Stop Leading, Start Building!. Robyn R. Jackson

      Introduction

      Why you haven't made a bigger difference in your school (and why it's not your fault)

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      I'm just going to start bluntly, OK?

      "Leadership" is dead.

      There.

      I said it.

      And as much as it pains me to say so, we all know it's true.

      For years, we have tried to use leadership to move our schools forward. We're trying still. We get into classrooms more, we adopt new programs, and we conduct data meeting after data meeting. We create ambitious school improvement plans, we organize teachers into professional learning communities (PLCs), and we bring in outside trainers. We tinker with the master schedule, and we stand in front of our staff, year after year, working hard to create a sense of urgency around the things that matter most.

      And yet, each year, we just grow more frustrated as the outcomes we seek still seem so far away. We progress toward our goals in inches—if we progress at all.

      I want you to know it's not your fault. It's how you were trained.

      If you're like most school administrators, you were trained to be a leader. You were given the tools of leadership, and you were told that they would help you transform your school. What they didn't tell you is that because "leadership" was created by the institution, it's designed to maintain the institution, not transform it.

      In order to transform your school, you need something more.

      This book is about that something more.

      Each year I help thousands of administrators stop wasting time and energy trying to drag their teachers toward their goals. I show them a new and better way. Now I want to show you.

      If you're like most of the administrators and instructional coaches I work with, you want to make a real difference in the lives of your students. You want to grow your school. You want to be able to look back on your work one day and know that you did something meaningful in your job, and that students' lives were changed because of it.

      But most days, you don't feel that way. Those grand goals are obscured by the daily grind of putting out fires; chasing, checking, and correcting people; and digging your way out from under a steady pile of "to-dos." What matters most recedes in the face of what's happening now. You work nights and weekends, sacrificing your personal time just to keep up. You face enormous pressure from both above and around you to perform.

      I get it. I used to feel the same way.

      As an instructional coach and a middle school administrator, I truly wanted to help the teachers I was supporting become better teachers. I desperately wanted to make my school a better school—one in which all my students would be successful. This meant I would go to the trainings and then try to apply the new strategies I'd been taught when I returned to my school. I would spend hours devouring leadership books. The leadership strategies I encountered always seemed to work in the trainings or in the books, but they rarely worked the way I'd envisioned when I tried to use them with actual teachers. And I'm ashamed to admit that when those leadership strategies didn't work like I was told they would, I often blamed my teachers. I thought they were just too resistant to change, too invested in the old ways of doing things, too focused on their issues instead of the kids.

      Other times, I blamed myself. Maybe I was the problem. Maybe I wasn't the leader I thought I was. I'd reach for another leadership strategy, to make myself a better leader. I'd go to another training. I'd read another book. There was always the chance that this next new thing would be the