The Principal Path: Clarity, Culture, & Connection

Hi Darren, thank you so much for joining me today.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me, Susan.

Of course. So I always start out by asking you to just tell us a little bit about yourself and what first pulled you into education.

Yeah, for sure. No problem at all. So Dr. Darren Peppered, and I’ll tell you, I’ve been in education for this is coming up on 30 years from the time I first became a classroom teacher. But I’ll be honest with you, as a guy coming out of high school, the last thing I would have told you I would do is spend my life in public education. When I went to college, I started as a physical therapy major, I changed my major multiple times. It just, you know, it was kind of a drift, didn’t really know what I wanted to do. And I had a friend who asked me one night if I would help him coach a basketball team. I was an athlete in high school and, and I said, sure, I’ll come in. I’ll come and help you coach this team. And I was hooked. it was like, wow, this is what I want to do. And, and Susan, wasn’t like high level basketball. This was fifth grade girls. So, I mean, it wasn’t the X’s and O’s that got me. It was much more the, wow, I want to work with kids. when in the next day changed my major to secondary education and didn’t look back, spent 11 years as a middle school and then high school science teacher. I was a head basketball coach, head tennis coach, all kinds of stuff. Ultimately going on to be, excuse me, going on to be an assistant principal, principal, and then ultimately a superintendent to close out my formal public education career.

Yeah, so what led you into the path of school leadership?

Yeah. So that’s the interesting thing about moving into leadership. You know, when I was a kid, I was never associated with leadership. I was never a team captain, you know, never, you know, got to pick first at recess. I don’t even think I was ever a line leader, to be perfectly honest with you. And my second year, I believe it was my second year as a classroom teacher, my principal, who today to this day is still one of my biggest mentors. name is Betsy Parker.

Betsy was the one who kind of tapped me on the shoulder and said, you know, Darren, you really ought to think about a career in leadership. And, you know, at the time, I kind of just laughed it off. And that fall, I had a student teacher and part of having a student teacher was I was in Arizona at the time and Northern Arizona University gave you your option to take like two free master’s level courses. And I thought, well, okay, I’ll check this out. And yeah, I didn’t look back. I absolutely fell in love with that work and I mean it again it led to certainly being an assistant principal principal and superintendent, but it definitely Is something I look back on now and it’s one of my favorite questions on my podcast is to ask people, you know How did you end up in leadership? You know who tapped you on the shoulders? So I definitely have have Betsy Parker to thank for that

Yeah, so as you were discovering this love of school leadership, and I think this is fascinating because I had a similar trajectory I was not planning on ever going into administration and fell in love with it. So I’m curious, what about leadership and what about that kind of role spoke to you? What pulled you into that kind of realm?

Yeah, I think, you know, it was interesting as I was finishing up my master’s degree at that point in time, I was a head basketball coach and I kind of felt like I was at a crossroads in my career. Um, I certainly could continue, you know, all my path. You know, I really had a great schedule as a science teacher. mean, I got to teach the courses I wanted anatomy and physiology, AP bio. I mean, I had a great schedule. Obviously the coaching piece, I was, I was having some success there, really building a strong program.

But this other path would lead me into leadership. And it was ultimately, where do I see myself? Where do I feel like I can contribute the most to kids on my campus, to kids in my community? And I thought, honestly, that I was going to be an administrator right there in the town in Arizona where I started my teaching career. I’m a Wyoming kid. And actually, when Betsy hired me, she begged me to promise I’d stay for three years. I was there for 11. But my wife and I said, know, man, we really, want to get closer to, you know, aunts and uncles and grandparents for, you know, for our daughter. And I felt like following this, this path that I saw in my head, this, this calling, if you will, to, be able to impact more people, more educators, more students as the school leader was the route I needed to take. And that ultimately led us back to my home state of Wyoming where I landed my first assistant principal position.

Yeah, I think that’s so important for people to understand. think that’s when I speak to leaders, I know from my own leadership trajectory that it is almost always about the impact that you’re gonna be able to help more people. You’re gonna be able to support more in a way that maybe you weren’t supported or that you wish you had been supported. And I think there’s this misperception out there, especially if you go on like, Reddit boards, you’re looking at teachers’ lounges and you hear this, they just became an administrator for the pay grade, right, to up their pay, or they don’t really know what it’s like and they’re just shuffling papers around. And that’s not why leaders get into it, at least in my experience, right? So I think it’s important for people to hear that journey, that it is about the impact and bringing excellence into education in whatever way and capacity that we can.

I know that you call yourself a recovering high school principal. I’d love to know what that means and how those years in that principal chair really shaped your approach to leadership now.

