How to Become School Principal: What 30 Years Taught One Superintendent

You did not walk into your first classroom thinking about the principal's office. You walked in to teach. To guide. To shape the lives of the children in front of you.

Then, a few years in, something shifted. You started noticing how the whole school worked. Why one timetable decision rippled through every grade. Why some staff meetings energised people and others drained them. Why a good policy on paper never quite reached the classroom.

That noticing matters. It is often the first quiet sign that you are ready for something larger. But nobody hands you a map. You are expected to grow, yet rarely shown how.

Bernie Vidales knows that feeling. He spent 30 years in education and retired as Superintendent of Jefferson Elementary School District. He did not start in administration. He started with five-year-olds, as a kindergarten teacher, and stayed in that classroom for six years before moving into school leadership and, eventually, the district office.

In a conversation with Rishabh Khanna, Founder and CEO of Suraasa, on the Inspiring Educators series, Vidales traced that path and named what actually sustained it. Not shortcuts. Not titles. Purpose, systems thinking, the right balance of structure and freedom, and a mindset that never stops learning.

This article builds on his reflections and adds practical context for any teacher asking how to become school principal without losing the love of teaching that brought them here in the first place.

From Kindergarten Classroom to the Superintendent's Office

Most people picture the road to leadership as a ladder that begins somewhere far away from the classroom. Vidales describes the opposite. For him, the classroom was the training ground.

Watch the full conversation below to hear Bernie Vidales explain, in his own words, how a kindergarten classroom prepared him for district leadership and what he believes keeps teachers growing for decades.

Vidales spent six years managing and directing kindergarten classrooms. He credits those years with building the organisational and communication abilities that school leadership demands. As he put it:

"If I could control and direct a group of five-year-olds, then I should be well suited for the role of school leadership." (Bernie Vidales)

It is a line that makes people smile. It is also a serious point.

Think about what a kindergarten teacher does in a single morning. You plan transitions down to the minute. You communicate one instruction three different ways so every child understands. You read the mood of a room before it tips. You speak to anxious parents at the door, coordinate with an assistant, and adjust the plan the moment something unexpected happens.

Now look at what a principal does. Plan the school year. Communicate the same message to staff, parents and students in ways each group understands. Read the climate of a school. Coordinate many adults. Adjust when the plan meets reality.

The skills are the same. Only the scale changes.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics notes that principals typically need classroom teaching experience alongside a master's degree in education leadership or administration, and public school principals usually need a state licence. That requirement exists for a reason. Classroom experience is not a box to tick before the real job begins. It is where the real job is learned.

If you are early in your career and wondering whether your daily work counts toward leadership, it does. Every routine you design, every difficult parent conversation you handle well, every struggling student you reach is practice for leading a school.

Discovering Your Educational 'Why' in Early Childhood Education

Before Vidales talks about skills, he talks about purpose. His years with five-year-olds did more than sharpen his management. They clarified why he was in education at all.

Working with diverse groups of young children, Vidales saw what school is ultimately for. In his reflection, the core commitment became preparing students to participate fully in civic and economic life. Every child who walked through his door would one day vote, work, raise families and shape their communities. School was where that began.

That clarity became his anchor across three decades and several roles. When the job changed, the purpose did not.

This is worth pausing on, because purpose is often treated as something soft. In practice, it is the most practical tool a leader has.

• It filters decisions. When a new initiative arrives, you can ask whether it serves the purpose or distracts from it.
• It survives hard years. Titles and pay can disappoint. A clear purpose gives you a reason to stay when the external rewards do not.
• It travels across roles. A teacher, a coordinator, a principal and a superintendent can all serve the same core aim at different scales.

So how do you find yours? Start with your own classroom. Ask three questions and write the answers down:

1. What do I want my students to be able to do ten years from now, beyond the syllabus?
2. Which moments in my teaching make me feel most like myself?
3. What problem in my school would I fix first if I had the authority?

The third question is especially useful for aspiring principals. The issue that frustrates you most is often a clue to the leadership role you are being called toward.

Your why does not need to be grand. It needs to be true. Vidales' commitment grew from ordinary days with young children. Yours can grow from your ordinary days too.

