it (despite telling me for weeks that he would), so my “pizzas” were misshapen, undercooked, and, I’d imagine, pretty gross to eat. He’d show up late, change the menu last-minute without reason, and pay us when it was convenient for him, but certainly not on a regular schedule. And on the rare occasions when he’d come into the kitchen, all I could think was, “Get out of here. You’re in the way. You don’t know what we do every day. So leave us alone so we can do our work.”
The way I felt about this boss is what many teachers express about their school leaders. They express the opinion that they’re successful (to whatever degree they are successful) not because of the school leader and their support, but in spite of them. In spite of their misaligned feedback. In spite of their cancelled meetings. In spite of their disconnect to the content. In spite of their unhelpful PD. In spite of their lack of follow-up. In spite of their infrequent visits to their classrooms.
This makes sense when you think about what happens at a typical school. The school year begins in the summer with some in-service training, usually around school and classroom norms, school culture, and content. Sometimes there’s goal setting and a revisiting of school values, with time to set up classrooms mixed in. Then students come, and in a lot of ways, teachers are then on their own. Even in schools with a lot of teacher coaching, where school leaders see each teacher every week for meetings and observations, teachers are still doing most of their work alone. And that’s in a school where the level of coaching is high. In most schools it’s significantly less than this. I recently had a teacher tell me, in March, that her principal hadn’t observed her all year. While most leaders see their teachers more often than this, for teachers, even an average amount of visits can feel really infrequent. Think about this: if a school leader is observing every teacher in her building nine times per year, which is once a month from September through May, and that teacher teaches four blocks of math a day, that means that teacher is teaching 720 blocks of math a year (four blocks multiplied by 180 days of school), 711 of which she’s teaching without feedback or direct coaching.
The point is, teachers are used to doing things on their own. Even in schools where support is sky-high, where a school leader does fifty or seventy-five observations a year per teacher, teachers still do the overwhelming majority of their work solo.
So, what often happens is teachers begin to see their school leaders as nuisances. As people totally out of touch with what’s actually happening in classrooms. This is why some teachers push back on evaluations (or want them eliminated altogether). Because it can feel like the person evaluating them doesn’t know what they’re doing. Leaders pick up on this, but they’re often not sure how to address it. So, they default to doing two things: hiding and high-fiving.
First, they spend a lot of time “hiding” in their offices. People like to feel successful, and school leaders are no different. They can feel the icy stares from teachers when they enter their rooms. They can see their feedback isn’t being implemented. So, they sit in their offices, responding to emails, meeting with parents, handling operations issues, and in some cases, spending the entire day with a student who’s gotten into trouble. These leaders are not visible throughout the day, choosing small victories with a handful of parents and students at the expense of positively impacting the larger school community.
Other school leaders decide to pull back from anything instructional at all. They know their feedback isn’t valued. They can feel that they’re in the teachers’ way. So, they become cheerleaders for the school. They circulate the building, patting people on the back, checking in to make sure people are okay, and “high-fiving” everyone they see, all the while, handing over the instructional reins to teachers. These leaders are usually liked by their teachers, which is what they’re striving for. But almost no one takes them seriously when it comes to impacting student outcomes.
In some of our trainings, we ask school leaders to write a job description for themselves. Not what they actually do every day, but what they believe they should do every day. Their answers are surprisingly aligned. They usually write something like this: “To positively impact students by coaching and supporting teachers.” But so many aren’t doing this. They’re either hiding or high-fiving.
To clarify, handling operations issues and meeting with parents are important parts of a school leader’s job. And a leader who has strong relationships and celebrates teachers is a great thing. What I’m suggesting is that doing only these things, out of lack of confidence or to simply avoid the pressure and inevitable discomfort of being the instructional lead in the building is (a) not an effective way to move the instructional needle for teachers and students and (b) not what leaders themselves report they should be doing.
Something else often happens, and it happens whether the school leader is hiding or hive-fiving. Some school leaders try to “fix” their instructional (and overall leadership) misses by implementing something new in their schools. They think this new thing will be the change the school has been looking for. The change it desperately needs. It could be a new math curriculum or a new approach to school culture. It could be a shift to blended learning or new SMART Boards. And on and on. All these new things do is lead to disinvestment and reform fatigue from teachers who likely don’t believe the school leader will be able to support the execution of whatever the new thing is anyway. Think back to my example of the boss at the Italian restaurant. It wouldn’t have mattered if he upgraded every ingredient in the building so that we used only the finest ingredients found anywhere. And it wouldn’t have mattered if he overhauled the entire menu from top to bottom. Building renovations, new job titles, and even changing the name of the restaurant wouldn’t have mattered. He was the issue. No new thing was going to fix that.
And while many leaders will point to the same culprit—lack of time —as the reason for their instructional misses and ineffectiveness, this is almost never the case. Yes, time is in short supply in this work (I’ll talk more about time later on). But it’s the hiding and high-fiving that are stopping them from being extraordinary leaders for teachers and students.
But we can fix that.
The solution is for a school leader to be an expert. An expert who provides accurate feedback, delivered succinctly, with clear criteria for improvement, followed by concrete goals and next steps. An expert in the way Tom Brady is an expert at throwing a football or Simone Biles is an expert at the balance beam.
Let’s journey back into the past again to my other job at an Italian restaurant. This boss was a hothead. He screamed. A lot. He threw garlic knots at us when we messed up. He cursed at us. But here’s the thing: I liked working for him. When a customer had an issue, he was front and center to handle it (sometimes throwing garlic knots at them if he thought their concern was petty). When the head chef called in sick, he stepped up and spent the night cooking and sweating with us in the kitchen. When it snowed and one of the delivery drivers got stuck in a snowbank, he was out there with us, in knee-deep snow, pushing the car out. He was there first and left last. He was an expert at every part of the business. He knew how to do everything, was willing to do anything, and he watched every staff member and critiqued us continually. He’d even give me feedback on the size of the balls of dough that would eventually become pizzas, which I was sometimes charged with rolling. If there was one that was too small, even slightly, he always caught it. And while I didn’t enjoy being yelled at by him (and I don’t suggest doing this with your teachers, ever), it was always after I’d done something that didn’t meet the bar he’d set for us. It was always in an attempt to make me better.
While it’s likely not possible for any school leader to be an expert at everything from phonics to chemistry and from abstract art to The Scarlet Letter (and I’d argue they shouldn’t be), it is possible for you to become an expert at building classroom culture, lesson design and delivery, and deeply engaging students, regardless of content. But to do this, you need a simplified approach that allows you to simultaneously build your knowledge, capacity, and confidence. And I dive into this approach in the next chapter.
