Navigating Your First Year as Principal

You can spend years teaching and serving as an assistant principal and still walk into your first principalship feeling surprisingly unprepared.

I did.

I realized almost immediately that the work was different from every role I’d held before. My experience mattered, but there were parts of being a principal I could only learn from that seat. Meanwhile, I was building relationships with a new staff and discovering the needs of a campus I was now responsible for leading.

It felt lonely.

Looking back, my advice for navigating your first year as principal is to spend time understanding the school you’ve inherited, build strong working relationships, and involve others in choosing a manageable focus for improvement. Find ongoing support while you do that. You’ll face decisions you haven’t encountered before, even if you were an excellent assistant principal.

Learn the School Before Deciding What to Change

I was fortunate to begin my principalship at a school with many excellent, veteran teachers. That required some restraint on my part. I had to resist the urge to ask people to change things before I understood their work.

I needed to learn from them.

When you’re hired to lead a school, you may feel pressure to demonstrate that you have ideas and know how to improve it. That pressure can make it surprisingly easy to overlook what’s already working.

Spend your early months in classrooms and team meetings. Talk with the people who keep the school running, including your front office staff, custodians, and support staff. Ask teachers what they’re proud of and where they need support. Learn what families value about the school and what students experience during the day.

A few useful questions are:

• What is working well here that we need to protect?

• What gets in the way of teaching and learning?

• What have you already tried, and what happened?

• What do you wish I understood about this school?

You’ll still need to address urgent concerns. Student safety and serious problems cannot wait while you finish a listening tour. For other decisions, give yourself enough time to understand why a practice exists before deciding what should replace it.

Share Leadership With the Expertise Already in Your Building

One of my most important early lessons was learning to partner with veteran, master teachers.

They understood their students, their instructional practices, and the school’s history. My role included recognizing that expertise and helping it benefit other teachers, particularly those who were new or struggling.

That takes more than asking a strong teacher to present something at a faculty meeting. Invite teacher leaders into the thinking behind your decisions. Ask them to help identify instructional needs, plan professional learning, and determine what useful support would look like.

Be thoughtful about their workload, too. Sharing leadership should give teachers meaningful influence and the time and support to contribute.

Your administrative leadership team needs that same attention. Make time to understand one another’s strengths, clarify responsibilities, and discuss how you’ll handle disagreements. Establish regular meetings where you can work through campus needs together.

A positive working relationship with your team will matter throughout the year, especially when the decisions become difficult.

After the First 90 Days, Narrow Your Focus

As you learn more about your campus, your list of concerns may grow. You’ll notice gaps in instruction, inconsistent routines, or teams that need more support. It can feel as though every observation creates another task.

This is when I advise principals to start small.

Choose very few areas to work on, and make those decisions with your other administrators and teacher leaders. Consider what you’re seeing in classrooms alongside student work, assessment information, and staff perspectives. Look at the campus improvement plan and the commitments already underway.

In my post, Strengthening Tier 1 Instruction: Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing, I explain how a narrow instructional focus can guide professional learning, classroom visits, and feedback over time.

For a first-year principal, the practical question is: What can we give sustained attention to with the people, time, and resources we have?

Once you choose a focus, work out the details together:

• What specifically do we want to see happening?

• What support will teachers need?

• Who will take responsibility for each part of the work?

• How will we support ongoing implementation with aligned observation and feedback?

• When will we review progress, and what evidence will we bring?

Keep returning to those decisions during the year. Teachers need time to practice, receive feedback, and make adjustments before another priority arrives.

Connect Improvement Goals to What Teachers Need

A new principal I coached recently knew she was expected to help her campus improve its math scores. Through classroom observations, she had noticed that middle school math teachers weren’t providing small-group reteaching or Tier 1 intervention within their classrooms.

She was also concerned that checks for understanding might not be reaching students equitably. Teachers needed a clearer picture of who understood a concept and who needed more support before the lesson moved on.

That gave us something specific to work with. “Improve math scores” was the expectation. Her observations helped identify an instructional need she and her team could address.

After she brought the concern to our weekly Purposeful Principal Club coaching call, I created a 90-minute professional learning session on leading small groups in middle school math. It included agendas, slides, activities, videos, and discussion protocols that she and her instructional coach could use at their next professional learning opportunity. I added it to the member resource library so other members could use it as well.

The training is a starting point. The next work involves supporting teachers as they try the practices, looking at student responses, and deciding what to adjust.

For a new principal, this is an important habit to develop: use what you’re learning about classrooms to identify the support teachers need to move a campus goal forward.

Get Support Before You Feel Stuck

I was assigned an experienced principal as a mentor when I started. But that principal was also busy leading a school.

My experience was that mentoring largely meant having someone to call when I had a question. That was helpful, but I still had to recognize the problem, decide what to ask, and initiate the conversation.

There were times when I needed more ongoing help thinking through the work.

When I coach principals now, I begin by asking what is most challenging for them right now. We work from there. Sometimes that means sorting through a decision. Sometimes it means identifying a gap in a plan or finding practical support for teachers.

As you build your own support system, look for someone you can meet with regularly and speak to honestly. Bring concerns while they’re still taking shape. You don’t need to have a perfectly formed question before a conversation can be useful.

Use the Spring to Prepare for Year Two

By spring, you’ll have a fuller understanding of your school than you had when you arrived. Use that perspective with your leadership team.

Review the areas you focused on. Discuss what changed, what remains difficult, and what you learned about the support your staff needs. Ask for feedback on your leadership as well. Following up on that feedback matters as much as collecting it.

When I think about a successful first year, I want a principal to be able to see strong relationships and growing trust with staff and the community. I want them to have a positive working relationship with their administrative team and a few clear areas for school growth around which they can build a strategic plan for the coming year.

There will still be problems to solve. Some efforts will need more time, and you’ll probably recognize decisions you would handle differently.

Use that knowledge as you plan for next year. You now have experience with this school, relationships you can build on, and a better understanding of where to focus next.

Find Support for the Work You’re Facing Now

If you’re navigating your first year and would benefit from regular coaching conversations and practical leadership resources, you can learn more about the Purposeful Principal Club. Bring the concern you’re working through, whether it’s supporting instruction or deciding where to focus with your team. That gives us a useful place to begin.

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A quick note about AI use: The ideas, stories, and leadership perspective in this post are my own. I sometimes use AI tools to help me edit, clarify, and refine my writing, but I review and revise everything myself before sharing it with you.