A teacher is a leader. Truly, a teacher is many things, but my contention in this article is that a teacher is fundamentally a leader. To the extent this contention is true, it behooves us to consider not only what it means to be a leader, but also to clarify a set of leadership principles that can enhance the effectiveness of teachers in fulfilling their calling.

Leadership has been studied from many angles in an attempt to delineate all the factors that make great leaders. While there are common threads among all the different schools of thought, a singular definition is elusive. It is easy to tell when leadership is being done well, but how do we replicate the traits, circumstances and contingent factors that went into making any given person an outstanding leader?

Defining leadership, though, isn’t all that hard. A leader brings a group from one place to another in a coordinated way. I like the simple definition of leadership in Rare Leadership, “leading is primarily about guiding the group that does the work” (32). A dear friend of mine, Tasha Chapman, who teaches leadership at Covenant Seminary in St. Louis, shared her image of a leader. She talks about a group needing to cross a river. Getting the whole group across takes leadership through planning, teamwork, vision, inspiration, motivation and timeliness. A leader cannot do all the work if everyone is going to get across the river. Effort must be distributed, yet coordinated. There must be direction (get to the other side) and yet flexibility to meet changing circumstances along the way. Applying this image to the classroom, we can think of a class making it from the first day of class to the last day of class as something like a river crossing. The teacher is the leader who can envision the destination and keeps the group together all along the way.

In this article, we’ll explore several principles of leadership drawing on a number of resources. Most principles of leadership at fairly simple in concept, and yet to apply them well takes practice and coaching. Whether you are a teacher or an administrator, hopefully an overview of these six leadership principles will enable you to grow the leadership quotient in your classroom or school.

1. Clear, Simple Communication

The first principle of leadership is effective communication. There are so many ways in which we mis-communicate, largely because we know what we mean and we assume everyone else knows what we mean, and yet something happens that interferes in the interchange. And yet, communication can be effective when we understand a few basic ideas.

I place clarity and simplicity on two ends of a continuum pertaining to the amount of words we communicate. Often times we attempt to clarify what we mean by throwing more and more words into the mix. So clarity represents one end of the spectrum. Simplicity, on the other hand, is about using a few words as possible. These concepts create a tension for the communicator. I need enough words to be clear to my listener, and yet not so elaborate that I lose simplicity.

This is something I reference in my work on habit training. The second step of habit training is describing the details of the habit. Here the teacher or parent needs to break down the habit into a very simple set of instructions so that the child is able to succeed. I find this principle to be transferrable to all situations, from classroom routines to emergency procedures. Clear, simple communication is the first task of leadership.

For a teacher, minute by minute of every day, communicating with students is job number one. Obviously there are other forms of communication that a teacher must engage in, with fellow teachers, with parents, with administration, etc. Applying the concept of simplicity and clarity works at all levels of communication. Keeping all these different parties in the know leads to the next principle of leadership.

2. Coordinate Your Team

The second principle is a cognate of the first. Keeping your team together and pulling in the same direction is at the heart of leadership. Effective communication only works within a community. This is an idea hinted at by Peter Drucker, who uses the word “communion” to describe a group of people pursuing a common purpose (The Essential Drucker 341). Notice the interesting cognate group: common, communion, community, communication.

This is a source of profound meaning for a teacher. Your class is your community for a year. Building a bond – a communion – with your students is a genuine treasure. Coordinating your team, your class or your school begins with a common purpose.

Simon Sinek, author of Start with Why, writes about the power of expressing your common purpose. He defines the why as “the purpose, cause or belief” that you pursue as an organization. (39) The why can be differentiated from the what and the how. What you do is usually pretty easy to identify. In the classroom, we read books, we solve problems, we take tests, etc. The how is likewise an easy proposition to express. “We use classroom discussions . . .” “We employ a mentorship model of instruction . . .” Both the what and the how, though, aren’t what build a common purpose. Sinek argues we need a why. Clarifying the why can be difficult, because it is often felt and sensed, but hard to articulate. He shares that clarity of the why “comes from absolute conviction in an ideal bigger than oneself.” (134) So what is it that is the highest ideal of your classroom? Finding the why of your classroom, your school, or your team is essential to keeping everyone moving in the same direction. This feeds back into your communication. Why are we preparing for the upcoming performance? Because we are on this mission to achieve our why.

3. Long-range Objectives

Lesson planning is all about connecting the day’s lesson to objectives. Often we are thinking in term of unit objectives, subject competencies and grade-level benchmarks. The teacher as a leader must consider a number of objectives on the horizon and lead the group toward those goals every day, each lesson.

