What happens when you ask 7 amazing, thoughtful educators to guest blog on a topic? Unsurprisingly, you get 7 amazing, thoughtful posts and a phenomenal week of conversing, thinking, and learning!
Here are all of the guest posts this past week on the topic of “What do teachers need from administrators?”
- Brian Crosby
- Alice Mercer
- Jose Vilson
- Bill Ferriter
- The Frustrated Teacher
- Adina Sullivan
- Shelly Blake-Plock
Several others were inspired by the series to post on their own blogs:
If there are others of you whom I missed, please put a link to your post in the comments; we’d love to see it! Thank you Brian, Alice, Jose, Bill, TFT, Adina, and Shelly for an awesome week. Your contributions and insights are very much appreciated.
Happy reading, everyone. I strongly encourage you to click through at each post and see my guests’ other writing. Also, feel free to forward this wrap-up post on to your local school administrators and/or university educational leadership professors; there’s lots of good stuff here for them and/or their students!
Principal means “first” or “best”, implying First Teacher”. If more administrators were teachers at heart, and lead accordingly, there would be much less silliness and unnecessary administrative bs.
Many thanks for this series of posts. I have enjoyed reading, and sharing this with some of the staff members at my school who are considering degrees in administration.
I wonder… will you also have a series of posts going in the opposite direction? What do Principals REALLY want from their staff? I hear repeatedly in these posts the desire for teachers to be treated like professionals. As a Principal, I go out of my way to treat my staff as professionals, I want to give them the leeway to make decisions and know that they will be in the best interest of students… however, I need them to respect the academic freedom and to then, in turn, act like professionals. Don’t get me wrong, I have a great staff, but just as we have high expectations for our students, I think we should for ourselves and the entire staff as well. I would love to see what other administrators really wish they could see they in their staff as a collective.
Thanks again!
Curt
Curt, I think this is a GREAT idea. I’ll make it happen!
Thanks so much for starting the conversation. I was able to say things that I have always wanted to say to an administrator. I think things will only get better if we have the dialogue because too many people expect administrators to know what teachers are thinking. Too many teachers feel intimidated by administrators and sometimes that is the way administrators want it. Hopefully administrators out there are reading the conversations.
Thanks for the opportunity to speak to your audience, Scott….I appreciated and enjoyed the forum.
And like Curt, I think a series on what principals want from their faculties would be instructive, too.
My only worry, though, is that the perceptions of principals and teachers on important topics—-as evidenced in teacher working condition survey after teacher working condition survey—is often miles apart. Principals are almost always more positive about what’s possible and what’s actually happening than teachers.
That makes sense if you think about it: Principals are hardworking, honest people doing the best that they can to create positive school environments.
But–because they’re the ones with organizational power—it also means that their perspectives carry more authority.
As I mentioned in my post for your series, I long for the day when I’m seen as the intellectual equal of my administrator—and I don’t think we’re there yet.
Bill