Should People Become Administrators Without Teaching First?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses whether requiring teaching experience before administration is actually necessary.
Key Takeaways
- It seems like a bad idea on the surface - Leading teachers without having taught seems like a credibility problem
- But the argument has nuances - Some leadership skills come from other fields, and teaching experience doesn't guarantee good leadership
- Classroom experience still matters - Understanding what teachers face daily is important context for making good decisions as a leader
Transcript
My state allows people to get their admin license without any teaching experience.
I don't know exactly how you would go about evaluating teachers well if you've never been a teacher, if you've never personally planned a lesson, worked with students, spent all day in the classroom, like I really feel like that experience is indispensable.
And I think in a lot of other industries, they feel the same way.
Like if you try to become a manager of computer scientists, like computer programmers, developers, and you've never been one, you're going to get complaints from the team that you're supervising that you don't understand the work.
You can't manage them effectively.
If you are a healthcare administrator and you have never been a doctor, you are going to get criticism from the doctors who know that you don't understand their work as well as perhaps you should to lead it.
I think even those of us who have been teachers prior to becoming principals face a learning curve and face a problem of not having done every specific job of everyone you supervise, right?
Like, you can't teach everything.
You're going to supervise people who teach things that you didn't teach, and that's inevitable.
But I don't think we need to go so far with this that no experience is fine, right?
Like, we have three or four million teachers in this country, many of whom would make great principals, and I think developing that talent pool to find our next administrators makes a lot more sense than just opening the job to anybody who comes in off the street.
Now, I will say there have been some great exceptions to that, right?
There have been great people who have come in from other fields, and who have been good district leaders, maybe been good school leaders.
And I'm certainly not mad at anybody who did that.
If you've been a good leader, you know, I think the key is humility and the willingness to learn.
Right.
And that's true if you do have teaching experience.
And I've seen what happens when people have teaching experience, but not humility, where they become very dogmatic and controlling about their preferred ways to teach.
And they don't really understand why anybody would do anything differently than they would.
Well, There are lots of different jobs in the classroom and lots of different ways to approach the work of teaching.
So I think we have to have humility.
We have to be open to learning.
We have to be open to different approaches and not just try to micromanage people.
But having said all of that, I still think it makes a lot more sense to require that people who want to be principals be teachers first.
Let me know what you think and let me know for how long you think people should have to teach before they become administrators.