Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 365. 

Welcome to The Empowered Principal® Podcast, a not so typical educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy by refining your most powerful tool, your mind. Here’s your host certified life coach Angela Kelly Robeck. 

Well, hello my empowered principals. Happy Tuesday and happy holiday season. We are here. We are here for the break. You’ve made it. You’ve made it to December. Congratulations. I wish you a restful, peaceful, relaxing, delightful holiday season, holiday break. May all of your wishes come true. 

Please plan out the experience you want to have, make sure it’s balanced with fun and activity and friends and family and self-care and rest and replenishment. This is your time to celebrate the first half of the school year, and we are going to be holding the mid-year reboot for empowered principals this coming January. You need to sign up. Get into EPC. 

We’re going to be talking about how to reflect and celebrate in December, and then we’re going to reboot mid-year to rejuvenate and generate more awareness, clarity, momentum. We’re going to talk about how to overcome obstacles for the second half of the year, get you planned and prepared so you can feel good, you can remain rested, you can stay inspired, and you can lead. We want you leading with empowerment.

Join the mid-year reboot and be sure to register for EPC. The doors are opening in January. You can pre-register here in December. We begin January 8th. The mid-year reboot is the first week coming off of the break in January. You’ll want to be there. The registration links are in the show notes. So be sure to check those out and get registered for both the mid-year reboot and EPC. 

It’s going to be fun, invigorating. We’re going to get planned, prepared, energized, and ready for the second half of the school year. Have an amazing break. Enjoy the replay show. 

I just coached one of my A++ student clients. She’s amazing. She’s wonderful. She is a first year principal. I am telling you, it is magic what’s happening over here with the Empowered Principal® Program and the coaching results that these clients are creating. It is madness. I am so, so excited to talk with you about this today. 

So the topic of today is next level results. We’re going to talk about how to create the next level of results for your school. What I mean by that is going from good to great. So I was coaching a client this week, and she said she was working on her rubric for her school. They were creating their site plan and looking at their goals. 

She said, “Actually, I’m struggling a little bit to find the lack in my school.” She said, “We’re in a really good place. There’s a lot of good things going on, and it’s hard to find the lack.” Which I thought was so fascinating that her brain was struggling to find the lack. 

Now, to be fair, she said to me, “Actually, I’m harder on our school than I maybe should be, or I’m not sure.” This is her first year. So she’s trying to figure out what that is, how to calibrate herself. But she was saying, “I tend to be harder on us. I tend to give us a lower rubric score. But then teachers will say no, we are doing that. This is how we’re doing it, and this is what’s working, and this is where we’ve improved it, and this is how it’s being implemented.” She’s like oh, okay.

Part of being new, right? You don’t know everything that is happening on your campus when it’s your first year, especially when it’s working, right. If it’s not working, you know about it. People are talking about it or it’s obvious to you or somebody is complaining, or you can tell that there’s a system or a protocol that’s not quite working as well as it could. Or if your test scores are not where you want them to be. There are certain things that you can definitely tell when you walk into a school if it’s working well. 

Now, this client of mine, she’s a first year principal. So when she walked into her campus, it actually is a pretty well-oiled machine. A lot of things are working well. She said, “I’m trying to figure out how to write the goals so that I’m not discounting or dismissing what is working and what people are doing well. I don’t want to write a goal that’s already been achieved, and I don’t want to make problems up that aren’t there just to create a goal.”

So she said, “I want to find the middle ground.” She goes, “I keep thinking it’s too harsh. Then the teachers are telling me where it’s good. We definitely have some things to improve upon, but I want to have goals that have high impact.”

As I was listening to her talk, what came up for me as her coach was the brain is always trying to look for the next problem to solve, right? It’s looking for what’s not working so it can be fixed so that it can go on to the next thing that’s not working and fix that. 

Sometimes our brain wants to create a problem where there isn’t one. So I want you thinking about your school. When you’re writing goals for your school, are you writing the goal because you have to have a goal? You’re kind of finding something wrong so that you can spend time fixing it? Or are you acknowledging all of the things that are working and asking yourself to push higher than what the rubric is asking you to do? 

You might have a school that’s functioning really well where kids are happy and teachers are happy and things are performing. You want to be honest with yourself if it’s going well. Don’t create success intolerance by creating problems that aren’t there, or by looking to tweak something that isn’t going to really give you the best bang for the buck. If you have a system that’s working at 95%, 90%/95%, why would you spend all your time and energy for a full school year trying to get it to 98%? Do you see what I’m saying? 

