How Two California Principals Are Building Leadership in Their Schools 

August 31, 2026

On any given day at Crescenta Valley High School, Principal Christine Benitez may move from conversing about the gym floor to discussing student intervention strategies to leading interviews with prospective staff. A few miles away at Glenoaks Elementary School, Principal Christine Aroyan manages a similarly wide range of responsibilities but without an assistant principal or administrative team at her side to help carry them.

The principals lead vastly different schools within Glendale Unified School District, but both have been grappling with a reality familiar to school leaders nationwide: The responsibilities of the principalship continue to grow, while the time and capacity to carry them have not.

Participation in WestEd’s Leadership Playbook—a research-based professional learning series focused on shared leadership practices—guided Benitez and Aroyan beyond the question of how they can manage more by themselves and toward a different one: How can principals develop the people around them so that leadership and responsibility don’t rest with a single person?

Becoming School Leaders

Benitez wanted to be a teacher from an early age and began her career as a mathematics teacher in 1997. She had no intention of leaving the classroom, but a practice interview that was required for her administrative credential unexpectedly led to an assistant principal position. She stayed in administration, serving for 9 years as an assistant principal before joining Crescenta Valley, first as associate principal and later as principal.

“I do love the job. One minute, I’ll be talking about the hardwood floors in the gym, and the next minute I’m talking about intervention strategies,” Benitez said. “Then I’m working with a community member on mental health awareness. You just never know what you’re going to be doing.”

What sustains her is seeing change that can be difficult to notice from one day to the next.

“Big high schools change very slowly,” she said. “In the moment, it feels like you’re not getting anywhere, but then when you step back, you can see how far people have come and how we’ve changed the school, and that’s so rewarding.”

Similarly, Aroyan knew she wanted to work in education from a very young age.

“All I wanted to do was be in education, literally since I was 5. I used to play school with my friends; I was always the teacher. So, it was something I knew from very early on that this is exactly what I wanted to do,” she said.

Aroyan eventually taught in Sweden and in the Glendale Unified School District before becoming a teacher specialist, assistant principal, and, eventually, principal of Glenoaks.

“I feel like every part of my journey has been a dream come true,” Aroyan said. “It’s me living out my childhood dream every day.”

For Aroyan, the rewards of leading a school haven’t diminished, but they increasingly exist alongside the weight and isolation of the role.

“There’s joy within the job,” Aroyan said. “You get to see children grow on a daily basis. You get to help adults grow on a daily basis. It’s a very rewarding profession. But it can be very difficult, and it can be very lonely.”

Both principals faced different realities in their roles—realities the Leadership Playbook would later give them dedicated space to examine as they considered how others could help lead change.

Finding New Ways to Lead Through Professional Learning

Today’s principals must respond to a wide range of academic, social, emotional, and community needs, often in real time and with limited capacity. For Benitez, leading a large high school means balancing those demands with new district priorities.

New district initiatives can add pressure when they’re introduced without sufficient planning or consideration of the school’s goals. Benitez said successful implementation requires involving principals early and developing a clear understanding of what their schools will need.

Aroyan experiences the expanding role differently. As the only administrator at Glenoaks, she has no assistant principal or administrative team to share the school’s instructional, operational, and relational responsibilities.

She said the needs of students, families, and educators have changed significantly since the pandemic, but many of the systems and staffing structures supporting schools were designed decades ago. Meanwhile, the range of responsibilities assigned to principals continues to grow.

“For me, being a lone administrator, it’s impossible to do everything that I’m being asked to do,” Aroyan said. “It’s physically impossible without support.”

Those different pressures brought the two principals to the Leadership Playbook seeking more than another set of strategies.

Aroyan first attended WestEd’s Leading Difficult Conversations workshop on her own and returned to Glendale convinced that other district leaders needed the same practical strategies for navigating challenging conversations.

The Leading Difficult Conversations workshop helps education leaders learn practical strategies for managing conflict, shift unproductive discourse, and effectively prepare for challenging conversations in their school environment.

When the workshop was later offered districtwide, both Aroyan and Benitez participated. They then completed the six-session Leadership Playbook together, moving from strategies for navigating difficult conversations to a broader examination of relationships, teams, talent development, coaching, and facilitation.

The Leadership Playbook supports school and district leaders in developing shared leadership practices that strengthen culture, collaboration, and systemwide coherence. Participants build practical skills to lead teams, grow talent, coach others, and facilitate meaningful adult learning.

Benitez had found herself spending too much time responding to immediate demands and too little time thinking proactively. The Playbook reminded her of an informal practice she once held with a former principal. They would step away from daily tasks to examine a problem, consider who needed to be involved, and imagine a better approach.

