The Assistant Principal Podcast

About this show: 

“As an assistant principal, you must learn to bloom where you are planted. If you do, you will open up huge opportunities to make a meaningful difference right now in your career and build the skills you need to make an even greater difference once you become a principal.”
These aren’t my wise words. They were first spoken by Dr. Robyn Jackson, addressing a common concern of assistant principals: How do you grow your own leadership in the shadow, or at least presence, of another leader?

“But when you're a builder, nobody has to move because you can build wherever you are. And so I think that's kind of one of the main differences between leadership and builderdership that creates space for other people.” 2:40

“Because then you build the muscles of of of truly being the person who is the builder in the building, that you know the builder in chief in your school building. And those skills transfer over to the principal ship when most of the other skills we learned as an AP don't transfer” 10:45

“He said something that just stopped me in my tracks and I couldn't stop thinking about, which is he said bosses say go and leaders say let's go. And I've heard that before. That's, you know, that's a great distinction. But then he said builders. Say come and and in that one simple sentence, I'd started to to to see the answer to some of the problems that I've been frustrated about in education” 14:20

“And how do you get your people committed to that compelling purpose? And therefore things you're going to do, feedback, support, accountability and culture. That's the only four things you can do to positively influence your teacher's behaviors.” 16:27

“Then your conversations, whether they're formal or informal, become more about teacher growth and serving students than they do about fulfilling the requirements of the evaluation cycle. And so you don't have to straddle 2 worlds anymore. You turn the thing that you have to do into the thing that you want to do anyway, so that you're always every conversation helping teachers grow” 24:27

“ You have to sell things to the district, the idea about why we're going to do something or not doing, or you have to sell the idea to parents or to your community. We need to get good at selling our ideas, and the assistant principal is the assistant principal. Ship is a great way to practice that, you know, how do you see something that needs work in the school, and how do you, how do you present that idea to a principal in a way that the principal sees not only the merit and the idea, but is willing to take the risk of implementing your idea” 30:50

“If you can take yourself out of the hero spot, let them be the hero, and you put yourself in the guide position. You will always, always be able to get your story across in the way, or get your advice or your ideas across in a way that people can welcome them.” 35:54

“You owe it to yourself. You owe it to us. You owe it to the students and the families you serve. To instead of trying to be some cookie cutter version of of what somebody else's idea of an administrator is. To be yourself, but not just yourself, your best self, that's that's the, that's the ultimate role” 39:30

“Focus on being your best self, because if you can do that, you can really step into that the role will be the right role will be waiting for you” 41:00

“it's not just grow where you're planted, bloom where your planet. It does two things. First of all, it makes your work so much more fulfilling and rewarding right now. Secondly, it does change people's lives for the better. But thirdly, this is almost counterintuitive. By blooming where you're planted, you get more recognition than if you try to conform into what the district wants you to be anyway, because there's only one of you.” 42:54

“One of the best principles I know. Doesn't respond email You know, there are a few, but if you want to get in touch with him, emails not the way, because he doesn't do email, because he's out in classrooms working with teachers. So it's interesting that people, I think. If you're doing it right and executing on that vision and making a case for that, there's, I think we get more latitude than than what we think we can get.” 29:47

“We make a lot of assumptions about the systems we're in and what the systems want from us. And I think in your story what you show us is a lot of times our assumptions aren't correct” 47:43

School Leadership Reimagined: https://schoolleadershipreimagined.com

Buildership University: https://buildershipuniversity.com/

My email: frederick@frederickbuskey.com 

The Assistant Principal Podcast website: https://www.frederickbuskey.com/appodcast.html 

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