District politics are real. They affect schools in ways that are sometimes visible and sometimes invisible. Budget decisions that were made for political rather than educational reasons. Initiative priorities that reflect board dynamics rather than student outcomes. Leadership transitions above the principal level that shift the institutional terrain without notice or consultation. Alliances and rivalries…
I was a teacher before I was anything else in this profession, and I want to be honest about what that means when I reflect on what moving into administration required. I was a bilingual Spanish teacher for seven years. Not as a stopping point on the way to something else — as the work…
Every veteran teacher in your building has an internal change initiative counter. They have been through enough cycles of the new program — announced with urgency, supported with professional development, monitored with accountability structures, and then quietly replaced by the next priority before the last one was fully implemented — that the counter has reached…
The call comes from HR, or the letter from district counsel, or the message from your supervisor conveying information in carefully neutral language that communicates unmistakably what has happened. A teacher has filed a formal complaint against you. The specifics of the complaint, when you receive them, range from a distorted account of a real…
The transfer is one of the most accessible career moves available to a principal in difficulty. New school, same role, same district, different context. The specific problems of the current building — the resistant staff who have been there since before you arrived, the community relationship that calcified into something adversarial before you had the…
I was a bilingual kindergarten teacher before I was anything else in this work. I still remember the first day with my first class. Backpacks bigger than the kids carrying them. Brand new crayons, unbroken, still smelling like crayons. Five-year-olds standing at the door of the next thirteen years of their lives, half excited and…
I want to say this carefully and then directly: at some point during my administrative career I started therapy. Not because I was in crisis. Not because something dramatic had happened that required professional intervention. Because I had been doing one of the most emotionally complex and relationally demanding jobs that exists, for years, without…
The classroom walkthrough is simultaneously the most powerful instructional leadership tool available to a principal and one of the most consistently misused. Misused not through bad intention but through the failure to distinguish between two fundamentally different reasons for being in a classroom: evaluation and partnership. When teachers experience classroom visits primarily as surveillance —…
You knew about them before you officially arrived. The information travels — in the way that information about significant building dynamics always travels — through the colleague in another school, the district administrator who phrased something carefully in a way that communicated more than the words said, the file that contained performance documentation that stopped…
The story that gets told about school leadership recovery usually involves a new location. New school, new community, new beginning. The reset narrative tends to assume that change of context is the primary vehicle for change of practice. This post is for the reset that happens in place. The principal who has looked honestly at…