Pastor Andre Wheeler

I have been a public-school principal for twenty-one years and an African Methodist Episcopal pastor for twelve. I am writing this from my office at the school where I have served for the last nine years. I have spent my adult life in the work of educating Black children and pastoring Black men, and the two have shaped each other over the years.

I coach brothers through two intersecting questions. The first is the question of vocation — what kind of work am I called to over the long arc of my life, and how do I know? The second is the question of education-career navigation specifically — for brothers in the education field at any level, from new teachers through veteran administrators, who are trying to figure out the next move in a field that rewards the patience few twenty-first-century careers encourage.

On vocation, I work primarily with brothers in their twenties and thirties who are wrestling with whether the career path they are on is the one they should be on. The conversation is not a religious conversation by default. Brothers come to me from across the religious spectrum and the secular spectrum, and I tailor the work to the brother in front of me. For brothers who hold a religious framework — Christian, Muslim, traditional — we can use that framework as a structure for the discernment. For brothers without a religious framework, we use other structures — values clarification, the long-arc career questions, the honest accounting of what kind of life the brother wants to build. The work is the same; the language differs.

On education careers, I work with brothers across the ladder. New teachers in their first three years, who are deciding whether the classroom is where they belong. Teachers five to ten years in, who are considering moves into administration, counseling, or leaving the field. Assistant principals and principals working through the long arc of school leadership. Brothers in district or central-office roles. The education career path is one of the most rewarding and one of the most slowly-paid in our communities, and the patience it requires is unusual in the current cultural moment.

My approach is conversational. We meet by video, usually monthly, in sessions of an hour. The work is not heavily structured — I do not assign formal homework — but I often suggest readings, prayer or reflection practices, or specific conversations to have with people in your life. The brother does the work on his own time and brings the results to the next session.

I do not charge for vocational discernment work. I do charge a modest fee for the education-career specific coaching — sixty dollars per hour — because that work is more directly tied to career outcomes and benefits from the structure that a paid engagement brings. The vocational work I treat as a ministry function and keep separate. I work primarily with brothers in the U.S., though I have worked with brothers in the U.K. and the broader diaspora.

I will not pretend to be neutral on what makes a good vocation. I believe the work that lasts is work that is in service to others, work that draws on your specific gifts, and work that you can do without losing your soul. That belief shapes what I say in the room. The brother who wants to leave education for a higher-paying corporate role gets the same careful conversation as the brother who wants to leave a corporate role for the classroom. Neither move is automatically right. Both moves require honest discernment.

If you are wrestling with what to do next, write me. I read every note. I respond within a week. The work of figuring out what your life is for is slow work and it does not get done in a single conversation. But it can be started in one.