What Gets Your Focus as a Principal? Is It Reflected Around You and Is It What You Want?

If you’ve ever been to a personal development workshop, or spent time working with a therapist, or even studied entry-level psychology, you know that our thoughts are powerful and just might create the world around us. Well, maybe not create the actual world around us, but the lens through which we view the world and the details that stand out to us.

Have you heard of the famous “Red Car Theory”? Let someone mention the words “red car” to you while you are driving, or walking on a city street, or meandering through a multi-level parking lot and all of a sudden, all that you see are red cars.

It happens because our minds respond, consciously or unconsciously, to thoughts that we have. When someone suggests that there’s something to look forward to with glee, you probably smile a bit more and you receive whatever comes next positively. Turn it around, though, and in the exact same situation, if the person says, “we’re only going to get to stay here for 20 minutes because of the bees” instead of being thrilled about the pause in the shade in the park and the ice cream you were about to eat, you are now worried about bees and overwhelmed by fatigue and the thought of continuing to walk. 

What you focus on will also translate to your school system as a school leader. If you are consumed by what is coming at you (task completion mode), then each day continues to be filled with more and more coming at you and fairly soon they become legitimately urgent. And it is simple for the demands on a principal’s day to become consumed with responding to others instead of leading a team toward a vision because the scope of a principal’s job is so vast. District office administrators can find themselves racing between texts, emails, meetings and schools in variations of the same “urgent-response” mode instead of setting a course and supporting educators to get there. 

Think about this when it comes to instruction. How well do you maintain that focus and get ahead of the goals with the educators on your team on a daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly basis?

Here’s a quick exercise you can do, right now, as you read this to get a sense of how close you are to focusing, as a leader, on the instructional mission and outcomes of your school system. 

Taking no more than 10 minutes, make as long a list as you can of the moments you witnessed last year that were about student learning that are exemplars for you as an instructional leader.

1. What was the learning? 

Describe it in detail (ex. Students were applying genetic traits to create a new species and understand trait inheritance). 

2. What were students doing? 

Describe it in detail (ex. Students were in pairs and, as I walked through the room, they were animatedly talking, standing up/sitting down, gesturing, laughing, excitedly interrupting their partner about the traits)

3. Where was this?

 Describe the level and class (ex. This was in Mr. Jackson’s third grade)

4. How does this align with the school’s instructional vision? 

Describe this in detail (ex. We want students to drive the meaning-making process and have classrooms be active, energetic and planned. This lesson was all three). 

Look through your list and observe what you wrote, the patterns, what's there and what's not.

What’s most revealing about this is how easy it is/is not to generate a list with rich details and how easy it is to recall a set of experiences you witnessed.

If your list is detailed and the examples match your school’s instructional vision, then keep it up and dig deeper for 2024-2025.

If your list is short, but descriptive and aligned, then you’re on the right track. The question for you is how to get into more spaces / classrooms to witness more learning across more settings and capture it. Use what you have captured to illustrate the vision to other educators (teachers and administrators) and build momentum for the work in 2024-2025.

If your list is either not descriptive and it was hard to say much other than “students were doing grade level math” or you realize the list didn’t align to a stated instructional vision, then that is the place to dig into for the coming year. 

Whichever place your list is, you, as a system leader, can utilize the “Red Car Theory” to your advantage.

Get clear on what you want to see across classrooms and why.

Describe it in so much detail, it’s like we are seeing it with you.

Grab some examples in the first weeks of school and tell the story to get others looking for the “red cars” of learning too.  

Bring that focus to everyone for 2024-2025.