himself a former principal and today an assistant commissioner in Kentucky’s Department of Education. Hensley likes to remind people that when it was first used in connection with school leadership in the 1800s, the word “principal” was an adjective in front of another word, “teacher” (Pierce, 1935, p. 11). The “principal teacher,” he says, was a kind of first among equals, an instructor who assumed some administrative tasks as schools began to grow beyond the one-room buildings of yore. The original principal, Hensley stresses, was, like the other teachers in the school, concerned with instruction above all.