The following is the first chapter in our book, Hallway Leadership. Scroll down to order your copy today!
The People’s Principal
“A positive culture beats strategy any day of the week.”
I worked for a man named John for years. He is the principal I want all teachers to have at some point in their careers. When I worked for him, he redeemed my hope in the education system, in society, in people, in life.
He was skinny, lanky even. Goofy. He loved to laugh and joke around, and he genuinely cared about people. We were always people first in John’s eyes. Before we were a warm body in a classroom, a piece of data, a lesson plan, a teacher, we were valued as human beings.
I was coming off a few years at a toxic school. If you do this long enough, you will work in a positive culture, and unfortunately in a toxic one. It is one of the inevitable pitfalls in a broken education sphere. If you are reading this and you’ve never worked in a school that felt toxic, please reach out because I want to interview you!
I was gun shy when I came to John decently early in my career. I came to his school from a place of trauma. I was at a point in my teaching career that I did not know if I wanted to continue this journey. We all have these thoughts as educators. I entered this new school year with not only my heart broken a little, but my body was broken too. Four days before school started, I tore my entire left knee out playing soccer on a turf indoor field. It was the triple tear of terrible. I got my ACL, my MCL, and my meniscus all in one fell swoop. I wish I could tell you it was because I was doing something amazingly cool, diving header over four players to score the winning goal. Nope. I was all alone and twisted wrong. Pop. Pop. Pop. went my left knee.
So there I was. Broken heart. Broken body. Crutches and sadness. I had to wear a backpack and crutch down to make copies, and crutch back. I crutched around my classroom and every once in a while I would teach on a stool with my whole leg elevated to keep the swelling at bay. I would teach all day to the best of my ability, cry in the car all the way to physical therapy, cry the whole time at physical therapy, cry the whole way home, and finally pull it together for my family to make dinner and prepare my mind to do it all again the next day. My kids were toddlers at the time, and I had to be strong for them.
For the next year, I was quiet. If you know me at all, to say the adjective ‘quiet’ is laughable. I am not. But this particular year, I was. I observed. I learned, and watched, and grew as a leader. The first month, I rested in the fact that this school was NOT toxic, not even close, not even a little bit. The levity I felt in my soul was something I cannot describe to you. John observed my teaching on a near daily basis; he is relational. He started to see that even on one leg, I was pretty dang good. He immediately put me on the principal’s leadership team, the guiding coalition, and made me a team leader. “Oh,” I thought to myself, “Maybe I am meant for this career.” He poured into me as an educator, so I could pour into my students as a teacher. This was heart and soul work, and John was the heartbeat of our building.
John was the epitome of a hallway leader. If you needed John, he was not far away. He wholeheartedly believed that if students were in the school, he would not be doing any sort of paperwork. He never hid in his office; he was there. It made the school feel safe like a family.
John did lunch duty every single day. He was never not there. For three hours of every single school day, Monday through Friday, he monitored, led, herded, laughed with, and disciplined the 600 students in and out of the lunch room. I often only guessed at his exhaustion while the teachers in his school were blessed with this glorious, thirty minutes of lunch bliss.
Sometimes, in a school full of middle school kids, with hormones raging, and power dynamics in the balance, drama will ensue; that is the nature of teaching in middle school. In unstructured environments, some kids will take advantage of the walk from lunch back to the classroom. (Only some). See, I work in a school in which, statistically, it is the third most violent neighborhood in our urban city. They won’t deliver pizzas to the housing projects I am referring to; that is my student population. Now, don’t get it twisted, my students are smart, capable, beautiful, and often exist within a cycle of poverty in which the only way out is their education. But, if pride is the only thing that belongs to you, you will physically fight for that pride. And, that happens, often.
On this particular day, John was leading the herd down the hallway back to their 8th grade classes to close out the afternoon as he did every school day. Then it happened, we saw it happening as if in slow motion. I’m standing at my door, crutches in hand when two girls drop their backpacks, the kids circle up, phones come out, cameras come on, and these two girls start wailing on each other. Both girls were in my class in different hours. It was February, so there should be no doubt in your mind that as their teacher, I loved each one of them as I had poured into them since August, and wanted to see their success.
It was the most violent fight I had ever witnessed in my years as an educator, and that is saying a lot. I had witnessed my fair share of horrific fights since 2006. In a whirl of blood, hair, broken noses, screams, and utter sadness, we broke it up. John, Coach Jones, and myself were able to push through and physically restrain these precious babies who thought the only avenue to resolution was to take the other one out. Arrests were made, and we got our kids back in class, and I looked out into the hall with pencils, backpacks, phones, blood, hair strewn all over, I thought to myself, “this can’t be here when the bell rings for 6th hour.” I was on my hands and knees cleaning before I even realized what I was doing; bloodborne pathogens be damned. Tears streaming down my face, I’m placing things in a trash bag when I look up. On his hands and knees, tears streaming down his face, bloodborne pathogens be damned, was John. The Hallway Leader I hope you all have one day. The servant leader I pray every teacher on this planet will have one day.
-Katie Kinder
This book is a memoir. It reflects the authors’ opinions and present recollections of experiences over time. Some names and characteristics have been changed, some events have been compressed, and some dialogue has been recreated.
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Katie Kinder 