How Distributive Leadership Shapes Future School Administrators

Purpose gets you started. Systems thinking moves you forward.

Vidales points to distributive leadership as a turning point in his own path. Early in his career, he took part in site-level decision-making. That involvement changed how he saw the school. Instead of viewing everything from inside a single classroom, he began to see the school as a system: interconnected parts, shared resources, competing priorities, and decisions that affect everyone.

Distributive leadership simply means that leadership is spread across many people in a school, not concentrated in one office. Teachers lead committees, coordinate grade levels, mentor new colleagues, and shape policy. It is one of the most underused pathways to administration, because it lets you practise leadership before you hold the title.

Here is how classroom roles and leadership opportunities connect:

Vidales' practical advice is direct: get involved in school-wide committee work. You will understand institutional systems far better than you ever could from your classroom alone.

There is a second benefit. When you join these groups, leaders notice you. Not because you are seeking attention, but because you start contributing to problems that matter beyond your own room. That visibility, built on real work, is how many principals are first identified.

If you want to see how others have made this move, our guide on how to transition from local classrooms to global educator and leadership roles walks through the steps in more detail.

Start small. Volunteer for one committee this term. Ask to sit in on one planning meeting. Offer to mentor one new colleague. Each step widens your view of the school, and that wider view is exactly what leadership requires.

The 30-Year Pendulum Swing: From Blank Classrooms to Strict Pacing Guides

Anyone who stays in education for three decades sees the field change around them. Vidales describes that change as a pendulum.

When he started, teachers often walked into bare classrooms. No supplies. No set standards. No guidance on what to teach or when. A new teacher had enormous freedom, but also enormous isolation. You figured it out alone or you did not figure it out at all.

Over the years, the pendulum swung. Standards arrived. Materials arrived. Curriculum frameworks arrived. Much of that was progress. But Vidales observes that in recent years the swing has sometimes gone too far, into rigid pacing schedules and micromanagement that leave teachers with little room to use their own judgement.

Both extremes fail teachers, in different ways:

• Zero guidance leaves teachers to reinvent everything, with uneven results for students.
• Excessive control treats teachers as delivery mechanisms, draining the creativity and professional judgement that make teaching work.

This matters for aspiring principals because you will one day sit on the other side of that pendulum. You will decide how much structure to give your staff. You will choose whether pacing guides are a support or a straitjacket.

The challenge sits at system level too. The Brookings Institution argues that to ensure policy goals reach the classroom, states need a sustained, standards-aligned system that supports educators throughout their careers. Notice the word "supports". Structure works when it equips teachers. It fails when it only monitors them.

International comparisons point the same way. The OECD's education policy reviews examine how different systems organise curriculum, teacher professional growth and school leadership, and they show that there is no single correct setting for the pendulum. Each system has to find its own balance.

The lesson from Vidales' 30 years is not that one era was right and the other wrong. It is that leaders must keep watching the swing and correct it before it reaches either extreme.

Balancing Guaranteed Curriculum with Teacher Autonomy and Creativity

If the pendulum describes the problem, balance is the answer Vidales offers.

He makes a strong case for a guaranteed curriculum. When students move between schools, which happens often, a shared framework ensures their learning progresses consistently. A child who changes schools mid-year should not repeat a unit they already covered or miss one entirely. Standards protect students from that kind of gap.

But Vidales is equally clear that educators need leeway. Teachers must be able to adapt lessons to the actual students in front of them and apply their own expertise. True educator satisfaction, in his view, depends on this balance between structure and creativity.

What does that look like day to day? Think of the curriculum as the destination and your teaching as the route.

Two practices from Vidales' takeaways help you hold this balance well.

First, balance required pacing with creative instructional choices that push students toward deeper learning. Meeting the pacing guide is the floor, not the ceiling. Planning approaches like backward design lesson planning help here, because you start with the required outcome and then design your own path toward it.

Second, collaborate across grade levels so learning builds progressively instead of repeating previous years' content. Sit down with the teacher who had your students last year and the one who will have them next year. Map what each of you covers. You will often find overlaps you can remove and gaps you can fill.

Aspiring principals should practise this balance now. A school leader who understands both the value of a guaranteed curriculum and the value of teacher autonomy earns trust from staff and from the system. That trust is the foundation of effective leadership.

