A principal in a small school holds a position with no natural limit. Every matter involving a student, a parent, a staff member, a facility, or the community arrives eventually, and there is nobody below to absorb it.
The role is frequently held by somebody promoted for being an excellent teacher, which is the technical trap described in the promotions entry and produces predictable difficulty in the first two years.
Supervising people who know more than you
A principal supervises teachers across subjects and grades they have never taught, several of whom have been doing it longer.
The instinct is to compensate by asserting expertise, which fails immediately and permanently, or to withdraw from instructional matters entirely, which is the more common failure and produces a principal who manages a building.
The position that works is the one from the corresponding entry in the first volume. You are not there to know their subject better than they do. You are there to hold the standard, supply what they need, and make judgments about the whole that no individual is positioned to make.
Saying that plainly to a veteran teacher — I am not going to tell you how to teach chemistry, and I am going to be in your room and I will have questions — establishes the relationship more effectively than any amount of demonstrated competence.
The observation that means something
Formal observation cycles produce documentation and frequently produce nothing else, for the reason set out in the feedback entry: they merge feedback with evaluation.
A teacher who suspects that a conversation about their practice is also a conversation about their standing will attend to the second and hear none of the first.
Separating them costs one sentence at the start and changes what is possible. This is not going in anything, I want to talk about the second half of the lesson.
Frequent brief presence, with brief specific observations, does more than three formal cycles a year. It also means a principal’s presence is ordinary rather than an event, which is the condition under which they see what actually happens.
The parent conversation
A recurring situation with a reliable structure: a parent arrives upset about something involving their child and a teacher.
Two failures are available. Defending the teacher before establishing the facts, which tells the parent the outcome was decided before they spoke. Or conceding in the room to end the discomfort, which undermines a staff member who is not present and cannot answer.
The position that holds is procedural. Hear the account fully, without adjudicating. State what you will do and by when. Then actually do it, including going back to them when the answer is not what they wanted.
Most enduring grievance against a school originates in somebody feeling they were dismissed rather than in the eventual outcome, which is the finding from the hearings entry and applies exactly here.
What a principal actually controls
Considerably less than the accountability suggests, and being clear about it prevents years of effort aimed at the immovable.
Not the budget, the staffing allocation, the curriculum framework, the calendar, or in most cases who is hired into a vacancy.
What is controlled: how time is allocated within the building, what is noticed and what is let pass, who is developed, what happens when a standard is broken, and the register in which people speak to each other.
That second list is the culture of the school, and it is entirely a principal’s to set. It is also, by the argument in the culture chapter, the thing that determines what the building is actually like to work in and to attend.
Constructing a boundary
Since the role has no natural limit, one has to be built, and principals who do not build one leave the profession.
Decide in advance what gets a same-day response and what does not, and tell people. A parent who knows they will hear back within two days will wait; one who does not know will call again.
Route what belongs elsewhere. A principal who takes every matter personally because it is faster than routing it has ensured that everything comes to them permanently.
And protect one block of time in the week for the instructional work, because it is the only part of the job that has no deadline attached and is therefore the first thing consumed.
The isolation is real
A principal in a small school has no peer in the building. The staff cannot be confided in, the superintendent is an evaluator, and the community knows them personally.
The material from the isolation entry applies, including its central distinction. The informational problem — having nobody who will tell you the truth about your own situation — is solvable by constructing a small set of independent people, and principals in comparable schools elsewhere are the obvious source.
That is a phone call to two people in neighbouring districts, made once, and it is the most useful thing a new principal can do in their first term.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD