When something hard happens at your school, you need someone who can help you think — someone who'll stay on the line long enough for you to get the answer you need.
Most principals can't name that person. And that absence is costly.
It's also baked into the job: principalship is the only leadership role in your building designed to surround you with people while leaving you to think alone.
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OFF CAMPUS
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🎙 The Antidote to teacher burnout, and what’s holding students back
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A MESSAGE FROM IXL
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DO SCHOOL DIFFERENT
Who do you call?
When something hard happens at your school next Monday afternoon …
(The kind of thing that doesn't have a clean answer, the kind that needs you to think out loud with someone smarter than the situation)
WHO DO YOU CALL?
Not because you need a decision approved.
Not because you need to vent.
I mean who do you actually call to think?
I mean who do you actually call to think?
I mean who do you actually call to think?
The person who'll listen long enough to hear what you’re actually asking and will stay on the line long enough for you to find clarity.
Most principals can't name that person.
Some can name a colleague they can text.
Some can name an old mentor who loves to share what worked in the 90s.
Some can name their AP. Some can’t. And the AP listens because they have to.
Few can name someone they can call who can help them think.
That’s not good enough.
You are leading a building full of adults and kids who need you.
To think.
You are making decisions every day that affect families, careers, and futures.
You are absorbing the emotional weight of every staff member who walks into your office and every parent who calls.
And on the days when the situation is genuinely hard you are mostly doing it alone.
Welcome to the structural reality of 2026 principalship.
Superintendents have peer cohorts.
Teachers have grade-level teams.
Coaches have coordinators.
Department heads have department meetings.
Principals have a job that isolates them by design.
You spend your days surrounded by people, but most of those people need something from you.
Almost none of them are positioned to think with you.
And if you’re lucky enough to have someone who CAN think with you …
They’re not available at 10:47pm when you're staring at a teacher email and you don't know whether to write back warm or firm.
So the email gets drafted or doesn’t.
You use the wrong tone because there was nobody to test it with.
That is the absence of a thinking partner at the moment of need.
And the longer that absence goes on, the more the cost compounds.
The hard conversations get postponed.
The bold moves get softened.
The strategic work gets delayed because all your thinking is happening reactively, in your head, alone.
So let me ask you this …
When the next hard thing happens at your school who are you going to call?
Who are you going to call?
To think?
If a gap exists there, you need this.
TIP OF THE WEEK
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SUNDAY VIBES
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Keep Making a Ruckus,
PS … in case you missed it, hard conversations are worth it
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