So if something is working, why don’t we create new goals, next level goals? It’s going from good to great. You guys know that book, I think Jim Collins is the author. We’re talking about taking our school from a place that’s working and making it magical, extraordinary. Sometimes the reason we don’t do this is because our brain is like it’s good enough. Things are working. Why would I break it down? Why would I change it? Why would I push people to work harder and think outside the box and be more creative and all of these things? Why do all of that extra work if it’s working? 

Well, option number one is to let it work. Let it work until it breaks and then fix it. Or my recommendation and the approach that I invite my leaders to take is where are things working? Celebrate that, and let’s bring it with us, and then 10X that. Let’s take what we’re doing well and double down on that and go from good to great. 

Sometimes we’ve got to tear down good in order to create great, which is why the brain is going to resist thinking about next level problems, next level solutions, the next level of being extraordinary as a school and as a school leader.

So I was talking with this client. She said, “I always score us a little bit lower because I don’t see us being good enough.” But that’s just the brain telling you it’s safer to stay here and play around with tweaking maybe a 2% or 3% or 5% because it’s a known entity and staying in the middle road. But my personal coach calls that the miserable maybe, when you’re staying in the land of maybe. You don’t want to stay in the middle road. You want to go to the next level. You want to go to the freeway. You want to go to that higher level, okay? 

So let me invite you to think about this. What if your school is simply ready for the next level rubric? One that goes off the charts of the current rubric and extends you into greatness? You can make up your own rubric. If something’s working, don’t piddle around with the old rubric. You can take yourself in your school to the next one. It might not even be out there yet. You might have to invent it to create it for yourselves. The fun part about this is that it gives you greater possibilities to aim for. 

Here’s the thing. You don’t have to wait for everything to be perfect to take your school to the next level, to the next rubric. You get to design that rubric. You can bring your current problems with you and look at that rubric. So when I asked my client what’s coming up for you as I talk about taking your school from good to great, she said, “Well, I can see that we are really good. There’s lots of good things happening, but I wouldn’t identify us as great.”

I said to her there’s where you need to create clarity because that’s just your brain wanting to hold back from acknowledging the truth of what’s working. I think we spend more time holding our school back when things are working and celebrating them and then finding other ways to take us to the next level of greatness versus when something really is broken. When something’s really broken, you know right away we’ve got to fix this. It catches your attention. It just zooms you in, right? You can’t not see it. 

So for many of you out there, you know exactly the top three things you need to be working on in your school, do those things because that work is taking your school to the next level. But if your school is pretty high functioning, what else can you work on that’s not the same thing over and over and over, rinsing and repeating?

So you want to be honest with yourself, but you also don’t want to keep spinning on the same old rubric, shooting for the same results and the same middle of the road efforts. So if you knew you were taking your school beyond the current results of the rubric that is available to you now, if you were going to skyrocket past that rubric, what results would come next? 

I’m not just talking about academic scores and test scores and all of the current ways you’re measuring. Most of us measure by academics and performance based and we do our mid-trimester assessments, end of trimester assessments, state testing. We have lots of measurements already in place. 

I’m talking about finding other aspects of your school that actually enhance the performance and the experience for yourself, your teachers, your staff, your students, your community. Think about what it would look and feel like if you were focused on enhancing the quality of the experience for all of the people that are involved at your school, for all the stakeholders. What would a school look like that is at that next level? What would it look like? What would it feel like? 

So what we’re doing here is we’re asking your brain to project out into the future into your vision, and sit in a moment in that vision having been realized. What does it feel like? What does it look like? What does it sound like? How do you feel? How are you showing up? What are other people doing? How are kids learning? How are they engaging? What do parents think? How do they feel? What does your district think of your school? 

This is going to require your brain to go out into a new portal of possibility. Stay with me. I know this sounds very meta, but what I’m showing you that it’s almost like we’re playing in the little leagues on the rubric of the little leagues, and we want to go to the big leagues. But we’ve never thought about going to the big leagues because we’re so focused on looking at the little league rubric. I’m asking us to like even if we are in the little leagues, that’s okay, but what about the big leagues? What would it take to get us to the big leagues? 

