Before we added any administrator-facing features to Teacher's Buddy, we spent several months asking a specific question to school principals and assistant principals: what would actually be useful to you from a tool that helps teachers with lesson planning and documentation, and what would just add to your workload?
We spoke with eight school administrators across three states: elementary principals, a middle school assistant principal, and two high school administrators whose responsibilities included curriculum oversight. The conversations were long and sometimes pointed. The answers were not what we expected.
The First Surprise: Principals Were Not Asking for More Data
Most education technology pitches to school leadership emphasize data. Dashboards with compliance rates, completion percentages, engagement scores, usage graphs. The assumption is that principals want visibility into everything their teachers are doing.
The administrators we talked with pushed back on this framing immediately. Several pointed out that their biggest problem was not a lack of data, it was an excess of fragmented data that required manual effort to interpret. One principal described spending two hours on a Sunday pulling together lesson plan submission rates from three different systems before a curriculum review. The data existed; it was just in the wrong form, requiring her to synthesize it rather than read it.
The ask was not more visibility. It was less synthesis work. The distinction matters because it points toward different product decisions. More visibility means more charts. Less synthesis work means smarter aggregation of what already exists.
What They Said They Actually Look At
When we asked administrators to describe the last time they looked at teacher documentation and found it genuinely useful, the answers were consistent across different school types and grade bands.
Useful information was always specific and actionable. A principal who could see that three teachers in the same grade level had not yet addressed a specific state standard was able to act. A principal who could see that one teacher's lesson objectives were consistently below the stated grade-level complexity could offer targeted coaching. A curriculum coordinator who could quickly see whether the ELA unit plans across a department were coherent in their standards progression could use that to structure department meeting time.
What they described as not useful: aggregate compliance metrics, usage dashboards showing who logged in and when, and summary statistics about how many lesson plans had been submitted. One administrator described receiving a monthly report from a previous tool showing that her teachers had collectively generated 847 documents. The number was meaningless.
The Workload Problem on the Admin Side
Administrators have their own documentation burden, and it is often invisible to teachers. When a teacher support tool requires a principal to administer accounts, review submitted materials, provide feedback through a workflow, and generate reports for district leadership, that tool has added to the principal's plate rather than reducing anyone's work.
The administrators we talked with were specifically wary of tools that required them to be active users. Several described the pattern they had seen with previous ed-tech implementations: the product demo showed a beautiful dashboard, the pilot required a point person to maintain it, the point person left, and the tool went unused within a semester.
What they wanted instead was something that benefited teachers visibly enough that teachers would advocate for continued use, and that provided principals with read-only visibility into what teachers were already doing, without requiring the principal to be in the workflow. That framing, benefit the teacher first, give the administrator optional visibility, shaped how we thought about the administrator view in Teacher's Buddy.
The Coaching Use Case Was the Most Consistent Ask
Across all eight administrators, the most consistent request was for information that could inform coaching conversations rather than compliance review. There is a meaningful difference between the two.
Compliance review is about whether teachers are meeting a requirement. Did they submit a lesson plan? Does the plan include an objective? Has the parent communication log been updated? These questions have binary answers and produce the kind of metrics that fill dashboards.
Coaching conversations are about instructional quality. Is a teacher's lesson design improving over time? Is the differentiation strategy in this teacher's plans appropriate for the range of learners in her classroom? Is a new teacher's approach to formative assessment developing in the right direction? Those questions require judgment, but they also require some form of information to inform the conversation. Administrators told us they often went into coaching conversations under-prepared not because they were not paying attention, but because they did not have a quick way to look at a teacher's work before a meeting.
The administrator view we are building is oriented around this use case. Rather than compliance tracking, the goal is to surface the information that makes a 15-minute pre-observation conversation more productive. A principal should be able to pull up a teacher's recent lesson plans, see the standards they have been targeting, and see the assessment approach they have been using, without having to request that information from the teacher before the meeting.
What We Decided Not to Build
Based on these conversations, there are features that would have been easy to build and that we chose not to include, at least in the initial version.
We did not build submission deadlines or required approval workflows. Several administrators we talked with noted that approval workflows tend to create paperwork theaters where plans are submitted for compliance rather than actually used. We did not build comparison metrics that rank teachers against each other. Two administrators specifically flagged this as something that damages trust in a faculty and rarely produces useful information.
We also did not build anything that requires the principal to take an action to keep the tool working. If a principal does not log into the administrator view for six weeks, teachers' use of the tool should not be affected. That principle, that administrator visibility should be optional and additive rather than required, is easy to state and harder to implement, but the administrators we talked with were clear that any product that required their ongoing attention would eventually be abandoned.
What This Means for Schools Evaluating Teacher Support Tools
If your school or district is evaluating a tool to support teachers with planning, documentation, or communication, the administrator view deserves the same scrutiny as the teacher experience. The questions worth asking: does this tool require administrators to maintain an active workflow, or is their visibility read-only and optional? Does the reporting surface actionable information or compliance metrics? If the point person for this tool moves to another school, does the tool continue working?
We are not saying that compliance tracking and usage metrics have no value. For some district-level accountability processes, they are required. But for the day-to-day goal of supporting instructional quality, the bar is higher. A tool that reduces teacher prep time while also giving principals the information they need for coaching conversations serves both groups without creating a third workload for administrators.
We are still learning what that looks like in practice. The administrator view in Teacher's Buddy is actively being shaped by feedback from the principals and curriculum leads who are using it. If you are a school administrator with a different take on what would be useful, we would genuinely like to hear it.