Elementary and Secondary Education Administrators

A Day in the Life

You've worked hard to earn your current position as a middle school principal. While you one day aspire to become the principal of your district's largest high school and eventually take over the reins as superintendent, you realize that there's a great deal of competition for those coveted job openings. As a result, you're committed to proving that you can handle your current responsibilities with the professionalism and attention to detail that the kids in your charge deserve.

On a typical day, you'll arrive at your school before 7 a.m. This gives you and the teachers who work under you a chance to prepare for the day without having to deal with rambunctious students. Although the school's janitorial staff arrive before you, you're usually the first member of the office staff to arrive. You sit down at your desk and greet other members of the office team as they filter in.

You have a busy day ahead of you. For starters, your school district is preparing for its annual state review. Accordingly, the superintendent has asked you to compile a boatload of data that measures the performance of each of the teachers in your charge. You'll also need to aggregate your students' test data into an easy-to-understand presentation that you can give to your state's auditors.

While several members of your support staff are helping you with this task, it still seems daunting. You spend the first few hours of your day analyzing and aggregating data from your latest round of teacher evaluations. Ultimately, you'll produce a comprehensive chart that ranks your school's teachers according to their in-class effectiveness. Later today, you'll wrap up your evaluations with two half-hour teacher-observation sessions.

At around 10 a.m., you feel as if you've made enough progress on your report to walk away from your desk for a moment. Just as you're about to walk out into the hallway to observe students as they change classes, you're accosted by a teacher's aide with a disheveled-looking student. Hurriedly, she explains that the student was caught defacing another student's locker and needs to be disciplined. You gather some basic facts about the incident and mentally prepare yourself for what's to come.

Although this type of interruption is not uncommon, it's always unwelcome. However, you recognize that one of your duties as a school administrator involves disciplining kids who misbehave. Adopting a stern look, you lead the student into your office and ask him to have a seat. You're secretly pleased that he looks downright nervous about being in his current position.

For the next 15 minutes, you get the student's side of the story and calmly explain to him why his actions were inappropriate. Matter-of-factly, you inform him that you'll need to notify his parents about the incident. Until they can pick him up, he'll spend the rest of the day in a detention room adjacent to your school's central office. Although you'll need to consult with the teacher's aide and his parents before making a final decision, it's likely that you'll subject him to another day or two of in-school detention.

Once you've dismissed the student, you quickly eat lunch at your desk and continue to update the report that you've been compiling. Since you're also in charge of your school's finances, you're now putting the finishing touches on a section that details the financial challenges that your school has faced over the past school year and argues for a small but measurable funding increase for the coming five-year period.

Once you've completed this section, you make rounds in your office and ensure that each member of your support staff is on task. Next, you head to your first teacher-observation session.

Although the teacher knows that you're coming, your presence is sure to make him nervous. Accordingly, you sit all the way in the back of the room and make your presence as unobtrusive as possible. You mark his performance in several key pedagogical areas and file your preliminary report away in anticipation of the review meeting that you'll conduct with him tomorrow. You repeat this process with the second teacher and return to your office.

As the students begin to leave for the day, you stand outside in the hallway and wish them well. As the school's most recognizable staff member, you like to maintain a benevolent public presence and ensure that you're visible to students from time to time. After returning to your office and making a few additional tweaks to your report, you bid the remaining staff members goodnight and leave the building around 5 p.m.