So I asked my client. I said let’s just have fun. I said we’ve got 10 minutes left on this call. I want you for the next eight minutes to tell me everything. So here’s some of the things that she said. Teachers are prepared and excited and ready for their day. They have time to fit in all the curriculum. This is just her brain drain, by the way. I’ll talk about her list in a minute here. 

But they have time to fit in all the curriculum. They make learning fun with the kids. They’re building relationships. There’s a lot of trust building going on. There is an equal amount of time and behavior and emotional regulations for both adults and students. You hear me on that one? Parents are involved. Teachers are involved with parents. Teachers aren’t afraid to engage with parents and invite them in and work with them as a collaborators. 

Parents feel valued. Kids feel valued. Teachers feel valued. Kids are feeling successful. They’re excited to learn. Failure is the path. I loved when she said this. We’re going to talk more about that in a minute. Two kids are excited to learn. Teachers are excited to learn. Everyone’s feeling motivated. 

The kids want to help their friends out. So they’re learning collaborative skills. The topics of instruction are exciting for adults and students alike. We’re celebrating wins along the way. We are a culture where struggling to learn is not a problem, and we celebrate the struggle. We have a clear vision and a clear path. We have permission to keep trying things until they work. 

I just had goose bumps when I was listening to her brain go into that portal of possibility, and here’s what I want to offer. Go back and listen to that list again. What I noticed was it wasn’t about making the school board happy or the superintendent happy or the test score people happy or the state happy with all of the numbers and all of the percentages and all the awards. Right? It’s not about the state awards. It’s not about School of the Year, Principal of the Year. 

It’s about the way that people think and feel and engage with the environment, with one another, with the curriculum. It’s how we function as a little society within our school that makes it so successful. These aren’t the things we tend to measure. 

Now, I know there’s a lot of conversations about school culture and climate, and I want you to bring everything you know, equity, diversion, inclusion, all of it with the culture, all the culture work. Like, I don’t know all of the work out there. There’s a lot of work. Bring it all together. But what I’m noticing is that our brain wants to focus on the test scores and the assessment scores, but there are so many other rubrics we can use to measure our success. Be thinking about that. 

Now what I asked her to do, her homework for the week was for each statement that we wrote down. I take notes for her. So for each statement that I typed up, her work this week was to ask herself look through each one of these. Define what that means so that you can create a tangible measurement that you will know if you’re on the path to this achievement, to this goal, to the success. Right? So what would it take to create that result? 

Solve for them. Just brainstorm all the ways that that might be possible to achieve. So back to the first one, right? Teachers are prepared and excited and ready for their day. We need to define what does that mean, prepared? What is how will we know they’re excited? How will we know they’re ready? What will that look like and feel like? 

This is the tedious work our brain doesn’t want to do, but actually this is how we create intangible results by making them tangible. Teachers have time to fit in all the curriculum. What does that mean? That would mean prioritizing curriculum, identifying what curriculum we’re going to focus on, and what we’re not going to focus on. It’s around the time. It’s how we use our time. It’s what we make that mean. What does it mean to fit in all the curriculum? We have to define that really clearly. 

Now, I know this was her brain drain, so I’m not picking on it. I’m just saying that you have to get yourself to a place where this isn’t the final list. You have to weed this out and really define what it means. So it’s very simple, clear, tangible, and doable. But I want you to notice that the list is a lot about how people feel at the school. 

So I invite you to do this. What does your next level school look like? What are the emotions that people are feeling? What are the thoughts that they’re having about themselves, about their school, about their instructional quality, about their students? What are students thinking about teachers? What are students thinking about their school and their peers? What are your thoughts? Think about all the angles here, right? 

What are the decisions that are being made? What are the approaches that you’re taking? That just means your actions, right? What actions are you taking? What are the behaviors that people are exhibiting? Now, we’re not painting a fairyland with rainbows and daisies. Let’s be realistic. The human experience is the human experience.

This is not an exercise to avoid or bypass or circumvent any kind of negative experience. I would invite you to ask yourself what are we going to do when unpleasant experiences happen, when emergencies arise, when tragedy strikes, when trauma hits, when kids are dysregulated, when something happens to a teacher. 

Like I want you to think about real life scenarios, but talk to yourself about how do I want our school to handle this, right? How do I want my school to handle when a student is sick, or a teacher passes away, or something tragic happens in our community? How do I want to set up my school so that in the worst of times, we’re still at our best? Supporting each other, allowing time to process and grieve, and to hold space for one another. 

