School Leadership & the Principal Role FAQ

What's the #1 quality teachers want in a principal?

Backbone. Not charisma, not innovative ideas -- the courage to hold boundaries, say no to unreasonable demands, follow through on discipline, and have teachers' backs. If you can't do that, nothing else you bring to the table matters.

Do teachers really leave because of their principal?

The principal is the single biggest factor. A good principal buffers staff from district dysfunction, backs them up, and creates conditions where people want to stay. Even in a dysfunctional district, a good principal can keep great teachers from walking out the door.

What's the most important form of teacher appreciation?

Professional respect. Not pizza parties, not jeans passes, not cute little gifts. Teachers want to be trusted to do their jobs, given reasonable working conditions, and treated like the adult professionals they are. Gestures without respect are insulting, not appreciative.

Should principals say "I love you" to their staff?

No. That crosses a professional boundary. You can express deep gratitude, trust, and admiration without using language that belongs in personal relationships, not supervisor-employee ones.

Is it a red flag when a principal calls their school "a family"?

Yes. In my experience, "we're like a family" is often cover for missing boundaries -- demanding more than what's contractually appropriate, pressuring people into unpaid duties, or creating controlling dynamics. A school is a professional workplace, not a family.

Should principals make all the decisions?

No, and they can't -- they don't have the bandwidth or the information. The people closest to a decision should make it. Teachers need decision-making authority over their own work. Centralizing everything creates bottlenecks and produces worse outcomes.

Why do some principals treat teachers like students?

They never made the mental shift from working with children to leading adults. If you were a great elementary teacher, that's wonderful -- but your staff is not your class. Adults need professional trust and decision-making authority, not attention signals and candy rewards.

Is your employer entitled to your vulnerability and emotions?

No. Your employer is buying your time and skills. Demanding "your whole self," forced vulnerability exercises, and mandatory emotional sharing cross professional boundaries. Teachers should be kind, effective, and professional -- they don't owe their employer their heart.

What makes school culture actually good?

Working conditions, not cheerleading. A safe building, reasonable workloads, professional respect, continuity, and trust. When those are in place, you don't need balloons and birthday parties to keep morale up. Fix the conditions and positive culture follows naturally.

Why do so many school initiatives fail?

Because we start too many and finish none. School improvement isn't about collecting acronyms -- it's about doing a few things well. Leaders make decisions on the front end and move on, while teachers are still implementing the last initiative. That misalignment is why people are overwhelmed.

What does "go slow to go fast" mean in education?

Most substantive changes take multiple years. But senior leaders get new budgets and new ideas every year, and they keep starting new things before the last one is finished. The discipline to say "our strategic plan this year is to do nothing new" is rare, but it's often exactly what's needed.

Should schools try to "disrupt" the status quo?

No. The status quo exists because it does some sort of job. You need to understand what that job is before you replace it. In advertising, they call a proven performer a "control" -- they run it until they find something that actually beats it. Education should do the same. Surpass the status quo; don't just blow it up.

What is Chesterton's Fence and why does it matter for schools?

It's the principle that you shouldn't remove something until you understand why it exists. A fence in a field might be keeping in a bull. Schools have eliminated consequences, policies, and structures without understanding the jobs those things were doing -- and they're paying the price.

Are most new ideas in education actually good?

No. The good ideas have mostly been discovered after generations of millions of adults working with tens of millions of students. Truly new ideas are statistically unlikely to be better than proven practices. Unlike pharmaceuticals, education has no threshold test a new idea must pass before widespread adoption -- and that's a problem.

Why is groupthink such a problem in education?

Educators who question popular ideas risk professional consequences, so dissent gets silenced. Ideas gain traction through social pressure, not evidence. We're even seeing students tested in groups now, which defeats the entire purpose of assessment. We need more critical voices, not fewer.

Should leaders focus on outcome accountability or process accountability?

