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…
You have looked at the initiative. You have read the accompanying research, which is either thin or contextually irrelevant to your specific school population. You have mentally mapped the implementation against the reality of your building and identified at least three ways this is going to create more problems than it solves. You have attended…
There is a specific kind of leadership fatigue that is not about the hard days themselves. The hard days are survivable when the easy ones still exist in the balance — when there are enough days that feel like the work is worth what it asks, that remind you why you are here, that provide…
The principal who genuinely wants to be an instructional leader and the principal who is living in their office managing operational demands all day — these two principals are often the same person, in the same week, losing the same fight. The fight is not about priorities. Ask most principals what their most important responsibility…
There is a version of staff conflict that principals can legitimately stay out of. Two colleagues navigate a professional disagreement, reach some workable resolution or agree to disagree professionally, and the building culture absorbs it without lasting damage. The principal does not need to be the mediator of every interpersonal friction in a building full…
You are not at the end. That much is clear. The retirement horizon is still years out. There is professional energy left — real energy, not performance — that wants to go somewhere meaningful. You are not done with work. You are specifically, precisely done with this. Done with the principalship as it has been…
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…