This isn’t just about academics. Schools are about community in addition to academics. I would invite you to even reconsider like are these academics teaching kids the skills they need in this current day and age? Right? You can go down a pretty significant rabbit hole here, and that’s okay. I invite you to do that. I want your brain to go for it. I want you to go deep. I want you to explore your thoughts and go deep and mind your mind, right? Dig down deep. What else is possible? What would work better? How good can it get? 

So take your school to the next level, and that starts with your brain, your brilliance, and your ideas. Go into that portal of possibility, and let’s see what can happen. Have an amazing week. I’ll talk to you next week. Take care. Bye.

Hey empowered principal. If you enjoyed the content in this podcast, I invite you to join the Empowered Principal® Collaborative. It’s my latest offer for aspiring and current school leaders who want to experience exceptional impact and enjoy the school leadership experience. 

Look, you don’t have to overwork and overexert to be a successful school leader. You’ll be mentored weekly and surrounded by supportive likeminded colleagues who truly understand what it means to be a school leader. So join us today and become a member of the only certified life and leadership coaching program for school leaders in the country. Just head on over to angelakellycoaching.com/work-with-me to learn more and join. I’ll see you inside of the Empowered Principal® Collaborative. 

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal® Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, please visit angelakellycoaching.com where you can sign up for weekly updates and learn more about the tools that will help you become an emotionally fit school leader.

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 363. 

Welcome to The Empowered Principal® Podcast, a not so typical educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy by refining your most powerful tool, your mind. Here’s your host certified life coach Angela Kelly Robeck. 

Angela: Well, hello, my empowered principals. Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the podcast this week. I have a very special treat for you. We have another interview. We’re just getting all the interviews on the podcast and I love it because as you guys know, I really vet people out. I don’t want this to be a big infomercial. I don’t want you to feel like you’re being solicited to when you listen to this. I want you to come to The Empowered Principal® Podcast and feel like you’re getting your values worth for your time. 

Today, I definitely have some wonderful ladies here who are going to share some amazing resources with you today, and I’m so excited to have them. I have Andra and Sarah, and they are the founders of the Principal Exchange and I believe also the Teacher Exchange, is that correct? 

Andra: So yes, it’s the Principal Exchange and then our other business is Tailored Education where we do have resources on there specifically for principals to use with teachers. 

Angela: Yes. Okay. So as you can see, I’m still learning about their services, but we had a little meet and greet last week a couple weeks ago and I just fell in love with these ladies. I love the concept. I love what they’re doing to support school leaders and to educators across the board, but their work’s really fun. I want you to learn about it, hear about it. 

So I’m going to turn it over to them and let them explain what the Principal Exchange is, how to access it, all the goodies that are inside, and we’re going to chat it up because I want you to hear the value that you can walk away with today as a result of the work that they’re doing. So welcome to the podcast, ladies. 

Andra: Thank you. 

Sarah: Hey, thanks for having us.

Angela: Yeah, so introduce yourselves and tell them a little bit about who you are, your background, and what inspired this idea, this concept of the Principal Exchange. 

Andra: Sure. So this is Andra from the Principal Exchange. To give you a little background about our educational experience, prior to Tailored Education or the Principal Exchange, we worked in public education as classroom teachers, moving to reading specialists, instructional coaches, ending on the admin team before we decided that we really could have a bigger impact outside of the schools reaching educators in general across the country.

So we started Tailored Education, and Tailored Education supports new teachers, principals. We sell like resources to schools. We do professional development. We wrote a book, Bashing Boredom, on student engagement because we felt like that was a big need. 

In doing that, we started seeing principals all over as we were visiting schools and building these relationships and seeing what really they struggled with and that they were kind of isolated, and that they didn’t have the supports that maybe teachers had through websites and resources and even just the colleagues in their building. That’s kind of what springboarded the thought of the Principal Exchange and getting this started.

Sarah: Yeah. As we traveled around, we went to all kinds of different places and found that especially in some of these places that were like more landlocked or small districts, it wasn’t uncommon for a district to just have like an elementary principal, a middle school principal, and then a high school principal. So there was no form of collaboration. They weren’t getting some kind of a curriculum to use. They were juggling all kinds of things, and they were there all hours of every day. 