Clarifying long-range objectives is the third principle of leadership. In order to clarify these long-range objectives, one must have perspective. David Allen in his book Getting Things Done describes perspective with the analogy of an airplane at different altitudes. He calls 50,000 feet the altitude of purpose. It considers the question, “Why am I on this planet?” and envisions what your life ought to look like. At 40,000 feet, the question becomes, “what is my vision for the next 5 years?” At 30,000 feet, you set goals that will help you achieve this vision. The first three altitudes envision long-range objectives. The next three levels bring planning closer to the “now.” At 20,000 feet, you identify areas of focus in life, considering your main areas of responsibility. At 10,000 feet, you choose the right projects that help leverage each area of focus. And at 0 feet, or the runway, you are “just doing,” or as Allen calls it, taking the “next action.” (51-53)

I find this framework really helpful for coordinating long-term and short-term objectives. You really don’t need to spend a lot of time at the 30,000 to 50,000 foot altitude. These are ideas that are best considered during a long break or a focused day-retreat. And while many of these are framed around the grownup who has a career and different spheres of responsibility, I think we can envision these things for our students. Why has God put these children on the planet? What will the next five years look like for this group of individuals? What goals in the near span will help them flourish?

The curriculum often dictates the lower levels of planning. The areas of focus tend to be the academic subjects. The right projects might be a science lab or written essay. The next action is today’s assignment. But school is so much more than the domains of knowledge if we are committed to children as whole persons and to creating formational environments. Are there areas of focus, projects and next actions that help a child grow in personal responsibility or kindness toward others?

4. Prioritization

Hand in hand with long-range objectives is prioritization. The day-to-day life of a classroom can be chaotic. You’ve got a student absent one day, there’s a field trip another day, and a fire drill thrown in there during the week. As much as we plan, we can get thrown off that plan quite easily. So, to meet the shifts and changes that come our way, we need to learn how to prioritize based on a clear understanding of our objectives.

The person who has revolutionized my understanding of leadership is Jocko Willink. His book Extreme Ownership stands out as a one-of-a-kind manual of leadership principles. A former Navy Seal who served in the battle of Ramadi, Willink has had to reprioritize in the most extreme circumstances. He writes:

“Just as in combat, priorities can rapidly shift and change. When this happens, communication of that shift to the rest of the team, both up and down the chain of command, is critical. Teams must be careful to avoid target fixation on a single issue. They cannot fail to recognize when the highest priority task shifts to something else. The team must maintain the ability to quickly reprioritize efforts and rapidly adapt to a constantly changing battlefield.”

Extreme Ownership, 162

The battlefield is obviously different than a classroom, and yet target fixation can happen to us as teachers. It’s easy to get overly fixated on low test scores in math, or find yourself inundated with essays to grade. When these dynamics face us as teachers, we need to reconnect with our long-range objectives, communicate effectively and make a call about the most important next action. Your assessment of the situation might lead you to ask a fellow teacher to take your group to lunch so you can do a math workshop with some students. You might need to reconfigure your schedule slightly to make solid progress on grading. But, you might determine that despite low test scores and a backlog of essays to mark, we really need to do some teambuilding as a class to learn about kindness and care for each other. Prioritization comes from a well-considered perspective of long-range goals.

5. Empower Your People

This is a principle of leadership that operates at all levels of the school. The administration should empower the teachers to take initiative to achieve the mission of the school. Similarly, the teacher should empower the students to take hold of the tools that will enable them to achieve forward momentum on their own long-range objectives. This can sound scary, to entrust young ones with power. Aren’t they liable to fail, break something or take advantage of whatever freedoms they are given?

Yet, if we believe that children are born persons, then it is incumbent on us to empower our students. Educating young ones is simultaneously calling them to high standards and providing substantive support. I like the idea John Maxwell encapsulates in The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, when he explains his 20^th law, “Explosive Growth.” The central idea is that good leaders lead leaders. In other words, teachers are not leading followers, their students are actually leaders themselves. Listen to some of the phrases Maxwell uses in his description of “leaders who develop leaders:” “focus on strengths,” “give power away,” “invest time in others.” (210) Empowering your people means leaning into their strengths through the investment of time.

