I have been an administrator for almost 15 years. I have worked in three buildings at multiple levels, and I have spent the past 10 years as a high school administrator. I know how to lead a staff meeting. I know how to start a school year. I know how to navigate the inevitable challenges of leading a school.
And then I started in a new building.
There is something humbling about being an experienced administrator who is suddenly new again. You don’t forget how to lead. You just discover how many things you don’t know yet.
One of my first staff meetings made that very clear.
I was nervous. I had met some staff members over the summer, but this was the first time I stood in front of the entire staff as their principal. The technology was set up, and my assistant principal was running the computer. At one point, I walked up to the SmartBoard and touched the screen to advance the presentation.
The slide changed.
I thought, Well, look at me. I’ve got this.
Except I didn’t.
It turns out only one of the screens was interactive. I kept touching a side screen, and every time I did, my assistant principal quietly advanced the slide from the computer. I had absolutely no idea.
He could have stopped me and explained it in front of everyone. He could have said, “You need to touch the middle screen.” He could have laughed. Any of those responses would have been understandable.
Instead, he just quietly helped.
When I later realized what had happened, we laughed about it together. A month later, I am still comically working through the different ways to navigate a slideshow in front of my staff.
But that first moment mattered.
My assistant principal knew I was new. He knew I was nervous. He also knew that not knowing how the technology worked had nothing to do with whether I knew how to lead a school. He gave me room to figure things out without making my lack of knowledge into a thing.
I’ve thought about that moment several times already this year.
At Homecoming last weekend, I was looking for a staff member and confidently pointed to someone—while confidently calling them the wrong name. I immediately apologized and told another teacher, “I’m trying so hard to learn everyone’s names.”
He simply said, “You’re fine! Don’t worry about it.”
It was a tiny moment, but it was exactly the kind of grace I needed.
Being new is hard, especially when you’re used to being experienced.
I see this with teachers, too. A teacher with 15 years in the classroom may be asked to teach a course they’ve never taught. Someone may return to a certification they haven’t used in years. A highly skilled teacher may take on a new responsibility and find themselves asking questions they haven’t had to ask in a long time.
The pandemic made this especially obvious. Almost overnight, educators who were experts in their classrooms became beginners at teaching online, collecting work digitally and communicating with students in new ways.
As educators, we thrive on expertise, order and routine. We are used to being the people who know what we’re doing. So being the person who doesn’t know – who has to ask, try, mess up and try again – can be surprisingly uncomfortable.
Maybe that’s why one of the most important things we can offer one another is grace.
When someone is new, we don’t always need to teach them everything immediately. Sometimes we just need to let them find their balance. Sometimes we need to quietly fix someone’s crown without telling the whole world it was crooked.
And sometimes we need to remember that the people around us are probably giving us far more grace than we are giving ourselves.
I’m still learning names. I’m still learning the technology. I’m still learning the rhythms and routines of a new school community.
After nearly 15 years in administration, I’m still learning how to be new, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
Being new reminds us what it feels like to need a little patience, a little kindness and someone in our corner. And remembering that feeling makes us better at giving those things to the people who are new around us.