There is a type of principal burnout that does not look like burnout from the outside. It looks like energy. It looks like presence. It looks like someone who is fully invested in the work, constantly moving, always available, perpetually in the middle of something important. From the inside it feels different. There is an…
The conversation about principal sustainability almost always comes back to resilience. Build more of it. Develop it. Practice it. The resilient principal, the narrative goes, is the one who weathers the storms better — who bounces back faster, absorbs more, recovers quicker. The research does not entirely support this story. And the principals who have…
Here is something that nobody in educational leadership policy talks about, but every principal knows from the inside: the principalship is structured for isolation. Not accidentally. Structurally. The principal is responsible for everyone in the building, which means they cannot be fully a peer to anyone in it. The principal is evaluated by the district,…
There is a version of accountability culture in schools that makes the building feel like a surveillance operation. The principal observing constantly, writing things down, following up formally, communicating expectations with the energy of someone waiting for a violation. Staff who are performing rather than teaching. A culture of compliance rather than one of commitment….
You have seen this teacher. They were good — possibly very good — and then at some point something shifted. It may have been gradual enough that you are not sure exactly when it started. The lesson planning that used to have real thought behind it now meets the technical minimum. The student relationships that…
I want to show you a picture of what principal recovery actually looks like. Not the version that gets posted. The version that happens. It looks like a principal who still has hard days — possibly harder days, at least at first, because they are now doing things differently instead of defaulting to the patterns…
Twenty years in education does something to a person that cannot be replicated in any other way. Not through a leadership program, not through a corporate career, not through any amount of reading about schools or studying them from the outside. It gives you something that is impossible to manufacture and equally impossible to fully…
Your family notices before you do. They notice the specific silence in the car ride home from school events that is different from the easy quiet of someone who has had a full day. They notice that you are present at the dinner table and not present at the dinner table at the same time…
Every principal who has tried to change something in a school has encountered this moment: the meeting where you present the direction, the new approach, the shift you are asking for — and you can feel the room dividing in real time. The enthusiastic nodders in the front. The quiet skeptics in the middle. The…
There is a particular kind of classroom that you know the moment you walk past the door. The noise that tells you instruction is not happening. The students who have decided that this classroom is a place where the rules do not apply. The teacher who looks up when you appear in the doorway with…