I will never forget the first time that I suggested that principals are not the instructional leaders of their buildings.
I was sitting on a panel of experts at a conference about teacher working conditions. The audience was primarily administrators who were interested in making their buildings places where teachers wanted to work.
During the conversation, a principal on the panel started talking about the importance of modeling instructional leadership — and to him, that meant modeling expertise as an instructor and introducing teachers to new trends in instruction.
That’s where I jumped in.
“I actually don’t think that principals ARE the instructional leaders of their schools,” I said. “Instructional leadership for me comes from the members of my collaborative team. They are the ones who challenge and push my practice forward, not my principal.”
The audience lost it.
A parade of principals unloaded on me at the microphone. “How can you suggest that we don’t have instructional expertise?” they asked. “We were all teachers once, too.”
One lady even approached me at the end of the session to suggest that I had stepped out of my place when I argued that instructional leadership doesn’t come from principals. “Who are YOU to tell principals that they aren’t the instructional leaders of their buildings?” she suggested. “We have specialized training that you will never have.”
Since then, I’ve written extensively about the myth of the instructional leader.
My argument is really quite simple: Being an expert instructor requires constant practice — and once someone leaves the classroom, it is hard to continue practicing. Over time, you lose your skills and your professional agility — the ability to translate concepts to real-world environments in an instant and on the fly.
That’s what I call, “Your Expiration Date” — and it is the moment where you lose the ability to fully understand the work of teachers because you don’t do that work anymore and because your first-hand experience came during a different time with different demands, different resources and different expectations.
Expiration dates are a reality in every profession that requires highly skilled practitioners.
The managing partner at a law firm doesn’t argue that she is still a top rate trial lawyer anymore. The hospital administrator doesn’t argue that his skills in the operating room are on par with his top surgeons. The director of operations at a dealership’s service center doesn’t argue that she should be the first to diagnose problems on the cars rolling through for repairs.
The simple truth is that in knowledge-driven professions, practice is constantly evolving and to stay at the top of your game, you have to actually DO the work. Once you move into positions beyond the courtroom, the operating room, the service bay or the classroom, you might know a ton about practice — but knowing about practice and actually practicing are two completely different things.
Now, every time that I write about expiration dates and the myth of the instructional leader, I am VERY careful to acknowledge that administrators have knowledge and skill that is essential to the success of schools.
In fact, one of my central arguments is that we should start calling principals “leaders of instructors.”
To me, that work involves creating the conditions that allow teachers to learn from one another — and it is highly skilled work, too. Understanding how to move organizations forward requires a unique set of knowledge and skills that classroom teachers rarely have. More importantly, understanding how to move organizations forward is incredibly complex work that has a direct impact on the success of students in a school.
And to continue my analogy from above, the top trial lawyers, surgeons, mechanics and teachers all recognize that they don’t have the skills or knowledge to fill the roles played by managing partners, hospital administrators, directors of operations, or the best principals.
The roles that people play in professional organizations are complementary — all equally important to success, but all requiring a unique set of skills and expertise that are not equally shared across positions.
Here’s the difference in education, though: Every time that I make this argument, I get comments from principals that sound something like this:
- “I was a teacher for ten years! Of course, I know what it is like to be a teacher.”
- “Why does this have to be an either/or thing? Why is it so binary? Why can’t an administrator be an expert instructor, too?”
- “We really shouldn’t tear each other down. We should be lifting each other up.”
- “To suggest that a principal just forgets how to teach because they are no longer in the classroom is ridiculous.”
- “I don’t have to prove anything to you! I’m a principal and you aren’t. You don’t know anything about my job!”
And my all time favorite:
- “My wife is still a full-time teacher! I know first-hand just what that job takes because I see what she does every day!”
These types of reactions rub me the wrong way.
Imagine applying them to other professions.
- Would you REALLY want to hire a trial lawyer who had ten years of experience but who hadn’t been in a courtroom in a decade to defend you?
- Would you REALLY want to hire a mechanic who hasn’t touched a car since the early 2000s to work on your brand new Tesla?
And my all time favorite:
- Would you REALLY feel confidence in a surgeon who announced right before your operation that they hadn’t been in an operating room in a decade, but no need to worry because his wife is still a full-time surgeon so he knows first-hand what the job entails?
Of course you wouldn’t do any of these things.
That’s because you recognize that in complex professions, knowledge is constantly changing — and folks who haven’t done the work in a long while aren’t likely to have the current expertise necessary to do the work well.
But what REALLY bugs me about these kind of comments is that they reinforce the disparate power dynamics in education.
The school leaders who make statements like these are simply reinforcing education’s hierarchy at a time when the most successful leaders are flattening their organizational charts and recognizing the importance of distributing leadership throughout their companies.
Instead of seeing teachers as equals with a unique role to play and a unique set of skills that are essential to moving the organization forward, school leaders who make statements like these are sending tacit messages to their teachers that authority belongs to them and that expertise in instruction isn’t a function of constant practice but instead is a function of a title or a position.
That only serves to deprofessionalize teaching — to make it something “less than.”
And that’s why teacher turnover rates are so incredibly high.
Why would accomplished people choose to stay in the classroom if everyone — including school leaders — refuse to acknowledge teachers as professionals with any kind of unique skills and expertise?
Dan Lortie wrote about this deprofessionalization of the work of classroom teachers in his seminal book Schoolteacher, which was first published in 1975.
He argues that it is a function of false transparency. Everyone assumes that they know what it takes to be a classroom teacher because our position seems to be so transparent. Everyone sat in classrooms as kids. Many people have had their own sons and daughters sitting in classrooms. Everyone knows a teacher or has a teacher in their family — so everyone thinks they understand teaching.
That false transparency is what causes people to dismiss the notion that classroom teachers possess a unique set of skills and expertise.
And the fact that some school administrators embrace that same false transparency — “My wife is still a full-time teacher! I know first-hand what it takes to be a teacher because I watch what she does!” — is shameful.
Why can’t we acknowledge — even in our OWN profession — that classroom teachers really ARE the experts on instruction in a schoolhouse?
#worthasking
