When I transitioned from teaching middle school math to serving as a middle school principal, I was excited, but the shift was also bittersweet. I loved being a teacher and felt deeply connected to helping my students realize their potential. Nothing thrilled me more than seeing a student’s eyes light up with pride after mastering a tough problem, or hearing students who once groaned at the mention of math growing genuinely excited about what they were learning.
Still, stepping into the principal role felt like a chance to make a broader and more meaningful impact. It was an opportunity to shape school culture, support teachers, and ensure strong teaching and learning every day. I couldn’t wait to begin.
It didn’t take long to realize how quickly the weight of each day’s demands would pull me away from the very students who inspired me to lead. In those early days, my time was consumed by budget spreadsheets, compliance reports, safety plans, and what seemed like endless paperwork. It was not what I’d envisioned.
In my work today at The Leadership Academy, I’ve partnered with countless education leaders who describe the same challenge: competing tasks often leaving little time for the work that is most connected to the students’ school experience.
That experience, unfortunately, is common. What separates good leadership from great leadership is what—and who— stays at the heart of it.
Students at the Center. Always.
The Leadership Academy’s new leadership framework begins with being Student centered because it’s the anchor for everything that follows. Setting and holding High expectations, being Innovative, providing Nurturing support, and staying Engaged all flow from a relentless focus on students. Without that grounding, leadership risks being about system maintenance, performance optics, and adult comfort.
To be student-centered is to hold a mirror to every decision, practice, and initiative, asking:
- How does this improve the daily learning experience for students?
- Are we removing barriers that stand in the way of every student succeeding?
- Are students’ voices shaping what we do?
When leaders embrace this stance, they model what it means to lead with purpose and responsibility to children and families first. As a teacher, this came naturally to me, but I had to learn to apply those same mental models to my leadership as a principal.
I started by asking the same question before every important decision I had to make: Is this what’s best for students? It was a question I was intentional about asking my teachers and staff as well.
The answers helped to make it clear that everything in schools exists for one primary reason: to advance student success. Our teacher teams began adjusting their practice, basing it on mastery of standards data so that more students could achieve at high levels. We scheduled challenge-based learning classes based on student interests. We partnered with outside organizations to bring wellness, apprenticeships, and sports and performing arts-based opportunities to students. And I regularly collected feedback from the school community on my leadership to ensure that my approach was having the impact I’d intended. If the data revealed gaps, I addressed them.
I also started to see teachers who felt more empowered to solve problems. One day, an eighth-grade teacher peeked into my office and said with a smile, “I’m sure you’ve noticed I haven’t been stopping by as much. It’s not that I don’t want your opinion. It’s that I know you’ll ask, ‘Is that what’s best for students?’ Now I just ask myself that first.”
Leading for What and Who Matters Most
At The Leadership Academy, I now partner with principals, superintendents, and their leadership teams on a larger scale. The local context differs, but when we help leaders keep students at the center, what happens is the same:
- Coherence emerges
- District priorities line up with classroom practice
- Coaching conversations focus on what matters most for student learning instead of adult convenience
- Discussions about budgets, policies, or staffing shift away from compliance or politics and focus instead on creating the conditions for students to thrive
- Engaging with data moves beyond the numbers to questions like, “what does this tell us about the student experience?”
- Accountability stops being about top-down oversight and becomes a shared responsibility for student success
When leaders keep students as their north star, they lead differently: lifting up the faces behind the data, the stories behind the spreadsheets, and the purpose that brought them to this work.
The work of education leadership will never be simple, but it can be clear.
When students are our compass, even the most difficult decisions find direction, and education leaders create schools worthy of the children they serve.