I really like how our third graders at school have been empowered by their teacher. They are responsible for caring for the plants in the school. Each of them learned about their plants – what it’s called, how much water it should have each week, removing dead leaves, etc. Every Thursday you can find these students roaming the school with their water to tend to the plants. They have the privilege to go into any classroom to tend to the plants. I’m fascinated by how little supervision is required of them. They politely ask to water their plant, the go about their business and then return to their teacher. The plants look great, and the students have a sense of pride in the work they’ve done. These students have been empowered to take genuine responsibility. They have been entrusted with something of significance. They are now looked upon as experts about the plant they care for. You can imagine how this empowerment might play out over the course of the next several years. They’ve build trust, responsibility, accomplishment and will be ready for the next level and the next level after that in years to come.

6. Cultivate Humility

Level-five leadership is a concept Jim Collins develops in Good to Great. The kind of leader he is referring to is both driven by the cause or purpose of the business (what Simon Sinek calls the “why”) but also humble. You would see in this kind of person a mix of ambition and quiet reserve. The difference between a level-five leader and other (perhaps more typical) leaders is that a level-five leader is driven by the cause, whereas other kinds of leaders might be driven by personal achievement, financial gain, or competition with others. Collins writes:

“Compared to high-profile leaders with big personalities who make headlines and become celebrities, the good-to-great leaders seem to have come from Mars. Self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy – these leaders are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. They are more like Lincoln and Socrates than Patton or Caesar.” (Good to Great, 12-13)

Good to Great, 12-13

A teacher can be a level-five leader, turning away from the pathway of the “sage on the stage” to a leader of students who are pursuing a cause and a purpose. I am reminded of the most powerful Jedi in the Star Wars universe, Yoda. When we first meet him, he is a humble, bumbling, old swamp dweller. We soon learn that he is powerful in the ways of the Force. He begins to train Luke Skywalker, who departs before his training is complete. Luke is the protagonist, the one who is on the hero’s journey. Yoda, the teacher, is the level-five leader who is driven by the cause of the good side of the force, who must protect and promote the values of the Jedi order. And yet chooses the path of humility to train the hero.

One of the most transformational moments in my career as a teacher came when I realized I was not the one on the hero’s journey. Instead, the hero’s journey is what my students are pursuing. I get to guide them, like Yoda – or Merlin, or Gandalf, or Dumbledore – for a short time along their journey. Cultivating your own humility is not about being pretending to be bashful (false humility) nor about beating yourself up (negative self-talk). Instead, cultivating humility comes through being captivated by a majestic vision or a compelling cause. Your will, your personality, your ambition are all directed not at your own advancement, but in promoting something higher than yourself.

Putting It All Together

Certainly there are more leadership principles than these six, but I find these to be fairly universal when reading books and manuals on leadership. The point is that effective leadership can be broken down into several component parts. And yet the all need to be operating together. The six principles combine into sets. The first two pertain to communication. The second two are about planning. And the final two are about managing. Yet in each of the six principles, something from the others is embedded within it. Take humility, the sixth principle. Notice how true humility comes from a commitment to a compelling vision, which we talked about in principle two with the “why.”

So breaking it down in this way means we have to put it all back together into a singular concept of leadership. The idea here is that a teacher is a leader. A teacher is constantly communicating to students, fellow teachers, administrators, and parents. A teacher is planning from lesson plans to scopes and sequence to curriculum maps, planning is what we do. And a teacher is managing students and projects. If you weren’t already convinced, hopefully this article has helped you to see how much of a leader a teacher actually is.

I close with a concept from Stephen Covey. The seventh habit in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is “sharpen the saw,” which is an analogy for continual improvement. As individuals, we need to take care of ourselves physically, spiritually, and emotionally. The work we do as leaders can dull the blade of the saw, and so we are wise to invest in ourselves for our long-term wellbeing and effectiveness as teachers. As a team of teachers, we need to support one another, offering advice and assisting one another in the accomplishment of our mission to make a lasting impact in the lives of the children given into our care.

If you are an administrator, understanding that your teachers are leaders creates a framework for professional development. The six principles laid out here can be used as training concepts. Your role as an administrator is key to enabling the teachers to be ever mindful of the mission, the cause, and the core values of the school. Utilize some of the training time during the year to promote continual improvement. A spiritual retreat, relational activities or workout sessions can emphasize your own commitment to supporting teachers’ efforts to “sharpen the saw.”

Now let us follow our true leader, the shepherd of our souls, who has purchased our redemption through his blood. As a teacher, he laid down his life for us that we might live. May we as teachers follow in his footsteps.

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If you liked this article and want to “sharpen the saw” by learning new techniques for the classroom, check out Kolby’s eBook The Craft of Teaching which applies concepts from Teach Like a Champion 2.0 to the classical classroom.