Analytic Processes for School Leaders


Book Description

Explore four key analytic processes that will help you make choices, implement changes or plans, fgure out why something went wrong, and resolve a complex or confusing issue. Numerous examples of typical school and classroom problems make the processes clear, understandable, and easy to use.




Statistics Made Simple for School Leaders


Book Description

The chief executive officer of a corporation is not much different from a public school administrator. While CEOs base many of their decisions on data, for school administrators, this type of research may conjure up miserable memories of searching for information to meet a graduate school requirement. However, the value of data-based decision making will continue to escalate and the school community—students, teachers, parents and the general public—expect this information to come from their administrators. Administrators are called on to be accountable, but few are capable of presenting the mountain of data that they collect in a cohesive and strategic manner. Most statistical books are focused on statistical theory versus application, but Statistics Made Simple for School Leaders presents statistics in a simple, practical, conceptual, and immediately applicable manner. It enables administrators to take their data and manage it into strategic information so the results can be used for action plans that benefit the school system. The approach is 'user friendly' and leaves the reader with a confident can-do attitude to communicate results and plans to staff and the community.




Educational Data Analytics for Teachers and School Leaders


Book Description

Educational Data Analytics (EDA) have been attributed with significant benefits for enhancing on-demand personalized educational support of individual learners as well as reflective course (re)design for achieving more authentic teaching, learning and assessment experiences integrated into real work-oriented tasks. This open access textbook is a tutorial for developing, practicing and self-assessing core competences on educational data analytics for digital teaching and learning. It combines theoretical knowledge on core issues related to collecting, analyzing, interpreting and using educational data, including ethics and privacy concerns. The textbook provides questions and teaching materials/ learning activities as quiz tests of multiple types of questions, added after each section, related to the topic studied or the video(s) referenced. These activities reproduce real-life contexts by using a suitable use case scenario (storytelling), encouraging learners to link theory with practice; self-assessed assignments enabling learners to apply their attained knowledge and acquired competences on EDL. By studying this book, you will know where to locate useful educational data in different sources and understand their limitations; know the basics for managing educational data to make them useful; understand relevant methods; and be able to use relevant tools; know the basics for organising, analysing, interpreting and presenting learner-generated data within their learning context, understand relevant learning analytics methods and be able to use relevant learning analytics tools; know the basics for analysing and interpreting educational data to facilitate educational decision making, including course and curricula design, understand relevant teaching analytics methods and be able to use relevant teaching analytics tools; understand issues related with educational data ethics and privacy. This book is intended for school leaders and teachers engaged in blended (using the flipped classroom model) and online (during COVID-19 crisis and beyond) teaching and learning; e-learning professionals (such as, instructional designers and e-tutors) of online and blended courses; instructional technologists; researchers as well as undergraduate and postgraduate university students studying education, educational technology and relevant fields.




Leadership Capacity for Lasting School Improvement


Book Description

From the author of Building Leadership Capacity in Schools, insightful ideas for confronting the key challenges of leadership development in your school or district, including resistance to participation, time constraints, the changing role of the principal, and skills development.




School Leader's Guide to Tackling Attendance Challenges


Book Description

"For students to be successful in school, they first have to be in school." With that simple statement, Jessica Sprick and Randy Sprick launch a compelling case for prioritizing student attendance. This comprehensive guide provides school and district-level administrators and teams with the background information, strategies, and tools needed to implement a multitiered approach to improving attendance and preventing chronic absence. The authors use the results of their work in schools throughout the United States to dispel the myth that educators have little control over student attendance and provide success stories from elementary and secondary schools that have reversed longstanding patterns of absenteeism. Citing extensive research, Sprick and Sprick share details about the shocking prevalence of chronic absence in U.S. schools and its effects on students, teachers, families, and the school community. They explain how to replace punitive approaches to absenteeism with effective methods that begin with universal supports and continue through Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions for students with more persistent problems. Specifically, they explain how to Build an effective school team to address absenteeism . Create systems to collect accurate data and set priorities. Develop an attendance initiative that generates student enthusiasm as well as staff, parent, and community support. Design and implement strategies that are tailored to specific schoolwide concerns and demographics that reach all students. Equipped with the information and tools presented in this book, educators can ensure wise use of staff and other resources—and create a culture of attendance that is the foundation of successful schools. This book is a copublication of ASCD and Ancora Publishing.