Yeah, you know, it’s interesting, you know, what you’re talking about essentially is servant leadership. And I think, you know, when we go through those master’s programs or principal prep programs or whatever, whatever route people take to the licensure, that’s one of the things that you’re taught about is being a servant leader. And I think every one of us who have sat in the interview chair say, you know, hey, I want to be a servant leader. want to, I want to support, you know, everyone. It’s, it’s interesting, you know, I do call myself a recovering high school principal and that is completely out of love. I could tell you, mean, to this day, and as much as I love what I do right now, being a high school principal is probably the greatest job I’ve ever had. I genuinely, genuinely love that job, but it’s an all encompassing job. And having been a superintendent, and I would tell you lot of superintendents who were high school principals would echo what I’m about to say. It’s probably the hardest job in a district, especially when you have a single high school in your district like mine at, you know, 14, 1500 kids on my campus. Um, so there’s certainly some recovery from being away from the role, but there’s, there’s a lot from that time as a building principle that shaped the way I look at leadership, the way I support leaders now, because I think in many ways we are all uniquely positioned to help the person we used to be. And when I transitioned from being an assistant principal to being the principal who’s on the same campus, I actually held two assistant principal roles. First, I was in charge of all high school discipline and attendance. So feel sorry for me right there, right? But then had the opportunity to be in charge of curriculum, instruction, special programs. I worked for a principal who was very much the old school principal. was a manager. He delegated instructional leadership. He delegated everything, to be honest with you. He’s a wonderful, wonderful human being. I learned so much from him about leadership. But when I took that position, my superintendent said, Darren, really need you to be the instructional leader of the school. So it was kind of marking that transition, right? You now in school leadership, and this is something the general public doesn’t understand. The building administrator needs to be the instructional leader just as much as a manager of the facility. And when I moved into that role, I already was the instructional leader of my building. So when my superintendent told me that it’s like, okay, I keep doing everything I’ve been doing. And now I take on being the principal. And I just got overwhelmed. I was ineffective. I really was because I thought, and this is back to the servant leadership piece, Susan, I thought being a servant leader meant I need to do everything for everyone. You know, when, you know, when I asked, I asked principals this all the time, we, when I’m working with them now, you know, who do you serve? And almost invariably, they say the same thing I did. I serve everyone. I serve the teachers. I serve the parents. I serve the community. I serve the students. No, I mean, you do, but you have to really think about who do you directly serve. And by serving people, it means you doesn’t mean, rather, it does not mean that you do for them. It means you empower them to do for themselves. And I think that was something I learned in those first couple of years. One, by struggling. Two, by working with a leadership coach starting in my second year. He helped me just actually get my head above water, you know, where I could actually, you know, breathe without a snorkel and start leading my building. And I think that’s one of the biggest things for me working with with leaders now is if you’re genuinely going to be the instructional leader, you have to empower others to solve their own problems, to, you know, to take some risk. And I know we’re going to talk a lot about innovation and that type of stuff as a part of this conversation. So that’ll maybe be a teaser for that down the road. But I think I’ve kind of squirreled off from from the main trunk of the question. But the biggest thing I learned in that in that time as a principal and why I guess I refer to myself as a recovering high school principal is in order to be a genuinely effective leader, to be a high quality impact leader, you have to be willing to let go, you have to be willing to allow others to to take on, you know, challenges and solve their own problems. And I can riff on this for hours and hours and hours, but you have to understand really what servant leadership means.

Yeah, 100%. And I think one of the things that I have found really helpful about your work, Darren, and I’ve gone to your website, I’ve listened to your podcasts, The Road to Awesome is amazing. This whole idea around clarity is, and joy in the work and partnering these two ideas together. I would really love for you to expand on that because I have found in my own leadership, both at the school and the district level and in leading my own team here, that clarity, I often think that I am clear and people prove me wrong every single day. So I would love for you to share a little bit more around those two ideas and how you came to them and how that helps the coaching and the work that you do.

100 % Yeah. Yeah, it’s it’s interesting that you say that. Actually, you know, I’m a I’m a one word person. My one word for 2024 actually was clarity. Even though it’s something I talk about all the time. I felt, you know, in in our work here at Road to Awesome that I had to gain more clarity about, you know, what we were really about what our work really is all about, and so forth. And I mean, ultimately, what I do, I love it now when people ask me this question four years ago when I transitioned from being in a building on a regular basis to being a full time speaker coach author. I couldn’t really articulate what I do. Now it’s very easy. I help leaders gain clarity, be intentional and walk in their purpose. Period. That’s what I do it in a lot of different ways. But why I do that and why I think clarity most important is so huge is back to my first year as a building principal. I’m trying to do everything. I call it Superman syndrome, where as the school leader, I show up, I throw the cape on, and I got this. I got everything. I can handle everything. I’m gonna solve everybody’s problems. I’m gonna be the smartest person in the room. I mean, that’s what they want from the principal, right? To be the superhero. No, that’s not, you know, here’s the thing. When I got hired for that job, Superman didn’t sit in the interview chair. I did.

