After teaching for fourteen years in two districts and three different schools, I was given the exciting opportunity to be an elementary school principalâa leader of adult learners and of instruction. I remember two unexpected lessons sticking out to me the most in my first few months as a building principal.
September was approaching, and I was eagerly anticipating and planning the beginning of the school year and the first day that I was to report to work as the principal of McKinley Elementary School in Wyandotte, Michigan. I was strong and ready on the outside, but inside I was worried that I wouldnât know what to do in this new role. What if I am terrible at being a principal? What if I donât know the answers? I donât even know what the questions will be! I was also a relatively new momâmy daughter Mia was one and a half years old. This new role was different from teaching kids, and teaching was my professional passion. I was really good at teaching (at least that is what people told me).
I went in that first day determined that I was not going to make up answers but that I would present myself with the very best fake confidence I could possibly muster.
Within twenty minutes on my first day on the job, Jo, the daytime facility and maintenance employee, approached me with a distressing situation regarding the pear tree on the backside of school property. She shared that the tree had been planted by a class, and it was a sacred marker for the school. Then she said it was slated to be cut and removed within the next few days by the district. She said this tree was special for the school and that I needed to stop this action.
âOK, how do I stop this?â I was sure I was not going to have a voice because this decision had already been made by the district.
Jo looked at me strangely and said, âYou are the principal, and this is your school.â She was probably just as puzzled as I wasâbut for different reasons. Jo was operating under the assumption that in the formal organizational system my new title and rank carried enough influence for me to simply reverse this decision. I was a naĂŻve first-day principal. I believed my influence was the same as it was the day before. I had absolutely no expertise on trees; therefore, I should not have any control over the fate of a tree located on the schoolâs property.
She told me to call the director of operations and simply tell him he could not cut down the tree because it was special. Now, I had worked as a teacher at this school for three years before becoming the principal, and I had no idea the tree was special. I like trees, but I didnât really notice or know anything about this tree. So I took Joâs word that its specialness dated from before my time and I was just unaware of it.
Taking Joâs advice, I called the director of operations. Once I had him on the phone, I told him what Jo told me. âEd, the tree that is intended to be removed is very special. I donât think it should be removed.â
His reply was very short and very clear. âOK. We will leave it there. You are the principal.â
I suppose some would have liked this response and loved this newfound power, but I must admit that it put me in a place of great discomfort. How can my new title influence an action such as this? I didnât even give a good reason (frankly, I didnât have one). For fourteen years as a teacher I had acted with purpose and sought out support from my administration for any change initiative by sharing a specific purpose and the positive impact it would have on students. That day I made a phone call based on one personâs opinion that I didnât have full understanding of, and that phone call led to a quick decision that lacked justification. If it had been two months earlier when I was still a fourth-grade teacher, no one would have listened to me about that tree.
That first day as a principal was when I first understood the concept of a position of power. I honestly didnât like it. Now what? What if I make a mistake? From this day forward, every mistake I make will be bigger and worse than my mistakes were as a teacher! I was a really good teacher (I think), but what if I fail as a principal?!
Ironically, one year later that special pear tree was struck by lightning and had to be cut down. Hmmm. Undoubtedly, there was a deep lesson there. I am not sure what it was exactly, but I will tell you, I felt that in some way the world righted itself that day from my mistake. For the record, saving a tree was not the mistakeâmy naĂŻve leadership decisions were.
Today, as a leader and principal, I work each day to always act with purpose. If our students and teachers have no purpose or opportunity for growth, there is no reason to invest time and effort in the school day. But instructional rounds can help to clarify and spark that sense of purpose and provide opportunity for that growth. The effects theyâve had on both adult and student learning is incredible.
You know that intense, innocent zeal you feel your first year of teaching? I think it is the same for your first year as a principal. I viewed myself as an instructional leader, and I could not wait to get into classrooms and work with teachers. I was the brand-new principal of the school I had been a teacher at for the three years prior. It was perfect (in my head) because I had not been there too long, yet I had been there long enough to have relationships. I knew the needs and strengths of the school and the staff. I had a sense of our growth opportunities. Just like every year I had taught, I had a driving mission to make a difference. Now I would make a difference as a principal. Now I would make a difference beyond the walls of my fourth-grade classroom. I was going to make a difference in the whole school.
My first mission was the work I was most excited aboutâimproving teaching and learning. I needed to get in classrooms to observe and then talk to teachers. I prepared a lot on how to give feedback; I studied educational research on the best instructional practices; and I wanted to make teachers better. It started out very well. I felt like I was living my dream! It was easy and fun. My teachers loved the feedback, and we all played nice. I was growing the team while building a happy culture and remaining safe by interacting with my team in the friendliest kind of way. I wasnât taking risksâyet. I was not pushing my staff outside of their comfort zones.
Going into the classrooms of the colleagues I used to teach with was beyond eye-opening. As a teacher in isolation, I am not proud to say that I made judgments about my peers while I taught with them. Without ever seeing them teach, I had an opinion about who was a âgoodâ teacher and who was not. Finally, as a principal, I went into everyoneâs room often. Some of my previously held judgments were honestly unfairâone way or another. My assumptions didnât match my observations. Either way, I was hit hard by the amount of work I found to be done. As an educator, I did not know or appreciate my colleaguesâ strengths. As a principal, I saw that every teacher had strengths and growth opportunities that I was completely unaware of when I was their teaching colleague. My teachers were just as differentiated as my fourth-grade students were.
