Daily Table of Content Topics

• The Principal is the single most influential difference-maker in a school’s success or failure.
• The Principalship is a singularly unique position in PreK-12 education.
• School leadership “growing-pains”: Making sure your first year as a principal is not your last year as a principal!
• The twelve fundamental and foundational programmatic steps for raising student academic achievement.
• If a (middling or low-performing) school is chronically underperforming, then “game-changing” strategies are needed!
• The schoolhouse doors are opening for a new school year; is your personal house in order?
• Are you getting hit from all sides and feeling overstretched? (Welcome to the principalship!).
• The past need not always stay in the past.
• Artfully Crafting a Leadership Collage Personality.
• The new students and parents orientation: A tremendously useful, teachable moment!
• Back to school events (BTSE): Don’t waste this fantastically excellent information sharing opportunity!

• That very bad start to a new school year.
• The Ethical Principalship.
• The amazingly important new school-year opening teacher-staff meeting/conference.
• It’s almost always not about you—until it is!
• The importance of getting to know your students.
• The best countermoves for that “faux-bullying” parent.
• What’s the best approach to help new staff members be awesomely successful?
• Bushido SuperVision: Connecting your principalship life with that samurai life.
• Ethical Righteous Authority means you can’t always ask for permission to act.
• Wise Righteous Authority means there are times when you should ask for permission to act.
• The Empathetic Principalship.

• “Is this a public school?”
• How to best prepare for those unforeseen problematic school incidents.
• Meta in loco parentis: “Would I want this for my own child?”
• The Beautiful Simplicity: Applying Ockham’s “law of parsimony” hypothesis to raise student academic performance.
• The Elegant Complexity: Operationalizing Chekhov’s “literary gun theory” to raise student academic performance.
• Embracing the learning standards of a Common Core Curriculum for creating a highly-effective school building leader.
• Dealing with that recalcitrant staff person.
• Dealing with that recalcitrant principal—possibly yourself?
• The Emotionally Intelligent Principalship.
• The Authentic Principalship.
• The Principal as a Principled Peacemaker.
• Serving as the school’s chief equalizer of parental advantage and neutralizer of parental disadvantage.
• Establishing the critically vital parent/principal alliance.
• A core good school leadership skill: The ability to reduce the possibility and severity of school emergency incidents.
• In your principalship practice, be totally comprehensible, and at the same time, be totally mysterious!
• The art of strategic-luck-making: It’s not relying on “chance” for something wonderful to happen in your school.

• Principal, are you thinking about becoming a superintendent? Well, there’s one thing I want you to contemplate first.
• It’s one of those Beauty and Beastly days in the life of a high school principal.
• Honestly principal, who can you talk to, honestly? Building a safe psychotherapeutic zone around yourself.
• For those preparing themselves to be school administrators: Have you had “The Talk” with the people you love?
• Principals are human: Applying good leadership knowledge and skills in effectively supervising your personal life.
• A meaningful leadership practice: At and In the heart of principalship faithfulness is the learning to embrace doubt.
• Is it realistic to want to be highly effective in both your Principalship and “Parenting-ship” roles?
• Investing in and effectively managing the outside-of-regular-classroom programs and activities.
• “It’s not a matter of if it will happen; it’s only a matter of when will it be your turn!”
• The “Good School” correlation and connection to highly effective principal coaching.
• Your school family members (SFMs) have some key questions to ask about your leadership capabilities; it won’t work trying to avoid them!
• Why SuperVisionary school leaders will engage in an annual leadership Daydreaming vacation.
• Just focus on being your best, strongest self in your leg of the professional educational relay race!  

• Those essential (end of the school-day) school leadership informational, debriefing, and evaluation sessions.
• Those critical (end-of-the-week) school leadership analysis, advisement, and planning sessions.
• What you don’t know will hurt you: The hard truth about the “soft-skills” knowledge required for the principalship.
• Are highly effective principals born, or can good leadership skills and talents be taught and developed?
• An uncompromising principalship imperative: Give teachers a safe space to teach and students a safe place to learn!
• Bad leadership is like a bad virus!
• A constructive response to the self-destructive habits of Black and Latino male students: Case Study #1.
• A constructive response to the self-destructive habits of Black and Latino male students: Case Study #2.

• How to best prepare for the Superintendent’s announced or unannounced school visits.
• Bridging formal and informal education: Great schools discover and grow every student’s special skills, gifts, talents, and hobby interests!
• What you fail to supervise and manage in a school building will still get supervised and managed—just not by you!
• Don’t ever diminish or destroy a student’s access to strong parental support.
• The Mindful Principalship.
• Decision-Making & Difference-Making: Breaking Ineffectual Cycles of Same-Difference School Improvement Plans.
• Do you feel at times like walking away from your principalship? (Well, so did I for eleven years!).
• Bad educational service is an expression and end product of Bad customer service.
• Successfully Managing the Principal-Superintendent Relationship.
• The Subversive School-Based Leader.
• What is the true Culture of your school?  
• Every school needs an assistant principal of operations and administrative management.
• Desperately needed in public education: A serious series of ethical directives.
• Yes, by all means, have your teachers teach to, above, and beyond the (standardized) test!
• “Principal, do you have ‘staff favorites’ in your building?”