Process. When you hold schools accountable for outcomes like test scores and graduation rates, Campbell's Law kicks in -- people manipulate the numbers instead of improving the underlying reality. Focus on what schools are doing: Are they teaching effectively? Are they keeping students safe? That's harder to fake.

Should leaders seek validation?

No -- seek wisdom. Validation-seeking is a trap, especially because leaders are so starved for it. When you share a "nice thing" you did and people point out the underlying problem, that's wisdom, not an attack. Surround yourself with honest advisors, not sycophants. Marcus Aurelius kept his father's advisors for a reason.

What matters more for an instructional leader -- experience or curiosity?

Curiosity and humility, hands down. A 30-year veteran who taught your exact subject can still be a terrible instructional leader if they're disrespectful and not curious. I didn't have a lot of elementary experience when I became an elementary principal, but teachers taught me because I was willing to listen.

Is it ever appropriate to be negative about school practices?

Yes. When practices waste people's time, demean professionals, or drive people out of the profession, the solution is often just "stop it." Toxic positivity silences honest evaluation. Calling out bad practices -- like collecting lesson plans nobody reads -- isn't negativity. It's professional accountability.

Do leaders need to be willing to do unpleasant things?

Absolutely. Expelling a student for assaulting a teacher is unpleasant, but it's better than losing all your teachers. Holding high standards, enforcing consequences, and making tough calls are uncomfortable in the short term but necessary for the community's long-term wellbeing.

What's the #1 productivity hack for school leaders?

Set a quitting time and stick to it. Parkinson's Law says work expands to fill the time available. If you don't give yourself a deadline, you'll work inefficiently all evening. Go home. Rest makes tomorrow's work better than another hour of diminishing returns tonight.

What's the main job of central office?

Competence, not innovation. Schools need central offices that do the basics well -- staffing, budgeting, supporting schools. The push to be innovative distracts from core responsibilities. I've seen districts accidentally lay off teachers due to basic bookkeeping errors. Get the fundamentals right before chasing the next big thing.

Is central office admin bloat a real problem?

Yes. Central office administrators have increased about 88% in two decades while the teacher-to-student ratio hasn't changed. Much of what those positions produce is busywork for teachers -- "data-driven" mandates from people who never get into classrooms. Those resources would often be better spent in schools.

What's the difference between servant leadership and making work for people?

Simple: does this central office leader make schools' jobs easier or harder? True servant leaders support the people they supervise. The other kind sits in headquarters, buys programs, and issues mandates without ever seeing a classroom. If you stay in your office and shop, you're going to create busywork.

Should principals stop collecting lesson plans?

Yes. No researcher I've interviewed in 400+ podcast episodes has ever endorsed this practice. Nobody reads them, teachers often submit the same plans with different dates, and the time would be far better spent actually visiting classrooms. This is a made-up requirement with zero evidence behind it.

Should we stop giving teachers busywork to make admin look good?

Absolutely. Posting lesson plans in hallways, building data walls, and preparing materials for when the superintendent tours your building -- all of this wastes teacher time to serve administrator optics. If you want to see learning, walk into the classroom. It's right on the other side of that wall.

Is burnout an individual issue or systemic?

Primarily systemic. When you see the same churn over and over in an organization, it's the conditions, not the people. Self-care can't fix impossible workloads. That said, individuals can also overcommit themselves -- no organization can save you from that. We need to fight both.

How do we fix teacher retention?

Compete on working conditions. Stop seeing teachers as a bottomless resource of goodwill, time, and personal sacrifice. Make the job doable. Strip away non-essential duties. Provide safe schools, manageable workloads, and professional respect. Teachers have choices -- treat them like they do.

Should districts give teachers curriculum or make them create it?

Give them curriculum. Writing curriculum is a full-time job. Teaching curriculum is a full-time job. Asking people to do both at once is "building the airplane while flying it." We've slandered this as "teacher-proof" or "scripted," but providing quality curriculum is basic professional support.

Is teaching too flat a profession?

