Lawyers read. Doctors read. But principals? How often do you hear that they’re just too busy, that their day-to-day job of managing schools simply doesn’t allow any time for professional reading? The solution isn’t to wait for the day when the principal’s job becomes manageable. I don’t think any of us will live to see that.
The solution lies in a commitment to ongoing learning. We expect students to learn and teachers to learn, but we often don’t expect ourselves, the leaders, to engage in such learning. And yet, if we want schools to be learning organizations, we need to model this at the top.
In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey provides a time management matrix to help people use time more productively. It helps people categorize and understand their tasks across a continuum of how “urgent,” as compared to how “important,” they are. Principals get buried under tasks considered “urgent”—answering a call from a distressed parent, attending a last-minute district meeting, quelling a cafeteria food fight, and even fixing the copier for a frazzled teacher. But the most important work school leaders have to do—that is, the work of improving teaching and learning—may not seem all that pressing. If you don’t observe Mr. Manuel’s second-period class, the school building won’t topple.
It’s because of this perceived lack of urgency that principals end up spending more time on administration, external affairs, and other tasks unrelated to teaching and learning. One Stanford University study found that principals only spend about 13 percent of their time engaged in tasks connected to instruction.
And this is exactly what happens with your professional reading. Although such reading is absolutely essential to improving student learning, unfortunately, it’s not “urgent.”
Luckily, principals can reclaim their professional reading time by turning it into a habit. Habits are the most potent way I know to resist the powerful allure of those “urgent,” but not all that important, tasks. I draw here on the work of James Clear, author of Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones. In his book, he describes how to make habits stick by using strategies based on science. I applied his ideas to the challenge of how busy school leaders can develop a habit of professional reading.
Below are four of my favorite strategies for creating and sticking to a habit of professional reading. I’ve used these strategies successfully myself and have introduced them to leaders across the United States.
Luckily, principals can reclaim their professional reading time by turning it into a habit.
Strategy 1. Use habit stacking.
If you want a new habit to stick, it helps to do it right after another habit of yours: After [my existing habit], I’ll do [my new habit]. I’ve seen principals use this strategy successfully to get into the habit of informally observing teachers daily. They take a daily habit they already have in place (like greeting students as they come into school or dropping off their work bag in their office) and immediately tack on a few brief informal observations: “After greeting students each day in the morning, I will go directly (and not stop in my office) to two classes to observe for a few minutes.”
For our reading objective, this habit stacking might look like: “After making my morning coffee (a habit I already have), I will read an Educational Leadership article.” Or: “After I drop my daughter at soccer practice on Wednesday evenings, I will do some professional reading in the car before I drive home.”
Strategy 2. Make it obvious and easy.
To make the need to read obvious, consider leaving a book on your pillow (so you can’t miss it!) or having an administrative assistant print out interesting articles you find online and put them in a brightly colored folder for you to carry around. When a meeting is delayed, or when you have to wait somewhere for something, you’ll have that file with your professional reading right at your fingertips—easy!—instead of having to scroll online or look through your emails to find an article someone once sent you.
Strategy 3. Schedule it.
Effective principals schedule time for teacher observations and feedback conversations—and train their colleagues to hold that time sacred. Why not do the same with scheduling your professional reading?
For example, set aside just 15 minutes a week on Fridays for professional reading from, say, 9:45 to 10:00 a.m. Have your administrative assistant put it on your calendar, then, at that time, go somewhere quiet to read—to the school library, perhaps, or to an unused lab. Be sure to prepare colleagues in your office to handle anything other than a true emergency to protect your reading time. It might sound like this: “I’m glad you came in to see our principal. She has a meeting right now that ends at 10:00 a.m. and will be available to talk after that.”
Will this time get interrupted? Of course. But if it’s on your schedule for 36 weeks of the school year and administrative staff are supporting you to make this happen, you’ll end up reading a lot more than if you had never scheduled any reading time in the first place.
Set aside just 15 minutes a week on Fridays for professional reading, then, at that time, go somewhere quiet to read.
Strategy 4. Set up an accountability group.
Some people only show up for that 6:00 a.m. run or 8:00 p.m. yoga class because they’re meeting someone there and don’t want to let that person down. How might you build this type of accountability into setting up a new professional reading habit?
Consider starting with your leadership team: “On Friday, let’s talk about the latest article in Educational Leadership (or in another publication you read) on coaching teachers. Come ready to discuss it.” Or find other leaders outside of your school or district who want to gather monthly in an informal book group to choose and discuss a professional book on some facet of education. This not only holds you accountable for your professional reading, but it also helps you get more out of the reading—and makes it fun, too.
Make It a Habit
I’m not suggesting you need to use all four of these strategies to get yourself reading regularly. You only need to do one. Just choose the one that sparks your interest.
One strategy. One new habit. Then watch your professional reading grow.