Root Causes of the Teacher Shortage: Compensation and Societal Respect

No honest conversation about long teaching careers can skip the hard part. Many teachers leave.

Vidales names two root causes of retention struggles. The first is respect. Society often undervalues teaching, he says, even though the work is extraordinarily difficult. People praise teachers in speeches and then treat the profession as something anyone could do.

The second is compensation. Vidales points to salary gaps between teaching and fields like technology and AI. When a talented graduate can earn far more elsewhere, teaching has to compete harder for the people it needs.

If you have felt this, you are not imagining it. You are measured on outcomes, but rarely equipped or rewarded in proportion to your impact. That gap is real.

So what can an individual teacher do about problems this large? More than you might think.

• Build credentials that travel. Recognised qualifications strengthen your position in salary conversations and open doors in other schools and countries. Our comparison of the best teaching certifications for career growth can help you weigh the options.
• Make your impact visible. Track student progress, document initiatives you lead, and keep evidence of your contribution. Respect is easier to claim when the proof is in front of people.
• Move toward roles that recognise growth. Leadership positions, specialist roles and international schools often reward expertise in ways a fixed pay scale does not.

For future principals, this section carries a second message. One day, retention will be your problem to solve. The way you treat teachers, the respect you show them, the time you protect for them, and the growth you make possible will shape whether good people stay in your building.

Leaders cannot fix national pay scales alone. They can build schools where teachers feel valued. Vidales' reflections suggest that respect is not a small thing. It is part of why people stay.

Why Grit and a Growth Mindset Define Long-Term Teaching Success

When Rishabh Khanna asked what separates teachers who thrive over decades, Vidales did not point to talent, charisma or a particular degree. He pointed to grit and an evolving learner mindset.

"Those who have the ability to see themselves as continual learners and as evolving and developing, those see it as a challenge and pursue that development." (Bernie Vidales)

The contrast he draws is sharp. Some teachers believe they must know everything immediately. When they meet a difficult class or a failed lesson, they read it as proof they are not good enough. Others see themselves as evolving learners capable of incremental improvement. When they hit the same wall, they read it as a problem to work on.

The second group navigates difficult challenges far better. And over a career that may last 30 years or more, difficult challenges are guaranteed.

This idea connects closely to what research on teacher learning keeps exploring. Work published in Professional Development in Education sits within a wider body of scholarship on how teachers grow across their careers, and it reinforces a simple truth: development is not a one-time event. It is ongoing.

Here is a practical way to build the evolving-learner habit Vidales describes, one school year at a time:

1. Name one weakness honestly. At the start of the year, choose one area of your practice that is not yet strong. Questioning, differentiation, assessment, classroom routines.
2. Find one source of learning. A course, a colleague, a book, a peer observation. Something specific.
3. Try, then reflect. Test a new approach for a few weeks. Note what changed for students.
4. Keep what works. Fold the improvement into your normal practice and choose the next area.

One area a year sounds slow. Over a decade, it means ten significant improvements in your teaching. Over a career, it means you become a fundamentally different educator than the one who started.

Planning that growth deliberately helps. Our guide to CPD for teachers and how to plan your year shows how to structure this kind of continuous development so it does not get lost in the rush of term.

For aspiring principals, the growth mindset carries extra weight. Leaders model learning for an entire staff. A principal who admits what they are still working on gives everyone else permission to grow too. Grit is not about pushing through alone. It is about staying in the work long enough to get better at it.

Adapting Pedagogical Practices Across Diverse and International Classrooms

Teaching careers increasingly cross borders. Vidales spoke directly about international educators and what helps them thrive in new classrooms.

His point is simple and important. Pedagogical practices that work well in a teacher's home country may not translate directly into US schools. A questioning style, a classroom routine, an approach to discipline or parent communication can carry very different meanings in a new culture. Strong teachers can struggle not because they lack skill, but because the context has changed around them.

That is why Vidales sees global-ready training and cultural awareness as essential. His practical advice: when you move to a new district or country, actively study local community norms instead of relying only on the methods that served you before.

What does studying local norms look like in practice?

