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Are you feeling swamped by the demands of being a principal? From juggling emails, calls, and decisions to boosting test scores and wading through endless paperwork, the pressure is real.
But imagine a scenario where you no longer feel this overwhelming stress. Picture yourself as a more resilient leader, concentrating on enhancing your school rather than merely coping with the daily tasks that currently consume your time.
I‘m Barb Flowers. Drawing upon my eight-year experience as an elementary principal, with a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and certification as a life coach, Along the way, I've mentored and coached school leaders, guiding them to change their mindset, set boundaries and focus on their own well-being while navigating their roles.
Each episode offers practical insights on time management, communication, overcoming overwhelm, boosting confidence, and fostering a positive mindset. We'll also discuss topics like working with stakeholders, implementing new initiatives, and managing discipline. Let's set boundaries, focus on well-being, and reignite your passion for being a principal. Welcome to "The Principal's Handbook."
I firmly believe that to be an impactful educator, you must first become a confident and well-rounded individual. Join us in this journey to empower and enhance your confidence as a school leader.
Speaker 2: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Principal's Handbook, your go-to resource for principals looking to revamp their leadership approach and prioritize self-care. I'm Barb Flowers, a certified life coach with eight years of experience as an elementary principal. Tune in each week as we delve into strategies for boosting mental resilience, managing time effectively, and nurturing overall wellness.
From tackling daily challenges to maintaining a healthy work-life balance, we'll navigate the complexities of school leadership together. Join me in fostering your sense of purpose as a principal and reigniting your passion for the job. Welcome to a podcast where your wellbeing is the top priority
Speaker: welcome to the podcast. Today we are talking about why our days are spent putting out fires. And I love talking about this because I feel like so many principals can relate to this.
A lot of people struggle with just being in reaction mode, reactive mode all the time. They're reacting all day, and they really don't have time [00:01:00] to just sit and focus on principals of leadership, of being proactive, of actually getting to lead the school the way they want to. And a lot of times, it's not because principals have a time problem.
Sometimes it is. I work with all kinds of principals, and sometimes I see it's a time management problem. But a lot of times, what it really is a priority problem. We know the things that are important, but unfortunately, everything feels so important. Think about your school,
you have all of these things that you are supposed to keep improving in your building. There's academic achievement and test scores and continuing to help students grow. Then you have behavior, , helping students just behave to be able to function throughout the school day
And to help students who aren't on a tier one level for behavior but have those higher needs, higher behavior needs, need more support. You have attendance initiatives, right? We always have, , initiatives going to get kids at school because if kids aren't at school, you can't raise academic achievement.
You can't help kids [00:02:00] grow. You can't help with their behavior. A lot of those things are impacted with attendance. Then there's the whole issue of teacher morale. You have teachers who are burnt out, I think more and more ever since COVID. People are feeling burnt out. There's a lot of emotions in schools that principals are navigating, and it's all coming back to you as the principal that you have these teacher dynamics, team dynamics that you are navigating.
Then there's parents, you're working with parents. You have parent communication. How do you be proactive with parent communication? How do you get parents more involved , so that they're supporting their child's education? How do you get parents on board with behaviors and how to parent,
that's a whole conversation we've been having, , in the last district I was at, was just getting parents involved and being able to tell their child no or, actually parenting. And then there's the issue of school safety here in the US. That's a huge issue that there are so many things happening with school safety where [00:03:00] kids are bringing weapons to school or threats are being made, and we have to take all of those things serious.
But for me, even being in an elementary school, , we've really seen an uptick of threats, that kids constantly talk about different threats of killing or bringing a gun to school. It's like their go-to to get a reaction. But you have to take those things really serious because of the climate of the US and because we wanna keep everybody safe Then there's special education,
we have to be supporting our students who have special needs, and so There's a lot to know with special education and making sure that students who are on IEPs are getting good tier one instruction, and interventions are still happening, and they're getting more support when they are on an IEP.
