Your Staff Is Not Your Class
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder reminds principals that leading adult professionals is fundamentally different from managing a classroom of children.
Key Takeaways
- Teachers are not your students - The dynamic between principal and staff should be professional, not parental
- Leadership skills aren't just classroom management - Managing adults requires different skills than managing children
- Respect the difference - Principals who treat teachers like students create resentment and dysfunction
Transcript
One of the shifts that you have to make when you move from being a classroom teacher to being an administrator is recognizing that your job is changing from one of working with children to one of working with adults.
And that sounds obvious, But as I hear from some of the difficulties people have with their principals, it occurs to me that a lot of what's going on there is their principal never really made that shift.
They never really realized that when you become a leader of adults, you have to treat those adults like adults, like professionals, and not like they're your class.
And I see this so much.
I see so many manifestations of treating your staff like they're your students, like they're your class.
And some of that is subtle and seems harmless to me, like the idea of using an attention-getting signal, like clap once if you can hear me, clap twice if you can hear me, in a staff meeting like that seems...
harmless, and I would probably stand by my past usage of things like that that are harmless, but if it's in the context of leadership that is consistently treating adults like their children, treating staff members not like professionals, but like students, that's a totally different thing, right?
That we're going to have a totally different feel to our leadership if we don't consistently treat teachers as adults.
And one of the ways that we can treat people as adults is giving them decision-making authority, right?
Teachers should be able to make decisions related to their work.
And if you don't set things up that way, if you don't let teachers make their own decisions, it creates these huge bottlenecks, right?
Like I don't want people asking me 50 million questions a day.
I want people empowered to do their jobs as professionals i want people to be able to ask questions if they need to but i want people to to know that they're trusted as professionals to make most of the decisions that they need to make on a day-to-day basis so let me know what you think about this let me know how it works for you to be treated like an adult, like a professional.
I'll say one more thing.
We have to also be sure that we're not treating teachers like they are parents, right?
The students that you have in your classroom are not your children.
They are your clients, right?
When you are a professional who is at work, that's very different from being a parent who has their own children.
And we take that for granted sometimes because we think, well, working with kids is working with kids.
A lot of our teachers are parents.
But that's a different capacity, right?
You are in a completely different capacity when you are working with a class full of students at your job than when you are at home with your own children, with your own family.
So let me know how this is showing up for you.
How can we make sure that all educators are treated like adult professionals, not like students, not like parents, but as professionals who are at work?
Leave a comment.
Let me know what you think.