I have found that educators donât share their observations on other teachersâ strengths and growth opportunities. In fact, they may not even be aware of their own strengths or areas in need of improvement. I had much learning to do as a leader. I asked myself, âHow do I help our teachers to see what their colleagues are doing in their classrooms so that they can reflect on their own practices and learn from the strengths of each other?â I asked myself that question in year one. I then wrestled with that question for the next five years.
Remember how I mentioned that I had my (risk-free) dream job? That didnât last. In the beginning of my second year as a principal I gave birth to twin boys, Matthew and Zachary. I returned from maternity leave excited and ready to move forward with the work of helping teachers grow while this concept of getting teachers in each otherâs rooms to learn from each other was still percolating in my head. Within a month of returning from my maternity leave, my superintendent, Pat, came for an unexpected visit. Pat shared that a decision would be made within the next couple of weeks to close our school. Financially, the district would not be able to absorb the cost of our declining enrollment, and our school would close at the end of that year. She advised me to establish transition teams to lay out the details of the merge.
I took a very deep breath and said, âOK.â I tried to hold back the tears, knowing I was about to face my first incredibly challenging task as an inexperienced school leader. After Pat left, I gathered my composure and went to my computer to Google âtransition team.â I had no idea what I was doing. Things got real hard, real fast. The next three years were some of the hardest in my career; those years also taught me much about being a leader. I was still the principal at my new school, and our first instructional rounds eventually happened . . . five years later. Much of the framework we developed and continue to use today was the result of those challenging lessons we learned closing a school and then merging with another.
Grown-Up Lessons
Inevitably, the decision was made to close McKinley Elementary School. The district plan was to merge the entire student body of McKinley with the neighboring elementary school of Monroe Elementary in Wyandotte, Michigan. The current principal of Monroe was going to retire, which would create a place for me as the new leader of the two newly merged schools. I quickly learned that these two schools were polar opposites in their culture and day-to-day functions. It was like a divorce, a death, and the creation of a new blended family all in one thirty-second span. McKinleyâs home was being taken away, and all the children, many teachers, and âmomâ were moving in with the new family. Monroe was losing their âdadâ (retiring principal, Mr. Strait), and a new unknown âmomâ was moving in to take over, bringing her beloved family. McKinley lost their home, and Monroe lost their parent. Both schools lost their identity.
How do you establish trust in this scenario? Two schools, polar opposites, neither wanting to lose their identity. We were the McKinley Tigers, and they were the Monroe Pandas. The problem was that each identity was unique enough to prevent a compromise. Seeing no compromise, I needed to learn what the sacred traditions of each school were so that they could be honored while building a new shared vision to create new traditions both schools could honor. McKinley valued their peace pole. It was a stone structure with the word peace written on it in several languages. The peace pole was moved to the new school property. Monroe valued their panda mural, and a promise was made that it would remain in place. These representations, while seemingly superficial, were important in that difficult transition, and honoring them, at that time, helped everyone move forward. Trust developed slowly and over time. One thing we learned was that having trust and feeling safe with each other was important to us, and it became critical to the success of our instructional rounds.
It was clear during the first year after the merge that the school had two different factions and a neutral group. The children were the first to show us all the path, of course. They appreciated their new friends. The staff came together next. Using the school improvement plan, we established what was nonnegotiable to keep all staff members on the same page. The parent group was the hardest challenge. It was hard for them to embrace a new school or a new vision. I suppose when you bring your child to school for the first day of kindergarten you do not envision school closures, mergers, and challenges.
I remember vividly the sixth year after the merge. That was the year students who had been part of our newly merged school since they were in kindergarten moved on from fifth grade to the middle school. It was very healing. We learned that teamwork and unity are better than factions and isolation. Those ideals are now a strong premise of our instructional rounds.
Dealing with sabotage was the most difficult lesson. I suppose that under the circumstances the reasoning and hurt behind sabotage can be understood. Sabotage happened in both expected ways as well as unexpected ways in the first few years. Our newly formed stepfamily had much work to do. In addition to reinventing ourselves, I could see that our school-wide instructional practices needed much improvement. Not everyone agreed we needed to improve or change, so I spent a lot of time sharing educational research and leading learning activities with our teachers. For the first time as a leader, I started to intentionally push my educators into a place of disruption. Beliefs and past practices were challenged. I was not always as liked as I had been when I was a teacher, which was often lonely for me. I distinctly remember when a group of parents from Monroe went to a school board meeting to publicly criticize my administrative decision to restructure our reading and writing instruction and a McKinley teacher who supported me. Their statements were harsh and sounded informed by discussions we had as a staff, which led to suspicion among staff members. This triggered greater division between the two teacher groups. At the end of that year, many teachers chose to transfer out of our school, and we had to again adjust and continue our work.
The next year we continued to grow, and I continued to push and hold high expectations for pursuing research-based best practices in the instructional work we did at our school. I was happy to see that through this intentional disruption of our beliefs and practices my teaching staff was beginning to unite. However, I realized many were uniting for the common cause of pushing back against me. We trudged through two years of private meetings and union consultations. I put curtains on my office windows so that I could close them and cry without anyone seeing. It was a difficult time for our school, and more teachers transferred out. By holding tight to a strong mission and vision and standing firm on decisions made that were best for our students, we eventually came out of that storm as better educators than when we entered.
I didnât know it at that time as a young principal, but that was my first experience leading second-order change. It was unbelievably hard. Later in my career I learned the difference between first-order change and second-order change, and then it made sense. First-order change is simply a change within an existing system, such as relocating from one classroom to another or adjusting to new start and end times in your school day. Second-order change is much more difficult to navigate through and incredibly difficult to lead. Second-order change challenges oneâs beliefs and alters the system as we know it. Whether a person makes the decision to change or is being forced to ...