Decision Making for Leaders


Book Description

This book is about how to make decisions using the Analytic Hierarchy Process. The basics of the theory are described in a clear, non-technical manner with many examples. It is suitable for business leaders and also is probably the best book for introducing the AHP to students at the college and graduate level. In this fifth printing of the book the reader will find a new appendix containing real-life applications that validate the use of the fundamental scale of the AHP.




Preparing Principals for a Changing World


Book Description

Preparing Principals for a Changing World provides a hands-on resource for creating and implementing effective policies and programs for developing expert school leaders. Written by acclaimed author and educator Linda Darling-Hammond and experts Debra Meyerson, Michelle LaPointe, and Margaret Terry Orr, this important book examines the characteristics of successful educational leadership programs and offers concrete recommendations to improve programs nationwide. In a study funded by the Wallace Foundation, Darling-Hammond and the team examined eight exemplary principal development programs, as well as state policies and principals' experiences across the country. Using the data from the study, they reveal how successful programs are structured, the skills and knowledge participants gain, and what they are able to do in practice as school leaders as a result. What do these exemplary programs have in common? Aggressive recruitment; close ties with schools in the community; on-the-ground training under the wing of expert principals, and a strong emphasis on the cutting-edge theories of instructional and transformational leadership. In addition to highlighting the programs' similarities, the study also explains the differences among the programs and sheds light on the effectiveness of approaches and models from different states and contexts?East, West, North, and South; urban and rural; pre-service and in-service. The authors analyze program outcomes for principals and their schools, including illustrative case studies and educators' voices on the influence of programs' strategies for recruitment, internships, mentoring, and coursework. The ideas and suggestions outlined in Preparing Principals for a Changing World are presented with the goal of increasing the number of highly qualified, thoughtful, and innovative educational leaders.




Data Analytics Applications in Education


Book Description

The abundance of data and the rise of new quantitative and statistical techniques have created a promising area: data analytics. This combination of a culture of data-driven decision making and techniques to include domain knowledge allows organizations to exploit big data analytics in their evaluation and decision processes. Also, in education and learning, big data analytics is being used to enhance the learning process, to evaluate efficiency, to improve feedback, and to enrich the learning experience. As every step a student takes in the online world can be traced, analyzed, and used, there are plenty of opportunities to improve the learning process of students. First, data analytics techniques can be used to enhance the student’ s learning process by providing real-time feedback, or by enriching the learning experience. Second, data analytics can be used to support the instructor or teacher. Using data analytics, the instructor can better trace, and take targeted actions to improve, the learning process of the student. Third, there are possibilities in using data analytics to measure the performance of instructors. Finally, for policy makers, it is often unclear how schools use their available resources to "produce" outcomes. By combining structured and unstructured data from various sources, data analytics might provide a solution for governments that aim to monitor the performance of schools more closely. Data analytics in education should not be the domain of a single discipline. Economists should discuss the possibilities, issues, and normative questions with a multidisciplinary team of pedagogists, philosophers, computer scientists, and sociologists. By bringing together various disciplines, a more comprehensive answer can be formulated to the challenges ahead. This book starts this discussion by highlighting some economic perspectives on the use of data analytics in education. The book begins a rich, multidisciplinary discussion that may make data analytics in education seem as natural as a teacher in front of a classroom.




Re-centering the Critical Potential of Nordic School Leadership Research


Book Description

This volume contributes significantly to the ongoing international and Nordic paradigm shift in educational leadership research. It advocates for going from a contemporary, mainstream functionalist paradigm to a reflexive paradigm, based on educational values and knowledge. The volume is built on the shared basis, that the purpose of education is, and must be, fundamental for school leadership practice. However, that is often forgotten in educational governance and policy. The basis of the argument is, that educational leadership needs to change from focusing on effectiveness and narrowly defined accountability towards focusing on leadership that is contributing to the general education of students. That entails that leadership research need to focus on complex perspectives like context, relations, trust, sense making and social and human values, and less on control, outcomes, accountability and testing. The volume reminds readers about the need to raise awareness of the contexts of education and research, be they political, cultural, economic or ideological. Chapters analyze, discuss and compare research from Nordic educational leadership research systems: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. The cross-system insights clarify the fundamental relations between policy/governance and research/practice are and discuss forgotten dependencies and opportunities.




Driven by Data


Book Description

Offers a practical guide for improving schools dramatically that will enable all students from all backgrounds to achieve at high levels. Includes assessment forms, an index, and a DVD.