And Superman didn’t answer the phone when Paul Groob called to offer him the job. I did. For that matter, Superman didn’t say yes. I did. They didn’t hire Superman. They hired me. And I did not have any clarity at all. And that first year, I just seriously just ran around from fire to fire to fire to fire. And I see it all the time in leaders. mean, holy moly, you know, we get so caught up in the firefighter piece.

And think there’s a couple reasons for it. This little school chase, but one, again, we think that servant leadership, I’ll solve their problems for them. But two, there’s a little ego involved there, right? Like, look at what all I did. know, hey, I handled this and this and this and this and this. But that’s not the job. That’s not what leadership’s about. And at the end of my first year, my superintendent retired, wonderful man. New superintendent came in and he believed in leadership coaches.

And he said, you know, I’m going to hire a leadership coach for every single member of the team. And I’ll be honest with you, almost all of my peers were resentful. They were angry. I mean, they were calling board members. He can’t do this. And I was like, thank you, please. I’m dying over here. Right? Yeah. And, my gosh, it was a life changing experience. Why I do what I do by having the opportunity to work with a leadership coach. And I’ll tell this story as quick as I can. My coach showed up for the very first time at my school, month into the school year, let’s say. And we met in the parking lot, 7.30, school starts at eight o’clock. I walk in the front door with him. It’s about maybe a hundred feet down the hallway from the front door to my office. I got stopped by probably eight different staff members. You hey, Darren, did you see my email? Hey, Darren, did you know, did you, you know, did you see the note I put on your board? Hey, I need a couple minutes of your time. Hey, can you come see me a little bit later? Probably five or six kids, you know, hey, Mr. Peppered, my mom sent you an email. Hey, Mr. Peppered, did you call my dad back? You know, those kinds of things get to my office, my secretary, you know, Hey, Darren, I need to talk to you about this, this, this. And you’ve got this group of parents sitting out front and they are irate with something to do with the physics teacher. I turn and look my little push pin board, you know, with the cork board, you know, the littered with notes. There’s a word for this in school leadership. Monday. It was Monday. It was just another Monday, right? And I was living Monday every single day. It was like Groundhog Day for me. Every Monday was like that. And I’d knock all the fires down, you know, in the first two hours and turn around and my coach isn’t even there. I’m like, expecting to sit and drink coffee and we’re going to talk shop and my secretary’s like,

Hey, Tom’s down in room 324. He said, grab a notepad and get down there. And okay, so I go to room 324 and Tom’s doing walkthroughs and we go out in the hallway. And he’s like, what’d you see? I’m like, I don’t need you to teach me how to do walkthroughs. Tom, I know how to do walkthroughs. Did you just see what I was dealing with? And he said something right then, Susan, that I could, I could walk you to the building and stand in the exact spot where he said this. was that much of a transformation for me. He said, Darren, I need you to make a choice. Do you want to be a firefighter or do you want to be a leader? Because if you want to be a leader, you got to get into the action. You need to be in classrooms. You need to be supporting teachers. Now all that other stuff, we need to build systems around how we can manage all of those things. And I’m going to help you do that. But if you just want to be a firefighter, tell me now I’m going go get my car. I’m going to drive home. And one, that’s a big part of why I do what I do, because again, we are all in this interesting space where we can help the person we used to be. And there are tons of second year principal Derrens that are out there. And in that, whole experience of being a high school principal, clarity in what I care about, clarity in how I’m going to drive the work, clarity in how I’m going to empower others. All of those pieces came from that conversation right there with my coach. He later said to me, what do you even care about? Like what’s important to you? And I couldn’t answer the question. I had to get some clarity there. So that’s a lot of what I do with leaders is just help them figure out what do you care about? What are you really looking for? What do you really value? What is your school really all about? And then now let’s go be intentional with your time, your systems, with your communication, all of that, so you can actually focus on that.

