How to Avoid Micromanaging Teachers
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses why teachers need both autonomy and attention, and how principals can support instruction without micromanaging.
Key Takeaways
- Autonomy Matters - Teaching requires constant professional judgment, so teachers need enough freedom to make decisions on their own.
- Attention Matters Too - Leaving teachers completely alone is neglectful; leaders need to show up, observe, and offer support.
- Avoid Management by Mandate - When leaders stay out of classrooms, they often rely on telling people what to do without seeing practice firsthand.
- Use Regular Walkthroughs - Visiting about three classrooms a day helps principals stay connected to instruction without creating stress.
- Show Respect, Not Control - Curiosity, presence, and professional respect build better classrooms than write-ups and micromanagement.
Full Transcript
micromanaging teachers is dangerous because teaching is a job that requires a professional who can make decisions on their own, right? If you're a teacher, you have so many decisions to make in a day that there's no way you can run those decisions by someone else every time.
There's no way you can make sure that everything you do is okay with someone else. You have a job to do as a professional that requires a degree of professional trust in your decisions. And so many people have had bad experiences with that.
They've been micromanagers.
They've been told what to do to such an extent that they can't actually do their job. Like, I truly believe this is a job that you cannot do without some degree of autonomy. If we want people to do professional work as teachers, we have to give them professional respect, and that requires a degree of autonomy. But, here's the but. I don't think that means completely leaving people alone. I think leaving people alone completely is neglectful, right?
I think as instructional leaders, there's an obligation to pay attention, right? People deserve attention. They deserve assistance. They deserve leaders' time. And if we don't give them that time, and we try to just make everybody, you know, kind of row in the same direction, and use effective practices, but we don't actually spend time in classrooms. What we end up with is what I call management by mandate, right?
If you don't get into classrooms and you want people to be aligned, well, you just tell people what to do and then you never actually go and see for yourself. I don't think that works just as I don't think micromanagement works. I think what we've got to do is make sure that we have two things right. One is autonomy, right? People do need autonomy. The other is attention.
People do need attention. If we have both of those ingredients, I call this the autonomy matrix, if we have both of those ingredients, people can have professional respect instead of management by mandate or micromanagement. So I think that means instructional leaders need to get into classrooms every day.
This is probably not a surprise if you've been following me for a while. I believe that administrators need to do about three classroom walkthroughs a day, every day. If it's the first day of school, or the first day after a break, or if you're just getting started, go visit everybody in, you know, a row, back to back, one to two minutes,
and then, on an ongoing basis, visit about three people a day, stay for a couple of minutes, talk, But don't micromanage.
That's the thing. I think if we micromanage, if we give people write-ups and all this terrible stuff that really stresses them out, this is not going to be a good thing. So, we've got to show up, show professional respect, recognize that people need autonomy, but don't ignore them. Pay attention, show interest, be curious, and amazing things will happen in classrooms. Let me know what you think.