Practical professional development and leadership notes for school and special education leaders — one short, useful email a week from Eric Wicherski, M.Ed., founder of Next Step Educational Services. Ready-to-deliver PD your team can actually use, plus straight talk on what's changing in special education.
The thing that works — because of one person
|
Hi Reader, Last week we talked about slowing down long enough to check the diagnosis before you act. This week, a problem that shows up on the other side — after something is already working. Here’s the pattern. There’s a thing in your building that runs beautifully. The new-teacher handoff is smooth. The behavior team actually follows through. Inclusion in third grade just works. And when you look closely at why, the answer is almost always a name. One person who holds it together — who remembers the steps, chases the loose ends, and quietly absorbs whatever the process doesn’t cover. That’s not a system. That’s a person doing the job a system should be doing. It feels like success, which is exactly why it’s easy to miss. Everything’s fine — until that person takes a new role, goes on leave, or finally burns out. Then the thing that “worked” turns out to have been one resignation away from collapse the whole time. And the leader is left rebuilding from scratch something they thought they already had. The question worth asking about anything that’s going well: “Does this work because of a system, or because of a person?” If the honest answer is a person, that’s not a reason to relax — it’s the most fragile spot in your building, hiding inside your best news. The answer isn’t to lean on that person harder. It’s to get what’s in their head onto paper: the steps, the handoffs, the “here’s what you do when.” Not to replace them — to make sure the work survives them. The strongest leaders I’ve watched treat their smoothest-running programs with a little suspicion. Not because something’s wrong, but because “it works” and “it would keep working without her” are two very different things — and only one of them is a system. This week: pick one thing in your building that’s running well. Ask whether it would still run if the person behind it were out for a month. If the answer is no, you’ve just found the most valuable thing you could write down. See you next week. — Eric Eric Wicherski, M.Ed. Next Step Educational Services Reply anytime — I read every one. New from NSES Ready-to-present PD you can lead yourself — built so the work lives in a system, not just in one person’s head. No outside facilitator required.
Browse the full catalog — new decks added regularly: - Special Education decks and District & Admin decks NSES Weekly shares general thinking for school leaders — professional development and ideas, not legal or compliance advice. |
Next Step Educational Services
Practical professional development and leadership notes for school and special education leaders — one short, useful email a week from Eric Wicherski, M.Ed., founder of Next Step Educational Services. Ready-to-deliver PD your team can actually use, plus straight talk on what's changing in special education.
Hi Reader, A student throws a chair. A parent emails in all caps. A teacher corners you in the hallway with "we need to talk right now." All three feel like fires. Only one of them might actually be one. Loud is not the same signal as urgent, and urgent is not the same signal as important — but under pressure, all three collapse into a single feeling: deal with this now. So you do. You drop what you were doing, you respond to the loudest thing in the room, and by the end of the day you've...
Hi Reader, A teacher sends three behavior referrals in one week. By Friday there's a theory — classroom management. By the following Monday there's a plan: a walkthrough, a coaching cycle, maybe a book someone liked. Every step in that chain is reasonable. Nobody was careless. But nobody stopped on the way to ask whether three referrals is enough to know anything at all. It isn't a case of reading the evidence wrong. It's a case of not having enough of it to read. You've seen the same shape...
Hi Reader, You've been in the meeting where everyone nods. The plan gets said out loud, heads go up and down, someone even repeats it back to confirm. Then two weeks later, half the building is doing something slightly different — not because anyone disagreed, but because "agreed" and "aligned" turned out to be two different things. It shows up everywhere. A team signs off on a new referral process, and by October three teachers are still using the old form because nobody actually checked. An...