Principal Playbook / For New Principals
You were hired
for the job. Not
prepared for it.
Principal Playbook is built for the person walking into a building for the first time, and for the assistant principal who intends to. One school year, worked stage by stage, with someone to ask.
You have six weeks before the doors open and no idea what the last five years did to this building.
Pre-Season
Understand the School Before You Lead It, then Plan a Strong Opening. You arrive on the first day having read the building rather than guessing at it, and the Good, Bad and Ugly assessment gives you a structure to do it with.
Your first faculty meeting is in nine days and you do not know what to say.
Quarter 1
Leadership Principles, Culture and Building a School, with agendas, communication examples and worked samples in the Playbook Tools. You adapt them to your building rather than starting from an empty page.
Something happened in the building at 8:40 this morning and the first parent email arrived at 8:52.
Quarter 1
Crisis Management, Safety and Community Response. Preparation, decision-making under pressure, and the communication sequence that follows an incident, with the templates already written.
Two teachers are not speaking to each other and both of them have now come to you about it.
Quarter 3
Difficult conversations, and staff, student and parent situations. How to prepare for the conversation, hold it, and follow up so it does not come back in March.
Your best assistant principal just told you they are applying for a principalship elsewhere.
Quarter 3
Build the Leadership Bench: developing staff leadership, building capacity, interviews, and growing the next leader from inside the building before you need them.
Testing window opens in three weeks and you have never run one from this chair.
Quarter 4
Testing and data, plus the spring testing calendar and the logistics that decide whether the window runs cleanly.
The year is over and you cannot tell whether it went well.
Post-Game
The Good, Bad and Ugly review, applied to your own year, then transition into the next season with a focus the whole building can name.
Every lesson ends with something you do in your own building, this week. Not a quiz.
One account, one school year, everything in it.
- The full program: Pre-Season, Quarters 1 to 4 and Post-Game
- A personal dashboard showing your stage, focus, progress and next action
- The digital Field Manual, with notes and completed worksheets saved to your account
- The appendix and resource library: templates, examples, calendars, agendas, forms, worksheets, checklists, communication examples and presentation materials
- Group coaching sessions, in person and virtual
- Individual coaching sessions
- The Ask Michael private channel, all year
- Progress tracking across lessons, activities, resources and coaching
- A certificate of completion at the end of the program
Do I have to be a principal already?
No. The program is written for new principals and for aspiring ones. If you are an assistant principal preparing for the chair, the Pre-Season and Quarter 1 material is the part of the job you have watched but not yet carried.
How much time does it take each week?
A lesson is designed to be worked in sittings rather than in one pass, which is why lessons are broken into topics. The field application is a task you were going to do anyway, done deliberately and with a template.
Nothing completes automatically. You mark a lesson complete yourself once you have finished the parts that matter to you.
What if I join partway through the school year?
The stages stay available. A principal who starts in November works Pre-Season and Quarter 1 material while Quarter 2 is running, because the content is released by stage rather than locked to a date.
Is anything I write visible to my district?
Your reflections, notes and Ask Michael questions are private to your account. Where a district has enrolled a cohort, district administrators see enrollment, completion rates, program progress and coaching attendance. They do not see individual coaching questions or private participant information.
Do I keep the materials afterwards?
Yes. The Field Manual and the resource library stay with you, along with the worksheets you completed and the notes you kept during the year.
How do I start?
Send an enquiry with your school, your division and the year you are starting, and you will get the next intake dates and what enrollment involves.
Next
Colophon
Develop people. Build culture. Leave a legacy.
Principal Playbook runs as a full school year for individual principals and as a cohort for districts. To ask about the next intake, a district cohort, a keynote or a consulting engagement, start a conversation, or write directly to the address below.