• Part of the effective principalship practice is not throwing yourself under the bus!
• Some interesting school-leadership phenomena to ponder.
• The School District Office’s “calling” is not to call schools constantly—helping to reduce the stresses of the principalship.
• Design a main and principal’s office escape plan.
• That which we call a school by any good name is still… 
• It’s simply not enough to ask kids who are bringing “emotional backpacks” full of pain and trauma to school every day; to just act “normal”. 
• Reports from the before school early mornings or the after-school evenings principal’s office thinking alone moments.
• Why, even if it doesn’t appear to be broken, you may still want to fix it—Hidden bad organizational habits can undermine the best work of even the best schools!
• “Want the people you supervise to be successful?” Start with asking questions about them, but at the same time, ask a few questions about your own coaching capacity and commitment.

• The Principalship as Poetry.
• A smart and easy principal win: Back your teachers when they hold students to high expectations and standards.
• It takes a school village of Courageous, Committed, and Consciously Aware adults to educate a child effectively.
• Those clandestine relaxation tricks utilized to offset a principal’s hectic and challenging days.
• “I led the staff effectively, but they just did not follow me effectively!”
• “Did that parent just say what I thought she said?”
• “I Am The Boss of This School!” —But is that who you really want to be?
• A consequential leadership contradiction: The constraining limits and vast influential reach of supervisory power.
• You are replaceable, so take good care of both your hearts!
• Build an ARC before student destructive behaviors and academic failure reigns in your school!
• Effectively managing high-risk (of something terrible happening) events and activities that occur every school year.
• Four politically correct “Eduspeak” throwaway lines that hide how we throw away too many children.

• Twenty of the best ways to effectively invest in the professional development and success of Assistant Principals.
• A holiday gift list for that principal who (you believe) has everything they need.
• Avoid those unprincipled and “unprincipal-like” conflicts with staff, students, and parents.
• Be smart and strategically thoughtful when designing “instructional practices professional development activities”.
•  Create an educationally dynamic school by building up a full head of school culture STEAM!
•  A Thinking Principalship: The most effective school-building leaders continuously think about leadership thinking.
•  L.E.A.D. or get out of the way of your school’s potential for success!
•  The highly effective principal’s toolbox will always contain these seven critical leadership skills tools.
•  With so many stakeholder friends like these, some public school children don’t need any enemies!
•  When doing a serious incident investigation, utilize True Detective techniques.
•  Give some quality strategic time to those students who are capable academically but are quietly underperforming.
•  The principalship is not just a title or what you do; it’s who you really are as a person!
•  What do the best principals do after they realize that…
•  Some brief but important school-building leadership things to think about.

•  The 5 R’s of building a powerfully positive school profile.

•  I traveled autobiographically backward to help my students to move forward academically.
•  I am “retired” but not yet tired of thinking about school leadership and its relationship to life in general and specifically  to our present state of public education.
•  Academic competitions are both indicators and incubators of a school’s academic achievement aspirations. 
•  “It’s not my fault; the MTA bus made me late!”: Helping students expand their locus of psychological and linguistic control.
•  Should public schools be forced to follow FDA-like “truth in advertising” laws and regulations?
•  When seeking support from non-public school entities, principals should not get in their own resources acquiring way.
•  There are times when you may want to give your own self a timeout!
•  Education is a political act — Schools are instruments of political power — Therefore, the principalship is political practice; and so…
•  What’s your “next act” professionally and personally?
•  The school operational leadership task of always mindfully magnifying your message.
•  Building a learning community and a community of learners’ school: A project-based pedagogical model.
•  What does your website tell others about your school? What does your website do for your school?

•  A special type of leadership quality is made possible by having a special type of leadership humility wisdom.
•  In public education, Language (words, terms, labels, definitions, etc.) is never politically neutral.
•  What reveals a school’s true instructional coaching character? —That school’s approach to the formal lesson observation process.
•  “Where in his IEP does it say that he can act like a doggone fool?”
•  Be an ethical, proficient leader, and simultaneously Be a proficient, ethical leader!
•  How do we carefully but honestly tell poor students and students of color that life is basically unfair?
•  “My bad, I forgot to celebrate last year’s victories!”  
•  The hidden job description: The unstipulated set of need to “knowables, doables, and beables” of the principalship.
•  The importance of having a club, team, and special activities recruitment fair early in the school year.
•  Supporting the superintendent’s school-building administrators “who’s next up” bench list.
•  Designing a school’s budget is ultimately a political, pedagogical, ethical, and leadership competency act.
•  Preparing for your end-of-year Superintendent’s Principal Performance Review Meeting.
•  You learn a lot about parenting and the human personality while serving in the principalship.
•  School-building crimes and punishment: A professionally ethical student disciplinary procedures practice. 
•  My dream school is a D.R.E.A.M. and S.T.R.E.A.M. school!
•  If their last principal was an S.O.B., there’s a good chance that you’ll be the next S.O.B.!
•  The art and craft of effective school leadership is the balancing of consistency and adaptability in your leadership style.