I mean, really, it was just a struggle for them. We saw that. So we started to really think about okay, how can we help solve this problem too? Because like we value teachers so much, but we’ve got to have great school leaders too, and we need to fill their cups too. So that was really where we started. We kind of took that idea and ran with it, and it turned into the Principal Exchange. 

What that is, it’s like a platform. It’s a website, kind of an online marketplace, like a Teachers Pay Teachers or Etsy. It’s where a bunch of principals have came together and made their little like digital mini stores, you might could say, where they are uploading resources that are specifically designed for principals. These resources range from support with like classroom management, data trackers, climate and culture builders, really anything you could think of, you can find it there.

They’re putting all of that out there as a place for principals to come and find what they need so that they’re not having to create it from scratch. They’re getting new ideas and they can really save some time and feel like there’s some level of support for them too. 

Andra: We also found in doing this as we were talking with principals, a lot of principals end up having like a second job or feeling like they need something. We knew that was true maybe of teachers, but we didn’t realize how many principals felt that way. 

So to be a vendor on the page, it’s not a way to earn like a huge second income, but at least it’s another revenue stream for something that somebody is doing and already creating. They have these ideas that they can share with other people. So we wanted to support them in that way as well too. 

Angela: Yeah.

Angela: It feels like it’s like an Etsy or like kind of like an online farmer’s market. You can go to the little vendors and pick like oh, I need something on staff development or oh, I need something on like tracking systems. Or there’s different vendors. So the vendors are actual real principals and educators who have designed tools that work for them. If it works for you, you’re welcome to come and peruse and purchase if you want to. 

It’s such a cool way of just being able to share our experiences, our wisdoms, like our little area of expertise in the world of education and to allow people to benefit from that, you know, from the tool that we’ve created. So I think it’s brilliant. 

Andra: Well, thank you. We hope so. The vendors on there are awesome. They’ve really thought of like even categories that we hadn’t thought of to bring products in for. We also say like, if you don’t see what you need on there, let us know because there might be a vendor out there that’s willing to create it or has something that they didn’t think to put up on there. So it’s just an ever evolving platform. 

Angela: Yeah. It’s almost like you’re searching on Amazon, and you’re looking for whatever product it is that you need. It sounds like it’s in the categories and then they can look and see. People have different because it’s one approach might work for one person, another one doesn’t. But there might be multiple ways of doing it on the platform, depending on what it is and who’s sharing their information. 

So principals out there, if you’re listening to this, you can participate in one of two ways. You can be a vendor. You might have resources you want to share, and you can get a percentage of income on that. Or you might be a shopper, and you might be looking for some strategies. It sounds like mostly like tools, right? Like tangible things that you can. 

I think of Teachers Pay Teachers, right, where they go in and they can get actual downloadable materials for their classroom or for teaching and instruction and lesson planning or worksheets, that kind of a thing. So it sounds like it’s a similar concept. 

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. It’s just like that. It’s very similar to that. What we did was we thought had that mindset going into it, but we really wanted to make it so that like it was just for principals. That if you typed in like climate and culture builders or a data tracker, you’re going to have a bunch of different options that come up that’s related to your position and that’s written by people who are in that position too. It was really important for us for people to really be able to understand what that feels like right now to be able to support in that area. 

So we really tried to create a space that was just a really big support system for our school leaders because that was really important to us. The more we talked to them and we developed these relationships, like we just wanted to do something that could help them along on this journey. 

We started a Facebook page, and we started looking at what different things that like they like. We found that there’s a huge little niche of people out there that follow us that love just humor, some kind of like lighthearted way to end their day. So we try to come up with stuff like that just to bring smiles and laughter to them to lighten up some of the hard things that principals struggle and go through because we know that’s real. Anything we can do to kind of pick them up, that’s where we’re at. 

Andra: Right. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Andra: Yeah. We try on our page too to put things that like draw them to be able to share something funny that happened that day or maybe even a struggle too. Because like we said, teachers usually have those colleagues in their building on their team or in their grade level or in their department that they can go to. But sometimes an admin team is isolated, and you don’t have that. 

So we really hope that our social pages and things that may be like conferences that we’re hoping to do in the future will really build not just the resources for our principals, but also that community for them and that place of support and understanding of like-minded people that have the same struggles and can laugh at the same kind of things that maybe if not, you’re going to be crying about. 

