, and quietly disappeared when the next superintendent came in. The platform that was going to transform how…
I want to talk about something that most principal professional development avoids because it is uncomfortable: the school improvement plan that does not improve the school. You know this pattern. The data review in August that identifies the priority. The goal that goes on the CIP. The initiative announced in September. The professional development in…
If you are preparing to become a principal right now, you are in one of the most interesting positions available in education: you are preparing to step into a role that is changing faster than any preparation program has been able to document. The job description you are reading in your coursework, the case studies…
Let me tell you what the AI conversation in your building looks like right now if you have not led it explicitly. Some of your teachers are using AI tools enthusiastically and productively, and telling each other about it in the staff lounge. Some are using it quietly and feeling vaguely uncertain about whether they…
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…
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…