the school leader paradox
When I work with clients in K-12 education, the shelf that most of my coaching content sits on is the School Leader Paradox. The paradox holds the following:
Being a School Leader is everything like being a teacher.
Being a School Leader is nothing like being a teacher.
The idea is that the best default moves that school leaders can make with/for their staff are slight adaptations of the ones they would have made with/for their students. At the same time, novel power dynamics and fewer opportunities to build and repair mean that leading adults is different than leading children.
The first half of the paradox is the one new school leaders are likeliest to overlook. They have to be reminded, often, that adults need so many of the same things that kids do, and often need higher doses of them: clear goals, explicitly high expectations, rationales for the things they are being asked to do that go beyond “because I said so.”
-ben