Yeah, and I think the gold nugget for me in there is that whole word of systems. And I think people think of systems and they think boring, and I think systems equals freedom, right? Because the more systems you have in place, the more it frees up your time, your energy, your focus, your clarity, right? Your ability to support others. And it’s so, so important. And I think regardless of whether you’re a principal or if you’re a team lead, or if you are the teacher leading the classroom, you need to have a set of systems that support all of the other things that are not as the most important, right? That you’re putting up at top. So I wanna transition a little bit and ask for, because a lot of our audience are teacher-based, what about the teachers who are dealing with the principals who are the firefighters in principal clothing? So we get a lot of requests and lot of questions around, want to do something innovative. I want to use arts integration. I want to have STEAM. Or our leadership even talks about these things. And they want us to pursue them. But then when we try, there are all of these other things that they’re now putting on our plates that we don’t have time for this other thing. Or for the innovation that we started out with. So how do we help the teachers who are working with firefighters in principal clothing to shift that tide a little bit to encourage that or how do we work around some of those challenges?

You know, that’s a huge challenge because ultimately, while as teachers in the classroom, certainly we have some independence. We have the ability to make decisions on a regular basis of what teaching and learning looks like in our classroom. We don’t necessarily have the ability to shape the direction of the instructional program in the school. And I think that’s where, me.

I think that’s where it’s so important to remember that the work that we do is all about relationships. And, you know, there’s a couple of ways for teachers to approach administrators who are stuck in firefighter world. I would suggest and I’ll be honest with you, I had a handful of staff members that that were really good about kind of helping pull me up out of the fire and reminding me, you know, hey,

There’s more to this than just solving everybody else’s problems on a daily basis. So first and foremost, I would say really lean into building that relationship with your administrator because for the most part, I can’t say this for every single administrator, but I would say probably 90 to 95 % of administrators, I mean, they genuinely are trying to do what they think is right to support teachers. often as administrators, get again stuck in this superhero syndrome where we think we have to because we carry the title of principal, we have to know what everybody else needs. And the reality is, as administrators, the number one thing we need to do is listen, and we need we need to actually hear what it is that our teachers are going through what they’re experiencing and so forth. So

One again, lean into that relationship where if you can build that trusting relationship, and you can have the conversation with your administrator, that in and of itself will help because they’re, probably looking for somebody to say, you know, Hey, Darren, you need to slow down a little bit, you know, Hey, you need to get focused on what matters. The second thing I would say too, is invite your administrators into your classroom. You know, yes, we

We want to be in classrooms. I do this activity when I keynote and when I do leadership workshops where I ask everybody in the room and it’s typically, know, principals, assistant principals, maybe some superintendents, that type of thing, district level administrators. I just ask them, know, hey, what are your number one time bandits? What steals most of your time? And I always see things like email, meetings, parents, adult drama, discipline, those things, none of which is instructional stuff. And then I follow it up with where do you want to spend the bulk of your time and invariably it’s classrooms, classrooms, classrooms in classrooms with teachers, supporting teachers. That’s what they want to do. If you invite your principal in, I had a bunch of teachers who used to do this and I was really pretty good about getting in the classroom, but I had a bunch of teachers who would just simply say, Hey, I’m working on something new in my classroom. Can you come and give me some feedback? You know, if you extend that invitation to them, you’re doing a couple of things. One, you’re throwing them a lifeline, you’re giving them an opportunity to get out of the classroom. You know, I mean, you’re giving them something to put on the calendar that they can say, cool, I don’t have to be working on the budget, or some report or stuck at the district office or any of those things. It’s I need to be in so and so’s classroom. And the second thing that you’re doing for them is you’re opening up that space for dialogue, because you’re giving them something very specific that you want to hear about. I’ve got a handful of teachers in my head who used to do this frequently, but one, a phenomenal, he was an English teacher for me, he’s a theater teacher now, his name’s Bradley Skinner. Bradley used to invite me in on a regular basis, and he would say, hey, I’m working on such and such, can you please come and give me some feedback? And I never missed an opportunity to go in his classroom.

And we would then have fantastic conversations about teaching and learning. We would have conversations about pedagogy simply because he gave me something very specific to give him feedback on. Invariably, it ended up being about even more than that. But again, that’s building that trusting relationship with your administrator. It’s not just on your administrator to build that relationship. It’s on you as well. And so

I can probably give you four or five others, but I think those are probably the two most important ones because it opens up the opportunity for dialogue where you could even say, and I had a teacher tell me this once to Darren were drowning in the initiatives. No joke, Susan. There was a point in time in the district where I was a principal and a wonderful assistant superintendent over curriculum and instruction. But every time he went to a conference, we cringed because here came a new initiative and

I think we had 13 in the air at one point in time, no joke. And I had a teacher just say to me, when do I just teach? I’m lost, I’m confused. And that allowed us to then carry that message back to the district level and, and, know, kind of work through some of that stuff. So really, I think it’s all about that relationship piece.

