Gerry Brooks - Go See the Principal: True Tales from the School Trenches

Im an educator who has taught every elementary school grade, with the exception of kindergarten. Ive spent six years in the classroom, two years as an intervention specialist, and 12 years as an administrator, plus time as a youth minister. These days, Im the principal of Liberty Elementary school in Lexington, Kentucky. Im proud to say that since I arrived in 2014, the school has made great progress as we began to prioritize climate and culture throughout the building. When I came to the school, we were just below the middle of the pack when it came to state testing for our district. With an amazing staff, we quickly moved up the ranks into a proficient rating within one year.

Weve steadily improved each year, gaining more knowledge of what our students need to grow both academically and emotionally. While I believe I helped set the stage for improvement, I do not in any way take credit for the high achievement at Liberty. Thats all due to the hard work of a dedicated staff.

I believe creating a culture of respect, support, and encouragement helps our staff focus on whats more important: the students. When this happens, everything else falls into place.

Education was a natural career path for me. Growing up in Rockledge, Florida, I was an outgoing kid. I valued attention, having lots of friends, and involvement in school activities. When it came to summer jobs, I preferred to babysit, teach swim lessons, or work as a camp counselor rather than, say, bag groceries at Kroger. I enjoyed spending time with kids and thrived under the responsibilities and opportunities for leadership that come with those jobs. As an undergraduate at Troy University in Alabama figuring out what to do with my life, it was an easy decision to pursue a career in education. Unlike my father, a school coach who resented having to spend time as a teacher, I truly enjoyed my work.

However, teaching can be stressful, even when you love it. After a fantastic first year at Liberty, I noticed that the mood of the school and teachers changed radically in the spring of 2015. I couldnt for the life of me figure out what happened until I began to listen to conversations about an upcoming state assessment.

By far, the most stressful aspect of education is the pressure we feel from assessmentsnote the s on that word! Nonstop assessments are a regular part of education today. Teachers often have to sacrifice up to six weeks of daily instruction to cram required assessments into their school days. Confident, skilled teachers at Liberty were now in What if I didnt do enough? mode, wondering (more like panicking) about how their students would perform. The staff was stressed in a way I hadnt seen before.

I couldnt figure out how to help. One day, as usual, I got to school at 5:00 a.m. because well, basically because no one is there to bother me that early. In those days, I walked the building every morning for 30 minutes to get some much-needed exercise. As I paced through the halls that late April, I walked by blank walls and empty bulletin boards with no student work on them. That reminded me of how ridiculous our state assessment system had becomethe state of Kentucky requires us to put away all instructional materials from our classrooms before state assessments, including things posted in the hallways, because, you know, we wouldnt want a student to go to the bathroom during an assessment and suddenly learn how to add fractions because of a hallway display that might accidentally help him do better on the state assessment!

I decided a way to break the stress would be to create a short video for the staff where Id pretend to call out the art teachers bulletin board in the hallway because she had left some staples in the corkboard. I stood in front of her bulletin board, which was completely blank aside from some purple background paper, a green border, and some offending staples, and lectured:

I know you arent used to this because you are an art teacher and all but here at Liberty we dont help students on state testing by leaving things on the walls. I have noticed you left some staples up, and when students see staples, they are going to begin to think, I went to Staples to get a computer and there werent many there, so I had to push my way through the day so thats an example of scarcity. So, these staples need to come down.

I wanted to remind our staff how dumb the situation had become. I hoped the half-minute video would relieve the stress of testing and lighten the mood of a fantastic staff that had doubted how much they had accomplished in the previous eight months.

While videos like these were originally made to communicate with Liberty teachers, to my surprise, they began to go viralthe most popular, where I asked for the communitys support during teacher strikes, drew in more than 10.7 million viewers. I have a slight Southern accent in real life (or so non-Southern people tell me), but in the videos I took it to the next level, incorporating the speaking styles of the Alabamans I met at Troy and several kids in our school who speak that exact way (so, no, I dont actually call myself the purnciple when Im home.)

Since I posted my first video, what started as a way to entertain my friends, family, and staff members has grown into a second career, as Ive been invited to speak at a number of educational conferences and engagements around the country to commiserate with and motivate other educators.

I think the videos connect with peopleteachers especiallynot only because I use a funny accent but because behind each humorous topic is something real that affects educators. For instance, I made a video about teacher bathroom etiquette after the alarming experience of walking in on a substitute teacher on the toilet because she had neglected to lock the bathroom door.

Bathrooms are funny; thats why theres a whole genre of humor devoted to them. But when I show that film at educational conferences, I use it to illustrate the larger point of why its important for a schools staff to get on the same page.