Sometimes that's an issue. Professional development. We're wanting to constantly, hopefully, grow our teachers and our staff so that they can be better, and so finding professional development to give them and finding ways that you can help keep them growing. There's building culture. We're always trying to find ways to [00:04:00] build culture.
In my first building, I felt like, we were always doing activities centered around food and parties and luncheons to just try to build up staff morale. I don't know, if that really helps, but, , just this idea of what are you doing for building culture? Then there's technology.
Incorporating technology, trying not to use technology too much. And then we have social media. That's been a big push, , for schools especially. I'm in Ohio with school choice. It's all about posting on social media so that you can really advertise the great things happening in your school so that people want to send their children there.
So that's another , added layer that is now on, , principals and staff is to make sure they're taking pictures of things, so we can really market the good things we're doing. And then there's district initiatives. So what are the things that the district wants to happen, of all of these?
What are those priorities? And then there are the state priorities that you have. I feel like in Ohio there's always different state priorities [00:05:00] that we have going on. So that's a lot of different things happening in your building if you think about that, and they are all important things.
Those are all big things that are important for the school to move forward and for the school to be safe. And so if I asked you which one of those matters most, you would probably say all of them. And I get that because they are all important, but that's the problem. When we have everything in a school become a priority, nothing is a priority and nothing gets your best leadership.
And so it's really important that we take some time to think about all of those things and to know that they're all important but know that we're not going to be able to Focus on all of them all of the time. Obviously, school safety, something like that has to be a priority all the time. But when we're thinking about, different initiatives, they can't all be a priority all the time.
And I think this with teachers too, , when I was an elementary teacher, I taught all subjects. [00:06:00] And so somebody once told me, "You can't get better at all subjects every year. Pick a subject and get better at that one subject that year." So maybe it's language arts that year, and you're really focusing on language arts.
The next year, it's math. And it doesn't mean that you're not doing your best in those other areas wh- while you're teaching. It just means that that's your priority for growth and to really move forward. So I want you to think about that. , What have you been trying to do? How many initiatives and priorities have you been trying to work on each year?
And then how can you really narrow that in? Now, another thing I wanna address here is that leadership looks different in every school and in every district. And I say that having been in a couple of different schools and districts now. , It's different based on the resources. So when you have priorities, it looks different based on the resources.
I'm going to a district right now where there's a social media person. So if there's a social media person, that takes that off me that I don't have to worry about posting that. , In my first building, I had an [00:07:00] assistant principal. So I still dealt with behavior, but that was somebody I had who helped me with behavior.
So it looks different based on the resources you have. My last district, I was doing all of these initiatives by myself because there was no assistant principal. I only had a counselor a couple days a week. , It was really just me and my secretary leading these things. And so it really makes a difference.
And I always like to point that out on where your building is, , in all of these processes. It looks different based on what resources are available, what professional development's available for teachers, what extra help you have from people is available. All of that makes a huge difference in what, , leadership looks like in your school.
So I always like to point that out because I think a lot of times we compare ourselves to other leaders, or we think we should be doing something, and it doesn't necessarily work for our building. And so one example of this, when I think of initiatives Is in my first [00:08:00] building, we worked on PLCs. We worked on them for a very long time.
That was something that I rolled out with the principal who was there when I was the assistant principal, but then really spent a lot of time building time into the schedule, training staff on it, having teachers help lead that. And some grades were further along than others, but we were working really hard on that.
Then I went into a new school, and that wasn't even a priority. Having time for PLCs, working on PLCs, it wasn't even a priority. We weren't there yet. Our focus was tier one behaviors and really making sure that tier one core curriculum was being followed. That's it. That's all we focused on, and we made huge growth last year because I wasn't worried about PLCs, and I wasn't worried about, honestly, social media.
I didn't focus on that. I didn't focus on technology. We didn't have a lot of professional development time. I just did a book study when I could. , Those things, I picked the priorities of being that tier one behavior and really focusing on, , tier one [00:09:00] for reading and math, just implementing the curriculums, and we made great growth.
