What Nobody Tells You Before You Become a Coordinator...

Before I became one myself, I thought I understood the role of a PYP Coordinator fairly well.

I had worked closely with several of them across different leaders and different schools, and the picture from the outside was consistent: coordinators led. They led the school's vision, led the programme, made the plans, documented learning across classrooms, ran events, organized professional development, conducted teacher inductions, hosted parent orientations, wrote policy, and reflected on and reviewed the Programme of Inquiry. Every interaction I had with a coordinator, I was watching leadership in motion. It looked, from where I stood, like a role you simply stepped into and led from day one.

Then I stepped into the role myself — and found out how much of that picture was missing.

The Gap Nobody Mentions

My current school was different from anything I'd worked in before. Not in one way, but in nearly every way that mattered: the culture was different, the faculty's understanding of the programme was at an entirely different stage, many teachers were completely new to teaching itself, the students were at a different level, and — perhaps most disorienting — the responsibility for all of it sat with me, with no one to hand me a map.

Nobody tells you about that gap. Training prepares you for the content of the role — the documentation, the policy, the planning cycles. It doesn't prepare you for walking into a context so different from anything you've seen that you genuinely don't know where to begin.

Starting With the Basics

So I started where the context actually needed me to start, not where I expected to start. I supported the team through the fundamentals — the basics of teaching, keeping already-existing programmes running, keeping every communication channel open with every stakeholder, making sure teachers were present and that teaching and learning were actually happening, even if "learning" didn't yet look like inquiry. It was less about leading a vision forward and more about steadying a foundation that wasn't yet stable enough to build on.

That wasn't what I expected the role to feel like. But it was what the role actually needed, in that place, at that time.

The Turn

Toward the end of that first year, I sat with the year's progress honestly — gathering feedback from students, parents, teachers, and management, not just reflecting privately on my own. That feedback became the starting point for the second year: a deliberate shift from support toward leadership, targeting the specific areas that needed strengthening, and building in tighter feedback loops so stakeholders could reflect and respond in real time, rather than waiting for a year-end review to surface what wasn't working.

The recent Role of the Coordinator workshop landed at exactly the right moment in that shift. It didn't hand me a new direction — it confirmed the one I was already on, and gave me the language and confidence to trust it.

"The role doesn't begin with leading. It begins with understanding exactly how much support a context needs before it can be led."

What I Actually Learned

If there's one thing I'd tell someone stepping into this role for the first time, it's this: the coordinators I watched leading so visibly were not necessarily leading from day one in their first schools either — I simply joined their story after the foundation was already built. What looks like constant leadership from the outside is often the visible tip of a much longer, much quieter process of first understanding a context deeply enough to know what it actually needs.

The quality I've come to believe matters most isn't decisiveness, and it isn't even vision — it's flexibility. A leader has to be willing to mould and adapt to what a specific school, a specific team, a specific moment genuinely requires, while still holding the underlying goal steady underneath all of that adaptation. Support and leadership were never two different roles I had to choose between. They were two different points on the same path — and the job was learning when to be on which point.