Educational Leadership & Technology

It is easy to delegate; it is easy to put more on someone’s plate. We have all seen it — a teacher who is known for being the go-to person; that reliable member of the faculty who gets the job done, never complains, and always pulls one for the team. And we have all seen that person get dumped on time and time again. As an administrator it makes sense to give the hard work to the people who have proven they can do it, but is it always right? At what point does it verge in to becoming a crutch?

I’m a big believer in leading by example; if you aren’t willing to do it, you better not ask someone else to do it. Of all the lunch time duties we have at my school, lunchroom duty is the one despised the most. It makes sense, because the lunchroom is large, loud, and messy all the time. Middle school students are talking, yelling, playing, and basically being kids during lunch. Teachers don’t want to deal with it. That is exactly why I do the lunchroom duty myself. Everyday I am in the lunchroom and everyday the teachers see me on duty. They see me interact with students; they see me talk to the students in lunch detention; they see me order students to pick up their messes; they see me pick up after the students who forgot and I didn’t catch. They see me taking duty seriously and it teaches them to do theirs well. I’m part of the team because I do the job that everybody hates each and every day. They respect it and they respect me because of it. And that is leadership.

I also handle the after school detention program for the same reason. Teachers need to feel supported and they want to know that they can relay on administrators to lessen problems, not increase problems. At one school I worked at the high school principal asked me why I wanted to schedule a special room for after school detention. “Why not just have teachers do it in their classrooms?” was the question he asked. I explained that I didn’t want to burden the teachers with a painful duty that I had time to do myself; furthermore, I didn’t even want to intrude on a teacher’s classroom after school, so he/she wouldn’t feel uncomfortable with a room full of students he/she didn’t know. Teacher’s do a lot of work in the classroom when students are gone and the room is quiet. I didn’t want to take that valuable time, when I knew that I could do the duty in a separate room. My response stupefied him to the point that he was unable to respond to me; I never got the room I was looking for. I believe that man is still thinking about the situation and pondering the idea, “He took something off a teachers plate instead of putting something on… Hmmm…”

Teachers need to see me work just as hard as they are, even harder. I’m supposed to be a leader; one cannot lead from the back, you need to be in the front. Teachers see me do lunch duty and they are thankful; they know I handle after school detention and they are thankful. They are thankful for a person who works with them and doesn’t simply sit behind a desk and delegate work to them. It is a small semantical difference, but an important difference none the less.