• Observe before you change. Spend your first weeks watching experienced colleagues teach. Notice how they open lessons, handle behaviour and speak to students.
• Learn the expectations around families. How often do parents expect contact? In what format? What tone feels respectful in this community?
• Understand the assessment culture. What counts as evidence of learning here? How much weight do tests carry versus projects or participation?
• Ask questions openly. Colleagues usually respect a new teacher who asks how things work far more than one who assumes.

None of this means abandoning what you know. Your experience is an asset. The goal is to adapt it, not erase it. The teachers who succeed abroad combine their own expertise with genuine curiosity about the new setting.

If an international move is part of your plan, you may find our international teaching career guide for Indian teachers and our overview of why teachers need global certification useful starting points.

Adapting across contexts also prepares you for leadership. A principal leads staff from different backgrounds and serves families from many cultures. The skill of learning a new environment quickly, and respecting it, is the same skill whether you are entering a new country or taking charge of a new school.

Classrooms as Mini-United Nations: Teaching Across Cultural Differences

Vidales extends the idea of cultural awareness from teachers to students. Diverse classrooms, he argues, are training grounds for future global leaders.

"Teachers have the ability to work with students to learn across differences and to learn from differences because the leaders of tomorrow need to be skilled at that." (Bernie Vidales)

Notice the two parts of that idea. Learning across differences means students can work together despite different languages, backgrounds and perspectives. Learning from differences goes further. It means students treat those differences as a source of insight, not just something to manage.

A classroom with students from many cultures can feel like a small United Nations. That is a challenge, and it is also a gift. Few places offer young people such a natural setting to practise the collaboration an interconnected world will demand of them.

Vidales' takeaway is to deliberately cultivate classroom practices that teach students how to communicate and collaborate across linguistic and cultural differences. Here are concrete ways to do that:

• Design mixed groups on purpose. Rotate groupings so students regularly work with peers from different backgrounds, not just friends.
• Teach collaboration skills explicitly. Show students how to disagree respectfully, check understanding and share roles fairly.
• Invite multiple perspectives into content. When you teach history, literature or even science, ask how people in different places might see the same issue.
• Value home languages. Let students connect new vocabulary to words in their own languages. It strengthens understanding and signals respect.
• Reflect together. After group work, ask students what they learned from someone who saw the task differently.

Thoughtful questioning makes this richer. Frameworks such as Bloom's Taxonomy help you move students from simply describing a different perspective toward analysing and evaluating it.

For future principals, this becomes a whole-school question. How does your school ensure every classroom builds these skills? How do you support teachers who are new to highly diverse settings? A leader who sees diversity as a strength shapes a school culture that prepares every student for the world they will inherit.

Leaving a Legacy: Touching the Future Through Student Lives

At the end of the conversation, Vidales returned to the reason most teachers enter the profession in the first place.

"Teachers have an ability to touch tomorrow through the life of a student." (Bernie Vidales)

After 30 years, from a kindergarten classroom to the superintendent's office, that is what he holds onto. Not the titles. The students. The quiet certainty that somewhere, years later, a child you taught is living a fuller life because of something that happened in your room.

That idea reframes the question of how to become school principal. Leadership is not an escape from teaching. It is teaching at a larger scale. A principal touches the future through every teacher they support and every student those teachers reach. A superintendent does the same across an entire district.

Vidales' path offers a clear shape for that journey:

Each stage builds on the one before. Nothing you learn in the classroom is wasted. It all comes with you.

Of course, the journey is hard. There will be years when the pendulum swings against you, when pay feels unfair, when respect feels thin. Vidales does not pretend otherwise. What he offers instead is a way to keep going: a clear purpose, a wider view of the system, and the humility to keep learning.

If you are ready to build that growth deliberately, structured professional learning can give it shape. You can compare routes in our guide to B.Ed vs PgCTL, which explains how the Professional Graduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning (PgCTL) fits alongside other qualifications. Whatever route you choose, choose one that moves when you do.

You were asked to shape the future. You deserve a path that shapes yours too. You do not have to walk it alone.

Vidales summed up the whole of his career in a single sentence. It is a fitting place to end, and a fitting place to begin your own next step: teaching, as he sees it, is the one field where you can touch the future.

For the Love of Teaching.