, But if I'm going into a new building, it's going to look different than that. So I just wanna point that out that every school is so different based on the systems and what they have in place and also based on the resources. So as you listen and think about that, just know that you have to, , think about what works for your school
One thing I always like to tell people is when I became a principal, I wanted to improve everything. I would get really excited. I started learning about leadership podcasts, , a lot of amazing podcasters that I, look up to now and are mentors to me. But I would listen to those podcasts in my car, and the problem with me listening to a podcast, some people are different.
And so I like to say that caveat. Some people can listen to a podcast, and they listen to the information and just learn from it. I'm a person who listens, and then I wanna implement it. And so the problem with that was I was listening to all these leadership podcasts. [00:10:00] I was reading any book that they suggested,
an author would come onto the podcast, and they would suggest a book, and they were amazing during their interview, so I was like, "I have to read this book and learn more." So I would read books. I would, , try to attend any professional development I could. I would come to school the next day so excited and have all of these ideas.
My brain was just going with all of these ideas. And it wasn't that I was lazy or disorganized. I was super ambitious, but ambition was really causing me to feel overwhelmed and overwhelm other people because I lost focus of what are the main focuses for our building and what are we doing to move that forward.
I was unintentionally changing the focus all the time, and that's when I realized that great schools don't improve because principals are changing things all the time. They actually improve because principals protect one priority long enough for it to make an impact. And I think about this too. I did this as a teacher, as a new teacher.[00:11:00]
And obviously as I got better as a teacher, I didn't do it anymore. But as a new teacher, I was constantly changing things. , I would learn something and be like, "Ooh, I have to implement that." But when I think about the district that I student taught in, which is a really high performing district in my area, they did curriculum programs for a really long time.
People would do new programs. They didn't. They did the same assessment measures for years. They were very consistent. They had just simple focuses, and they focused on them for the long run. And so I didn't realize that until I went into teaching and then I, became a principal, that I'm like, oh my gosh, here's the problem in education,
is we're constantly shifting focus. And all of these things are good. Everything I've implemented as a principal were good ideas. They were good things. It just might not have been the right thing for the building at that moment, or it might have just been too much for that building at that moment. And reflecting a lot on my leadership over [00:12:00] time, what I would go back and tell myself as a younger administrator is to really have that focus.
And so I want you to think about this, if we think about a flashlight and we're shining a flashlight, you have those big flashlights. When the light is scattered, you can see a little bit of everything. It's kinda dim, but you can see what's happening. But when you focus that same light and have a stronger light in one area, that light becomes more powerful,
because it's focused on just that one area. Well, it's the same in our leadership. When we focus for just that one area, it's going to create more momentum because that scattered attention creates frustration for us. When we are scattered in what we're doing, it's going to constantly create frustration for us and for the people that we lead.
So I really want you to think about that. I want you to think about where is your leadership scattered, and where do you really need to be focused? And maybe reflect on where have you been focused that you did see the biggest growth, right? Maybe you have been focused in the past and you saw [00:13:00] that big growth.
But I really want you to reflect on that scattered leadership. So this week, before we end today, I want you to just think about what are all of the initiatives happening in your building? What are all of the things... And when I'm talking about an initiative, I'm talking about areas that you're trying to improve.
What are all of the areas that you're trying to improve at once? And I want you to think, if you could only focus on one, maybe two if you're just improving, of these areas going into next school year, which one would create the biggest ripple effect? , So that's your leadership by subtraction challenge.
I want you to think about what are the things in your leadership that you really need to focus on so that you can stay focused and actually have the bigger impact in your building. So next week, I'm excited. I'm gonna introduce what I believe is the first principle of leadership by subtraction. I have five principles in leadership by subtraction.
I'm giving you the first one [00:14:00] next week called subtracting noise, because before you can lead with clarity, you have to stop listening to all of the things that are causing noise, all of the things competing for your attention. And trust me, in education, we know there's a lot of noise. So stay tuned for that episode next week.
But as we close today, I just want you to focus on what are the initiatives that you're trying to do and what is the one that is going to create the biggest ripple effect moving forward. So I hope you have a great week. , And I will see you here next week.