Saying Goodbye to the End of the Year

I’ve been hearing from a lot of my clients and my friends in the industry lately about the immense sense of sadness that they won’t be able to see out the school year, see their students move on, and generally say goodbye to another chapter in the normal way. This unusual time has brought up a lot of emotions, but this is a crushing one that so many teachers and school leaders are dealing with.

For a lot of people, this situation is manifesting itself as grief, saying goodbye to the end of the year before they were ready. And what’s worse, because we didn’t get a chance to prepare, allowing ourselves to experience these emotions is extremely difficult, and instead, we find ourselves resisting, which only makes things worse in the long run.

Read more

Staffing from a Distance

Now that all of my clients have settled into running their schools from home, more and more decisions are having to be made away from campus. And as a lot of my clients are new school leaders or are aiming to become a principal in the near future, they’re dealing with a lot of these decisions for the first time, and the distance isn’t making things any easier.

I want to share with all you listeners what I’ve been coaching my clients through the past few weeks. I’ve had clients interviewing for their first principal position, giving interviews to candidates for teaching jobs, helping new staff settle into their jobs, and even having to fire people. I’ve been coaching on all these things for years, but social distancing has brought a whole new dimension to all of this.

 

Read more

Balancing Home and Working from Home

As a principal, balancing work and home life has always been incredibly tricky. But now that we have found ourselves working from home, this balancing act has become pretty much impossible. Even when we get some sense that we’re moving in the right direction, something always seems to come up and we feel misaligned.

This is even worse when your own kids are involved. You’re trying to engage your students in learning, and you have your own children in the background who have their own needs, and feeling like you’re taking care of both of these areas is a tall order. So, what can we do about this?

 

Read more

The Myth of “Behind”

As I’m sure you’re aware, there are many discussions surrounding education at the moment. Everything is changing, so I’m going to use the podcast this month to walk through some of the issues that are coming up in the media and the conversations on social media and offer some more positive and productive ways to approach leading our schools now and into the future.

I was reading one article this week and the theme running throughout it was that, because of the circumstances born out of this pandemic, our schools and students are behind. This is a word that the educational world has always used to describe underperforming schools or kids who are struggling, but does the notion of being behind really help anyone?

 

Read more