Ever feel like you’re leading one crisis at a time? Like your job is a never-ending game of academic Whac-A-Mole?
Yeah, me too.
School leadership has a way of pulling our focus to the next class period… or if we’re lucky, next month’s PD day. We plan in short bursts.
We measure in test scores.
We lead like we’re stuck in the current chapter of a story…forgetting the story isn’t even finished yet.
But here’s the hard truth: We don’t know what chapter our students are in. We sure as hell don’t know how their story ends. And yet we build entire systems to evaluate, judge, and track students based on one snapshot in time.
That’s not just short-sighted, it’s a failure of imagination.
If we want to lead well, we have to see beyond the chapter we’re handed.
So, what can we do as school leaders to help us lead like we are “waiting for the end of the story”?
Three things school leaders can do:
- Audit your timelines.
Look at your school improvement plan, PLC agendas, and PD sessions—are you thinking in months or in years? Push your team to plan with a 5-year lens, not a 5-day one. - Stop fetishizing the test score.
Use it as one data point—then spend time learning your students’ actual stories. Create space for narrative data: student reflections, parent feedback, teacher observations. - Talk about the future more than the past.
In staff meetings, IEP teams, and student conferences, ask: Where is this student going? not What did they get on the last benchmark?
Leadership is not about predicting the end of the story…it’s about helping students write it.
