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…
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…
There is a particular kind of principal legacy that cannot be captured in a school improvement data report. It does not show up in the metrics that get discussed at board meetings or referenced in district newsletters. It shows up years later, in the professional trajectories of teachers who stayed in this profession past the…
Every teacher who has been in education for more than three years can tell you, with precision, what a waste of time looks like in a staff meeting. It looks like an hour of information that could have been a two-paragraph email. It looks like a presentation that the principal prepared and the staff received…
There is a version of principal coaching that is widespread, well-intentioned, and genuinely insufficient. It follows the post-observation conversation format: the principal shares what they observed, names what went well, identifies what could be stronger, and describes what better practice would look like. The teacher listens, agrees where they can, pushes back where they feel…
The question gets asked quietly and rarely in public because the answer carries professional weight before it is even given. Can I go back to the classroom? Would that be a retreat or a return? Would the people who know me professionally see a demotion story or a deliberate choice? I want to separate two…