Angela: Yes. I know your story, but I would love for you to share your story. Like, what is your relationship with school leadership? Because I’m sure the listeners, you’re saying they and them and they’re like wait a minute, what’s going on here? So like tell the story of your relationship as it relates to school leadership, the position of school leadership. 

Andra: Sure. So starting like prior to either of these, like I kind of gave a little glimpse into earlier, both of us have our admin degree, and we’ve had that experience like in a school itself before coming out for Tailored and the Principal Exchange. 

Even being instructional coaches. I think that’s when we first got a glimpse of where the lack of resources because a lot of the times what we were doing when we weren’t working with students and things was creating those resources for the principal in our building. As we became more of the admin team, like seeing that those resources were missing. So it kind of started there. 

Then our relationship with principals and school leaders has really expanded as we started with Tailored, as we’re going around to support new teachers and do professional development and go to conferences through the lens of Tailored Education. We’ve talked with so many principals and they’ve shared with us that they are lacking in these resources. Or if we share something oh, I never thought of that and things like that. 

Sarah: Yeah, we spend a lot of time in school buildings now as more on like the consultant side of things. So when we’re working with brand new teachers who come in without licenses and helping them get through the steps to get there. We are working closely with those principals to see like who needs what. Where are we? We try to be super aligned with coaching that we’re giving, making sure it’s aligned to school initiatives and stuff like that. 

So in building these relationships with people, really it’s easy when you’re in your own building to think like is it just here? Is it just this district? Like what happens if I go somewhere else? But we’ve now worked with many different even states. We’ve been to several different states and worked with principals in so many school districts and it’s everywhere. So when we really stepped out of that and saw like that, it’s everywhere. We were like okay we’ve got to help. We’ve got to help do something.

Angela: Yeah. The reason I ask that question, just to reiterate it, is that sometimes principals and district leaders, we can think that if a person hasn’t been in the position or hasn’t served on the position then they don’t really know the position, which there is definitely a layer of truth to that. 

Why I love what these ladies are doing is that they’re approaching supporting site and district leaders from the lens of instructional coaching, the lens of teaching, to be able to provide you as the leader with the tools that bridge between the leader and the teachers. To help you from that lens of instructional coaching or from the lens of a teacher to really help you be a better leader, to help you have the tools you need in hand that will relate and be relevant to instructional coaches or to the classroom.

So that it’s not just principals leading the way leading principals. It’s a teamwork approach where we’ve got the instructional coach lens. We have the teacher lens and the site administrator lens all coming together to share ideas, tools, strategies that will allow you to do your job to the best of your capacity because you’re looking through multiple lenses. It’s not just this one area of focus. 

Because I’m pretty particular. I understand that leaders are like well I don’t want people coaching me if they haven’t done the job. This isn’t coaching. This is a marketplace. This is a venue for you to be able to go shopping and make your own decisions about what resources you need and which ones fit best. It’s just the platform. 

They’re providing the opportunity for you to go shopping and to have access to these resources that otherwise wouldn’t be accessible. Like they would be just kept in the hearts and the minds of the individual who created them. You’re giving people a voice and a space and a platform to share that, which then inspires other people to be like what can I share? Now we’ve got a community of collaboration and connection and building up one another, focusing on strengths, focusing on what’s working. It all comes together through these multiple lenses. 

Sarah: That was a big thing. We moved from being classroom teachers into instructional coaches. Then we took on major school leadership roles when like COVID hit and people got spread out. You had to step into those shoes, processing referrals, running IEP meetings, balancing frustrated parents, answering the phone calls, and just being there to step in all the time. 

That lens thing that you were talking about is so important because it’s so easy for teachers to be like well, they don’t understand what I’m doing or they don’t care about how hard it is in my classroom. As a school leader and as an instructional coach, a lot of times we found like sometimes teachers can struggle to see the bigger picture, like more than just on their hallway.

We really tried to, in all of the roles that we’ve had, bridge those gaps. Relationships has been our number one thing from day one before we even started any of this and helping bridge those viewpoints and just let everyone see that we’re all on the same team. Sometimes it’s just little bits of information that get lost in the middle. 

Andra: Right. The team that we were on before we left the school there were people from different backgrounds and stuff. So it was kind of we brought all those pieces. But as we travel around, we see if you’re the only principal in a school and you only came from one pathway, maybe the Principal Exchange platform can help you have those other lenses or bring those strengths that maybe you don’t have yourself in. 

