How Much Teaching Experience Should You Need Before Becoming an Administrator?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses the debate over how many years of teaching experience should be required before someone moves into school administration.
Key Takeaways
- There's no magic number - Some excellent leaders transition after a few years while some longtime teachers struggle in admin
- Quality of experience matters more than quantity - What you learned during your teaching years matters more than how many you accumulated
- Both extremes are problematic - Too little experience means you don't understand the job; too much may mean you've waited too long
Transcript
Does being a good teacher make you a good administrator or are they different skill sets?
I've seen a lot of discussions around how many years of experience teaching you should have to have before you become an administrator.
And I believe pretty firmly that you should be a teacher before you become an administrator.
I've seen like a couple exceptions where somebody was maybe a school counselor before becoming an administrator and that worked out okay but like I think generally it is a good rule that you should have to teach for a certain number of years before you become an administrator let me know how many years you think it should be when I became a principal the minimum was three years and I had more than that but I think three years is like not really enough and some people say 10 years and 10 years to me seems excessive it seems past the point of diminishing returns where it's like if you're going to get better and better each year as a teacher that's gonna start to taper off after about seven years.
Like you're not going to be much better as a teacher in year 10 than you are in year seven.
So I'm not really sure what the value would be there for becoming an administrator.
And I'm curious what you think about the value of teaching experience or the necessity of teaching experience for being an administrator at all.
And I'm especially curious if you have ever come across someone who was a great teacher, but a terrible administrator.
because I feel like there's kind of a necessary but not sufficient aspect to this, right?
There's experience that you need.
There's perspective that you need.
There's knowledge of how to teach that you need in order to supervise teachers.
But at the same time, supervising is different from doing it yourself.
And I think we've probably all experienced people who just had like different skill sets.
So let me know what you think.
How much experience do you need as a teacher to become an administrator?
Have you ever had a great teacher become a bad administrator?
Let me know what you think.