•  The Inspirational Principal.
•  When society pushes low expectations, the principal should push high expectations!
•  Public schools should be working and teaching models of a good civility and civics education.
•  We can’t build societal “walls-of-protection” high enough to keep us safe from the young people public education has failed.
•  Protecting students from child abuse by school staff members.
•  The standards and rubrics for the effective initial assessment of a teaching position candidate.
•  Designing interview questions that reveal the head and heart of a teaching position candidate.
•  There are no “do-overs” in public schools for those things that we don’t get right the first time!
•  The 2020-21 Coronavirus—a painful, teachable moment in exposing civic and public education’s leadership inadequacies.
•  Educational Linguistic Integrity: Let the words of our mouths match our practice!
•  If you find a love that will love you back during your time in the principalship, go for it!
•  The practice of leadership questioning and the questioning of leadership practices.
•  The not-so-good, the good, the great, and the highly effective school-building leader.
•  For academically struggling or underperforming students, time is and is not their best friend!
•  Seeking to help male students succeed in an often “hostile and antagonistic” public school environment. A not “robbing-the-hood” educational opportunity principalship practice.
• We must seek to support and empower female students to gain access to leadership positions.

•  Should parents with political, social, financial, class, and ethnic advantages try to take further unfair advantages?  
•  The Self-Reflective Principal. (1).
•  The Self-Reflective Principal. (2).
•  The Self-Reflective Principal. (3).
•  Schools should be all about the Benjamins, da Vincis, and Galileos—Creating a school with HIGH-E³STEAM values.
•  A faithful leadership-calling question: “Am I looking for trouble, or is trouble looking for me?“.
•  The pedagogy of musical chairs.
•  The fine-tuning of your leadership moral compass through spiritual-scholarly readings.
•  The urgency of practicing a pedagogy of insurgency!
•  Learning to love and embrace staff and student’s eccentricities!
•  A leadership wisdom that is grounded in knowing your students, staff, and, equally important, knowing yourself!
•  How can we identify, professionally develop, and appoint more highly effective principals? —It’s as easy as 1-2-3!
•  Where is your school’s annual S.W.A.G. attitude?
•  Faith in Your Leadership is…
•  Having Leadership Courage is…
•  Practicing Leadership Charity is… 
•  Offering Leadership Love is…
•  Providing a Leadership of Hope is…
•  Successful principals employ attracting success principles!
•  The constant up and down motions of emotions that exist daily in the principalship.
•  Childhood comic books and spiritual superhero stories can inspire real life supervision hero stories.
•  The case for designing and implementing a school-wide educational Repairations Project.
•  They call them “learn-less” Mondays, but Fridays can turn out to be extra “learning-less” bad!
•  Some classic prospective staff interviews greatest misses.
•  What is the school administrators best practiced and practical approach to the decision-making process in a crisis?
•  Much good and helpful school leadership knowledge can be learned both inside and outside of the school building.
•  There is no getting-around the need for a walking-around school leadership practice.

•  Two superintendent’s personnel appointments considerations: (1) The “Peter Principle” promotional hypothesis; and (2) “Can one be a great principal without having been a great teacher?”
•  The rewards of a rewarding Principalship.
•  Has the concept of Professional Expertise lost its meaning in our modern world?
•  I engaged my senior class as if they were embarking on a hero’s rites of passage journey.
• The level of high: self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-expectations reveals the quality of a principalship personality; and the school’s performance possibilities.
•  “Why is it that so many American-born public school students can’t read at grade level by the end of eighth grade?”  
•  School Volunteerism: Getting good and kind people to donate their talents to enhance the talents of your students!
• The Entrepreneurial Principal.
• What is your Entrepreneurial Principal’s “elevator pitch”?
• “You do know, principal, that it’s ultimately (in the end) all about the quality of instruction!”
•  The Passionate Principalship.

•  This page is for superintendents (principals can peek, I won’t tell).
•  Lessons I learned in the Principal’s office that were either expanded upon or reinforced in the superintendent’s office. (1)
•  Lessons I learned in the Principal’s office that were either expanded upon or reinforced in the superintendent’s office. (2)
•  Lessons I learned in the Principal’s office that were either expanded upon or reinforced in the superintendent’s office. (3)
•  And then there are those book writing lessons learned after leaving the Principal and Superintendent’s office.
•  God’s gonna trouble the waters—God’s gonna calm the waters!  

I.   Ancestral Dedications.

II.  Grateful Appreciations and Acknowledgments and Book Tour Talking Points.