And I can’t agree more because I think so many teachers get nervous. They’re scared that the administrator is going to come in and judge them. But if you build the relationship first and you work on that culture of give and take and professional respect for one another, that fear goes away because you want to have that collegial conversation and get the feedback from someone you do respect. So building that relationship, I think, is critical as well.

I know you have a new book out. I would love for you to share a little bit more about that and what caused you to write it.

Yeah, so thank you for asking. Yeah, so the new book is Culture First Classrooms. It’s right here over my shoulder. And I actually co-authored that book with Katie Kinder, who’s a phenomenal educator in the Oklahoma City area. She’s out doing a lot of the same work I do. She works more with teachers. I work more with school leaders. And Katie and I met a couple of years ago at a conference. And wow, we just, we are cut from the same cloth. I went and watched her speak and she jumped up on a chair to make a point. I do that all the time. And she was in my session a little bit later and she’s like, my gosh, we’re like the same person in so many ways. And we were having a conversation on my podcast and when we were done, I shared with her that I had just started teaching at the university level. I have a course that I teach at Fort Hay State University out of Kansas. That’s an advanced classroom management course.

And when Dr. Chris Yocum first offered me this position and wanted me to teach this course, he’s like, I think you’ll be perfect for this. Our students really need somebody to help them learn classroom management. And very quickly, I moved the course away from just course classroom management because it’s not what I believe in. I know the phrase classroom management. There’s a reason that it exists. But to me, what’s much more important is classroom culture. I think that culture in your classroom drives a lot of the quote unquote management. And I ask my students at Fort Hayes every semester, one of the very first questions I ask them is, when you hear classroom management, what do you think of? And it’s always, how do I respond when kids misbehave? How do I get them to do what I want them to? Those kinds of things, right? How do I keep the room from being chaos?

The more Katie and I talked about this, the more we felt like putting the focus on culture in the classroom first, which ultimately that’s the title of the book is culture first classrooms. That’s where it really needed to be. And because she and I are both in so many schools around the country, we felt like we didn’t want it to just be our voice. And certainly there’s a lot of Katie’s voice and there’s a lot of Darren’s voice in the book, but we have 24 contributors from around the country.

And there are people who we didn’t just jump on the internet or go on, you know, Instagram and say, Hey, who wants to contribute to our book? Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Don’t, misunderstand what I’m saying there. We wanted to know unequivocally. We want to have been in their classrooms, in their schools, or in their districts, whether we worked with them or we now support them. That’s what we wanted. And every one of these individuals, Katie or myself, and in a couple of cases, both have been in their classrooms or in their schools or in their districts, and we asked them to share what are some steps they take to build culture first and foremost, in their classroom school and district. And, man, some of the stuff that that was shared, every single one of the contributors is super, super amazing. And the thing I love about this book, I think it’s a great resource for all educators.

I think it’s a great reminder for those who have been in for a while. I think it’s amazing tool for those who are brand new. Let’s focus on culture first. But the thing I love most about this book was Katie and I both have a great platform. We got the opportunity to share that platform with 24 other educators who typically don’t get that spotlight shined on them. And they are amazing educators. And it’s it’s been really fun to watch, you know, this book take off to, you know, get get selfie sent to us, you know, with, you know, people who are like, Hey, look, I’m reading your book or, know, school districts calling and saying, Hey, we want to buy the book for the whole district or what have you. But what really inspired us to write this book is we believe that culture is the most important thing. And without building that culture, all the rest of the stuff we talk about never reaches its full potential. So by putting culture first in the classroom, that should help set our educators up for success, keep them in the classroom longer, keep them in the profession longer, and so forth.

100 % and I think it ties in beautifully with what we were just talking about with relationship building between your leaders and your teachers. Same thing happens in our classrooms, right? In that relationship building, having that respect. And I often think back to, know, in my own classroom experience, I never really had a problem with classroom management because I always looked at the classroom as cultural driven, relational driven, and when you do that, much of the management takes care of itself, right?

So I love that you have this book out and that you featured so many practicing educators. We need more of that in education. I’m excited to be able to read that and receive that. Can you let our audience know where they can find that book? I’m assuming it’s on Amazon and everywhere else that they can purchase it.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It’s on Amazon Barnes and Noble, all that kind of stuff. You can get it on our website at rhodaustin.net backslash books. If you go there, you can actually get an autograph copy. But yeah, it’s it’s available pretty much anywhere books are sold.

fantastic and we will include the links to that in our show notes today to make sure that everybody has easy access to be able to get their own copy. Darren, thank you so much for the conversation today. It has been so insightful and I’ve learned so much from you, so I appreciate it.

Absolutely Susan. I appreciate you having me on.