From people who are really good at making data spreadsheets. That’s not your strength, but you don’t have a big enough team to have somebody on that team that has that strength. So hopefully the platform itself can play off that as well and provide that for people who have a smaller team, or maybe they have the same strengths and they’re looking for resources and things from people that come from those different viewpoints or that different pathway. 

Angela: Yes. Another thing I love about this, like it takes teamwork to such a deeper level, that we are all on the same team as educators. That we’re all out there, regardless of what state we’re in, what city we serve, what community, what school. We’re all trying to do our best to serve kids in the best way possible. 

What this does is it brings a layer of teamwork and collaboration that otherwise, like the way that the system’s currently set up, it’s like who’s the top school, and what’s the top score, and principal of the year, teacher of the year. There’s all of these, I don’t know, accolades within the field. But what it does is it individualizes us and it separates us and it doesn’t build team. It builds like a competition almost. 

This platform, it’s a space where you can feel safe enough to come in and share openly and collaborate, but it’s collaborating across the board, across states, across private/public, across K-12. It really is like a hub, like the town square, right? 

A place where people can come and everyone’s welcome and everyone’s invited. It’s a place where you can actually support one another without feeling that there’s any judgment or criticism or feedback or score or grades that you’re trying to hide from or trying to better or one up or whatever, right? That competition piece gets dropped out in this space.

Andra: Right. It’s just what do you need, and we hope that’s there for you, whether it’s on the platform or this community we’re trying to build right now through social media that hopefully transfers to like a conference with the same mindset. Where we hope principals are going to want to come in and they’re going to be the ones presenting at this conference and sharing their ideas and what’s going well in their schools and things. 

That’s the future of where we hope this is leading to. Maybe someday like a podcast where principals can share their stories and things. All of that kind of community that we feel like exists in a very small place right now that we hope is a growing place for principals. 

Sarah: Yeah, that was the idea behind the name is the principal exchange. We want principals exchanging and sharing, collaborating and bringing their successes and their struggles all together, you know? 

Angela: Right, right. Yeah. I love seeing opportunities like this because when I was a principal, and that was only 10 years ago, it was completely isolated. There wasn’t anything. Nobody was focusing on the school leader. It was the teachers. Right? Everything was on instructional leadership, instructional coaching, support for new teachers. Like we had the New Teacher Center come in and provide like mentors for the first two years of teaching. But it was like, here are the keys. Good luck.

Andra: Right.

Angela: That was it. So I did that for seven years before I saw a need. My niche is definitely like I’m a life and leadership coach. I’m a certified coach. So I’ve been in the job. I can coach on it, but I also mentor. But I’m working on time mastery, balance mastery, planning mastery, like emotional regulation. So that is a coaching piece that the work is within. Right? 

Andra: Right. 

Angela: This is like you get to go out into the world and you get to have that external exchange of ideas and connection and energy. Right? You just, you feed off of other people’s energy and enthusiasm and excitement and ideas. That adds to the experience for students, staff, and the principal, which is it’s such a beautiful collaboration of the internal work that I do with school leaders and then the external like connection and collaboration that you guys are offering as a platform for them. 

It’s beautiful to see that there’s people out here like hey, paying attention to the school leader. Hey, there is a need that is significant here. No one person can. Again, this is teamwork. There’s no one person that can cover all aspects of this job or what it entails. I love that you’re coming in really from the lens of I see the school principal struggling. I want to help them. I’m the instructional coach. I want to. 

They’re telling me their version, their perspective. Now we can take our talent and perspective as an instructional coach and be like hey, this is what we’re good at. This is what we see that you might need that could really help you. Now we’ve got a true collaboration. Not like there’s collaborations, and I’ve witnessed this like you’re playing collaboration, right? 

Andra: Yes.

Angela: Right. 

Andra: Right. 

Angela: There’s what it looks like and then there’s what it is. 

Andra: Right. You can try it, but does it actually work in our both parts or all parts really involved? Sometimes that’s the challenge. 

Angela: Yes. Yeah. It’s like, is this a safe environment? Do I trust people? Can I be somewhat vulnerable? Can I be honest? Most times it’s no, we shut down. So we play collaboration. But this sounds like it’s an invitation for people. Like they’re putting their wares out for you. You know, so again, like a market. Take it or leave it. But it’s a matter of like people are putting themselves out there for the benefit of the greater good, which I think it’s an act in education that we need to tap back into.

