Leading a Community of Practice: Why I'm Teaching Leaders to Coach, Not Fix
When Darcie first asked me to facilitate a Community of Practice for academic leaders across Virginia schools, I knew immediately it was a chance to live out my professional mission: creating cultures of learning among the adults in schools. Bring a group of leaders together, help them lead more powerfully, and watch that ripple down into stronger cultures of learning for teachers — and ultimately, richer environments for students. It's the kind of exponential impact I believe is possible when school leadership gets the support it deserves.
Most academic leaders — division heads, directors of teaching and learning, instructional specialists, and others — are appointed to those roles because they were excellent teachers. But leadership requires a different skill set than the one that got them the job.
The instinct, when a teacher comes to you with a classroom problem, is to fix it. That's what got you promoted in the first place: you were a superstar teacher and the master of your classroom territory, surmounting challenges of all kinds.
But fixing isn't leading.
My goal for this group was to help them build a different muscle entirely — coaching.
Coaching inspires teachers toward improvement while building their agency. It's slower and less satisfying in the moment than swooping in with a solution, but it's a reliable way to build a culture of learning at multiple levels in a school.
We talk about a teacher's job as lighting a fire, not filling a bucket. We rarely say the same about school leaders.
If we don't teach leaders how to light fires, they default to filling buckets — buckets that need refilling again and again, until the leader is too exhausted to keep pouring. Teachers, meanwhile, never learn to fill their own.
Agency erodes. Faculty culture flattens. Turnover climbs.
That's the cycle I wanted this group to interrupt.
Our final in-person session was held at Burgundy Farm Country Day School, whose campus — outdoor classrooms, a barn full of animals, a pond, a maker space — made the meeting feel genuinely special. We opened with a structured reflection: each participant identified the highs and lows of their year in leadership, then worked to surface the lessons and next steps buried inside those experiences.
One moment stayed with me.
A participant realized, partway through the exercise, that this exact structure was the one she needed to bring back to her own school — to use with every teacher in their end-of-year meetings. If she follows through, she'll be holding space for her teachers to name their own learning and their own next steps, rather than handing them a fix.
That's coaching, passed down a level.
That's my vision working: layered systems of learners in community…with students as the ultimate beneficiaries.
Later that day, we paused the formal agenda and wandered the campus together — down hallways plastered with student art, both finished pieces and the messy, in-process ones, poked our heads into classrooms, and said hello to the horses and chickens. This part of the day did its own kind of work: side-by-side conversation, unhurried, with nothing to produce at the end of it.
Here’s the twist: the tools and frameworks I brought to the group mattered — but they weren't what people seemed to crave most.
What they wanted, and what they lit up around, was the informal time: comparing notes on where to hold advisory meetings, how to respond to a difficult email, how to support a burned-out colleague. It didn't happen organically in their day-to-day roles, so this space filled a real gap.
As one participant put it, "I appreciated the time for sharing issues with colleagues from different schools and tapping into their expertise and experience."
Another noted that meeting in person early on made a real difference: "Meeting in person in November helped to solidify the group, so the Zooms were even more productive after that session."
It felt like holding a sacred space for confidential connection between people who rarely get to be anything other than the person everyone else leans on.
I keep coming back to why this work matters right now.
Enrollment is unpredictable. Competition for students is real.
And the thing that differentiates a school isn't a facility or a tagline — it's the experience inside the classroom.
I believe reflective, always-learning faculty build the strongest classrooms there are. And that starts with leaders who know how to light fires, not just refill buckets.