“I felt I had that same feeling during the Playbook meetings—like it was time to think and time to grow and to come up with proactive ways to make change,” she said. “We’re so busy trying to help others that we don’t give ourselves time to learn and grow.”

Aroyan said that participating with other Glendale leaders strengthened that learning and that the experience helped principals and administrators from different schools understand one another’s perspectives and build relationships they had not previously had.

For Aroyan, the experience challenged the assumption that being the school’s only administrator meant that she had to lead every part of the work herself.

“I know I can’t do it on my own,” Aroyan said, “but the Playbook helped me see that I really can’t do it on my own. I could do things differently to take the pressure off of me a little bit and share the wealth so that others can use the experience to grow.”

Developing School Leaders From Within

Aroyan’s realization led her to look more intentionally for leadership potential among teachers, extending the same trust that earlier administrators had placed in her.

“Sometimes you know that you have the talent, and sometimes you just walk up to people and ask them to share that talent,” she said.

One of those moments came after an early Playbook session when Aroyan spoke with a teacher who had previously served as an instructional coach. As Aroyan described efforts to maintain the school’s instructional focus, the teacher proposed dividing the leadership team into separate instructional and operational groups. Aroyan encouraged her to lead the instructional team and bring several colleagues into the work.

“You empower, you trust, you support, and those who have it will just run with it,” Aroyan said.

Benitez began making a similar shift with her administrative team. Completing the Playbook with one of her assistant principals gave them a common language and enabled someone other than Benitez to connect the learning to the team’s daily work.

She then asked several colleagues to take ownership of the school’s intervention efforts. They formed a team that included administrators, counselors, teachers, and classified staff; piloted an approach; and developed a clearer direction for the coming school year.

“I’m trying to give them things that are shared leadership, that they are responsible for,” said Benitez. “It worked out really well with intervention. We have a finished product, and we know where we’re going next year with it.”

Both principals also started to think more deliberately about the structures that make shared leadership possible.

Benitez returned to the Professional Standards for Educational Leaders with her administrative team. The standards gave them an opportunity to discuss where they were concentrating their time, where they were already strong, and where they needed to stretch.

The Playbook helped her consider how coaching, intervention, and other promising practices could become repeatable processes that other leaders could shape and sustain.

Her next step is a pilot in which six teachers will share a preparation period and meet once or twice a month to practice coaching one another through issues they are grappling with.

Aroyan faced a different challenge: How could she build leadership capacity without an assistant principal or administrative team?

She began focusing on routines that could make collaboration more consistent and give teacher leaders clearer ways to participate and take ownership of instructional work.

The Playbook sessions on Building Teams and Talent Development were especially relevant for Aroyan, who said they helped shift how she thought about developing leadership beyond herself.

That shift involved thinking not only about who could lead but also about the structures that would help them lead successfully. She was drawn to the Playbook’s practices on community agreements, consistent agenda templates, and structured three-person conversations with defined roles for speaking, listening, and observing.

“It’s the importance of sharing the work, but also having a process that’s predictable and easy to follow,” she said.

Aroyan plans to introduce those practices gradually, establishing one before moving to the next rather than trying to implement everything at once.

Carrying the Work Forward and Making Time for Joy

The Leadership Playbook didn’t lead Benitez and Aroyan toward the same model of shared leadership. Instead, it helped each principal identify what her school—and her own leadership—needed next.

Benitez said that this work requires dedicated time and that the development of others can’t be left to whatever time remains after more immediate demands are addressed.

“This kind of work, it’s what helps us guide the work and lead the work, so you have to make time for it, and you have to make it a priority,” she said.

Aroyan said principals also need to recognize when they—and their schools—are ready to share more responsibility. That readiness includes accepting that another person may carry the work forward differently.

“You want people to grow and learn,” Aroyan said. “It might not be exactly how you would do it, but you have to be okay with giving some of that up.”

For both principals, sustaining leadership also means protecting their connection to students.

Benitez now visits a mathematics class each month and has encouraged her assistant principals to choose a class that brings them joy—not to evaluate the teacher but to remember why they entered education.

When Aroyan needs that reminder, she visits Glenoaks’s kindergarten or transitional kindergarten classrooms.

“Whatever that joy is for you, you must find it and go do it,” Aroyan said.

The pressures facing the two principals haven’t disappeared. What has changed is how they think about meeting them: by developing others, seeking support, creating time for what matters, and remaining connected to the students and educators at the heart of the work.

“People always ask me, ‘Is this still what you want to do?’” Aroyan said. “My answer is always absolutely yes. No matter how tough the job gets, it’s what I chose to do. It’s what I always wanted to do.”

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