Andra: Yes. I think also the vendors on our page are so awesome. We weren’t sure when this started, how many people would be interested in this, and who even had time to do this and things like that. But they’ve been so awesome. 

What I’ve also seen and what we’ve seen is as vendors put their resources out, and there’s great feedback on it and they have success with it, maybe that’s helping with some of that burnout and things because they’re thinking oh, well, somebody else has used this and actually found value in it, and it’s made their day a little bit easier. So we’ve seen that piece of it too. So that’s been really neat. 

Sarah: Yeah. When we came into this, we also we ran into the idea of like we also don’t want principals like having to fork out a lot of their own money for this.

So within the system, we’ve embedded places for like POs. There’s W-9 forms, things you can print off so that you can use like school cards and school funds to pay for this stuff because it’s going back to your school. It’s to help your school leadership in your building. We want this to not be like well can I or can’t I? 

But we’ve really tried to think through all of the things that might be a hurdle in a principal’s way. We’re always open for feedback. So if anybody has any new ideas or is like oh, this would also be awesome to see, it really is a space that we’re trying to create just to support the school principal. 

Angela: Yeah. So, so, so good. So if listeners are dying right now and they’re like, I need to know all the details, all the information, give it to them. They’re going to be flooding over there. So tell them all the things.

Andra: Sure. So the website’s just theprincipalexchange.com. When you go there, whether you’re looking to be a vendor or whether you just want to check out all the resources that are already on there, the website is the same for that. We’re on social media, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and all of that’s just the Principal Exchange as well. So we hope that, and there’s so much value in there. Of course, we’re posting and putting things, but value from other people and the vendors and things too. So it really is just a community that hopefully they’ll follow and find beneficials. 

Angela: Yeah. We’ll put all of those links in the show notes so you guys can check them out. Do you have any last words of insight of information that you want to share with the listeners out there?

Sarah: We see you. Like we see you out there doing the best you can every day, and we just hope that we can do a little bit to support you in return. 

Andra: You’ve been doing great things because everybody talks about teacher burnout and teacher turnover, but we see the principal burnout and the principal turnover, and we want to help that. We want to make this a better place and provide that support. So.

Angela: Yeah. Yeah. So, listeners, I just want you to imagine having coaching and mentoring plus the Principal Exchange in your back pocket. You’re going to be a rock star. It really take your school to new levels because you’re going to be doing the work that I do, the work that they’re offering. You’re going to have the tools and the resources across the board. 

That is what helps reduce burnout. It’s what makes you feel more impactful, more influential, build up your legacy as a school leader because this job is hard, but it doesn’t have to feel hard. The way that it feels less hard is when you’re doing the internal work that you need to do, building up your leadership skills, building up your emotional capacity, your leadership capacity, and having the resources you need at your fingertips so you’re not reinventing the wheel all of the time. It’s what it feels like when you’re in the position.

So I feel like this combo is just like the triple crown of school leadership, development and empowerment and resources. You have them at your fingertips. The links are in the show notes. Ladies, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for the meet and greet. We had so much fun on that. I really do hope that this is the beginning of so much more availability in principal resources. 

Because this is just getting started, right? This is just the beginning of this program for you guys in this platform. I can see it really turning in to a thriving city market, like a little town square market, right? So I invite people who are listening. If you’ve got ideas and strategies and you want to be able to share something, reach out to the Principal Exchange. I’m sure on your website there is a place where they can get more information about being a mentor. 

Andra: Correct.

Angela: Then if you just want to shop and window shop and take a look, you can do that too. So there’s no harm, there’s no foul. It’s just pure support, pure fun. I’m just thrilled to see these types of resources popping up for school leaders as they have been over the last decade for teachers. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for this service. It’s so desperately needed. I wish I’d had it 10 years ago, and I’ll do everything I can to promote it, to get it into the hands of the people who need it most. 

Andra: Well, thank you. We really enjoyed being on today.

Sarah: Thank you so much. 

Angela: It was my pleasure. All right, empowered principals, have an amazing week. Don’t forget, check out the Principal Exchange and we’ll talk to you guys next week. Take good care. Bye. 

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