One of the most precious commodities we have as human beings is time. Time is precious because it’s the only resource we cannot purchase or get back. As a leadership coach, the one thing I see in every school principal I meet is a very hard worker. They often are at their desks before school starts, and they are often the last people to leave the school building at the end of the day. With all of the time they put in, they are often still frustrated because they don’t have enough time to complete all their tasks. The old adage that we need to “work smarter, not harder” certainly applies to every school leader I have ever coached. Each one has contacted me because they want to have a successful school, but they struggle with time allocation. In this article, I examine how secondary school principals can best allocate their time to lead effectively.

As I travel the country, I often hear that in order for principals to succeed, they must spend the majority of their time in classrooms doing classroom observations. I’ve even heard some superintendents go so far as to say that “principals should spend 80% of their time inside their teachers’ classes.” Although this sounds alluring, it’s an unrealistic—not to mention unnecessary—expectation given all that principals are directly and indirectly responsible for.

For school leaders to run successful schools, they must understand that focus and time are not one and the same. Focus—not time—should be a principal’s main priority. Essentially, as a school leader, I do not have to be in a teacher’s classroom for good instruction to be my focus. I may spend my time somewhere else because of all that I am responsible for. But as a school leader, I can ensure that I have created a culture that aligns with the fact that good instruction is my focus.

Good instruction and good instructional practice must be the engines that drive decisions, and they should be at the heart of all decision-making in a building. Student discipline must be administered with instruction in mind; parent meetings must be conducted with instruction in mind; every teacher’s conversation must keep good instruction in mind; sporting events, student celebrations, and everything happening at the school must be conducted with good instruction in mind.

Therefore, I do agree with superintendents who say that principals should focus the majority of their resources on good instruction, but time is only one aspect of those resources. In my book, What Success Looks Like: Increasing Graduation Rates Among Males of Color, I discuss the need for school principals to understand the importance of deciding where to allocate resources that will increase student achievement and support social and emotional development. To be clear, time spent is not about leaders physically showing up in class or physically going to a specific place; it’s about their presence and their expectations being made clear throughout the school. So, as a school principal, how do I make my school instructionally focused?

Strategies for Staying Focused on Instruction

In keeping with working smarter and not harder, it’s paramount that everything a school leader does should have a focus on improving the instruction in the school. To that end, I encourage principals to do the following:

  • Establish a clear vision and mission.
  • Have a clear administrative structure.
  • Ensure instructional calibration with a working walk-through tool, such as the Danielson Framework, to guide what you are seeing in the classroom.
  • Foster a coaching culture to model for all assistant principals and instructional coaches.
  • Know and understand the key data of your school, such as attendance data for teachers and students, behavior data, graduation rates, and other information. (I highlight these in a previous Principal Leadership article available at bit.ly/3WDjY4N.)
  • Create a strong, focused professional development plan for teachers.

Here are some questions to ask yourself when reflecting upon the instructional focus of your building:

  • What is the instructional vision and mission of our school?
  • Are we a school that says all of our students will receive a world-class education, or are we a school that is more focused on our sports teams?
  • How do we celebrate high-achieving teachers and students?
  • Does every assistant principal and instructional coach know who they are working with and what good instruction looks like according to the principal?
  • Do we have a walk-through tool that is grounded in a rubric to support an instructional focus?
  • Have we been trained in a coaching model to ensure we are inspecting what we expect?
  • Do we know how our students are performing regarding course-passing data and state assessments?
  • Is there a belief that good instruction leads to higher student outcomes?
  • Do we have an ongoing professional development program and a mechanism to examine the effectiveness of the professional development for our teachers?

School principals: The work you do is very difficult, but it is possible to do well. Taking the instructional temperature of your school to ensure that all resources are aligned to increase student performance is one way to work smarter and not harder. Use the questions above as a template for a root-cause analysis to examine the state of your school. As you know all too well, there are only five days in a week. We cannot be everywhere, but our presence—and the systems we set up—can be felt throughout our buildings.

Marck Abraham, EdD, is the president of MEA Consulting Services LLC, a motivational speaker, and the author of  What Success Looks Like: Increasing High School Graduation Rates Among Males of Color.