For many new principals and superintendents, July 1 feels like the starting line. A new title. A new office. A new opportunity to make a difference. I still remember those first days. When I became principal, I wasn’t new to the building. I had served as the assistant principal, so I already knew the staff, […]
For a long time, I believed I was practicing servant leadership. If a teacher had a problem, I stepped in. If an assistant principal was overwhelmed, I took something off their plate. If a parent was upset, I handled the conversation. If something needed to get done, I did it. I wasn’t trying to control […]
There I was in the Boise airport, walking toward my gate, when I stopped. Completely stopped. My flight wasn’t delayed, I hadn’t forgotten something, I wasn’t even being paged back to the TSA counter. Nope…I stopped because sitting across the ramp was the Alaska Airlines Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge livery. I wasn’t flying on it. […]
As I wrapped up a week of leadership work with one of the districts I support in Virginia, I found myself returning to one theme over and over again: The importance of intentional reflection. Not surface-level reflection. Not the kind where leaders quickly say, “Yeah, this year was good,” before immediately shifting into staffing conversations, […]
For a long time, I thought being a great principal meant being everything to everyone. I believed great leaders solved every problem, answered every question, handled every crisis, and somehow still found time to lead the building well. As a result, most weeks felt like survival. From the moment I walked through the doors each […]
There’s a moment every school leader reaches sometime in May where they stop thinking about “finishing strong” and start thinking about one thing: Let’s just land this thing safely. As a high school principal, I used to compare the end of the school year to being the pilot of an airplane. Everyone else on board […]
As a school and district leader, I occasionally found myself in situations where employees had made poor choices or simply were not following through on expectations I had clearly communicated. In one particular situation, I had several conversations with an employee over a period of time. We discussed concerns, expectations, next steps, and areas where […]
There was a teacher early in my administrative career who didn’t want to be in my building. He had been forced to transfer to the high school, and he made it clear—often—that he preferred where he came from. He spoke highly of his previous principal, and whether he intended it or not, it came across […]
Every leader knows how to build a plan. We set goals.We identify priorities.We map out what we want to accomplish in the year ahead. And if you’re like most leaders I work with, you’ve probably already done that work for next year. But here’s the part we don’t spend nearly enough time on: What happens […]
Every leader knows how to build a plan. We set goals.We identify priorities.We map out what we want to accomplish in the year ahead. And if you’re like most leaders I work with, you’ve probably already done that work for next year. But here’s the part we don’t spend nearly enough time on: What happens […]