Yes. You start as a teacher and retire as a teacher with no advancement path that keeps you in the classroom. Nursing has career ladders. Software development has senior engineer tracks. Education has nothing -- and our best teachers get promoted out of the classroom, which is backwards.

Should the best teachers become administrators?

Not necessarily. The Peter Principle applies -- great teachers sometimes become bad administrators because the skill sets are different. What we need are advancement pathways within teaching itself: lead teacher, mentor, specialist roles that keep excellent teachers in classrooms where they have the most impact.

How competitive is the admin job search?

Extremely. There are often 100+ applicants per position. You should expect to apply for 25-50 jobs to get an offer, and you should be getting interviews about 20% of the time. If you're not, your application materials need work. This is not like getting a teaching job -- it's a tournament.

Why do people get discouraged in the admin job search?

Because they expect it to be like getting a teaching job -- apply, get hired. When they apply for three positions and get none, they think something's wrong with them. Nothing is wrong. Admin hiring is just genuinely competitive, and persistence is the price of admission. Keep applying and keep getting better.

How should I prepare for an admin interview?

Practice five-minute answers organized around three main points -- the Rule of Three. Record yourself on your phone. Most candidates don't practice at all, so this alone gives you a massive edge. Work in one short story per answer that illustrates your qualifications, but keep it to one minute and make sure it's about you, not just the story.

Should I use AI to write my cover letter?

Use it as a starting point, but never submit what it produces without heavy personalization. If 800 candidates use AI without adding specifics about themselves, every cover letter sounds identical -- and hiring committees notice immediately. Your cover letter must include details about you, your accomplishments, and the specific role.

How much teaching experience do you need before becoming a principal?

There's no magic number, but you need enough to understand what teachers face daily. I taught four years before starting my certification program and became a principal at 27. More years don't automatically make you a better leader -- attitude and humility matter more than tenure. But skipping teaching entirely is generally a bad idea.

How do I get a strong recommendation letter?

Ask early -- months before you need it, not days. Request a draft so you have a natural opening to suggest revisions. Provide your resume and the job description. And don't underestimate the networking benefit: telling people you're looking activates your professional network in ways that help beyond the letter itself.

How many teachers can one administrator effectively supervise?

Far fewer than most schools assume. Research on span of control — including work from McKinsey — suggests that effective supervision breaks down well before the 30:1 ratios common in many schools. A principal directly supervising 30 or more teachers simply cannot provide the frequency of classroom visits, depth of feedback, and quality of evaluation that each teacher deserves.

This isn't a criticism of principals — it's a structural observation. The solution isn't harder-working principals. It's building a layer of leadership between the principal and the classroom: department heads and team leaders with real authority over curriculum, instruction, and assessment — not just meeting facilitation duties.

When team leaders carry genuine instructional leadership responsibility, the principal's span of control shrinks to a manageable number of leaders rather than an unmanageable number of teachers. That's how organizations of every other type operate. Schools are the outlier. Technology also helps: asynchronous video coaching via Sibme means coaching conversations don't require two schedules to align, which increases the frequency of meaningful feedback within a larger span of care.

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How do I build a shared instructional framework if my district doesn't provide one?

You already have one — it's just scattered. Your teacher evaluation rubric, your curriculum guides, your professional development priorities, and your school improvement plan all contain expectations for instruction. Taken together, they form a framework. The work isn't creating something from nothing — it's assembling and organizing what already exists.

Start by gathering every document that describes what good teaching should look like in your school. Then look for gaps: areas where you have strong expectations but no shared language, or areas where the language is so broad that everyone interprets it differently. Those gaps are where additional specificity is needed.

For targeted improvement in a specific practice area, you may want to develop a more detailed framework — one that describes what proficient practice looks like in that area at multiple levels of development. That's a collaborative process best done with teachers, starting from classroom observations and professional conversations about what the work actually involves. Reviewing classroom video together via Sibme accelerates this process — shared footage gives teams a concrete reference for what criteria look like in actual practice, surfacing disagreements about "proficient" in ways that rubric discussions alone rarely do.