Learning Together, Leading Together


Book Description

Increasingly the education world is recognizing that the development of learning communities is an effective means for improving schools without increasing the budget or adding new programs. This indispensible volume offers practical advice gathered from 22 schools (elementary, middle, and high schools) that have successfully modeled or are creating professional learning communities.




Strengthening the Heartbeat


Book Description

Study after study has concluded that no matter how competently managed a school may be, it is the bringing together of leadership and learning that makes the difference between ordinary and extraordinary performance. Strengthening the Heartbeat offers leaders a clear and compelling way to help their schools achieve extraordinary results. The proven principles outlined in this book can help any school build a culture of leadership and learning. Thomas J. Sergiovanni?a leading thinker in the educational leadership arena?shows how a strong heartbeat is a school's best defense against the obstacles leaders face as they work to change schools for the better. But strengthening the heartbeat of schools requires that we rethink what leadership is, how leadership works, what leadership's relationship is to learning, and why we need to practice both leadership and learning together. Filled with illustrative examples, Strengthening the Heartbeat shows how to build trust that leads to the creation of a vision and the building of a covenant that brings together principals, teachers, parents, and students to honor shared values, goals, and beliefs. When leaders are able to strengthen the heartbeat, their schools become stronger and more resilient. These qualities help leaders to share the burdens of leadership with others, to create collaborative cultures, and to be continuous learners. Leadership inevitably involves change and change inevitably involves learning. Using this book, school leaders will have the tools they need to make their schools the best they can be.




Collaborating Online


Book Description

Collaborating Online provides practical guidance for faculty seeking to help their students work together in creative ways, move out of the box of traditional papers and projects, and deepen the learning experience through their work with one another. Authors Rena Palloff and Keith Pratt draw on their extensive knowledge and experience to show how collaboration brings students together to support the learning of each member of the group while promoting creativity and critical thinking. Collaborating Online is the second title in the Jossey-Bass Guides to Online Teaching and Learning. This series helps higher education professionals improve the practice of online teaching and learning by providing concise, practical resources focused on particular areas or issues they might confront in this new learning environment.




Learning Together Online


Book Description

This book addresses the past and future of research on the effectiveness of "asynchronous learning networks" courses in which students and teachers learn together online via the Internet. An integrated theoretical framework called "Online Interaction Lea




Educational Leadership


Book Description

Educational Leadership is a major research book on contemporary leadership challenges for educational leaders. In this groundbreaking new work, educational leaders in schools, including teachers, are provided with ways of analysing and resolving common but complex leadership challenges. Ethical tensions inherent in these challenges are identified; tools for their analysis presented and explained; and clear and practitioner-focused guidelines for ethical decision making, in the form of ten practical steps, recommended. Included in this discussion is a jargon-free description and explanation of ethical theories and principles. Written by a leading researcher in the field, and recipient of the Australian Council for Educational Leadership Gold Medal for excellence, Educational Leadership: Key Challenges and Ethical Tensions is an important book that provides a practical framework for analysing ethical tensions and presenting, explaining, and applying ethical concepts and theories to real-life situations in practitioner language.




The Power of Voice in Schools


Book Description

For nearly four decades, Russ Quaglia has been laying the groundwork to inform, reform, and transform schools through student voice. That deep commitment is reflected in this inspirational book. Quaglia and his coauthors at the Quaglia Institute for School Voice & Aspirations deftly synthesize the thoughts and feelings of hundreds of thousands of stakeholders and offer a vision for schools where everyone's voice matters. They posit that students, teachers, administrators, and parents must work and learn together in ways that promote deep understanding and creativity. Making this collaborative effort successful, however, requires widespread recognition that all stakeholders have something to teach, and they all have a role to play in moving the entire school forward. We must abandon the "us versus them" fallacy in education; there is only "us." To that end, The Power of Voice in Schools offers a way forward that can be used in any school and * Addresses the importance of everyone's voice in the school community. * Articulates the lessons learned from listening to these voices over the past decade. * Suggests concrete, practical strategies for combined teams of students, teachers, parents, and administrators to make a difference together. This book reflects the dream of a true partnership in listening, learning, and leading together. When the potential of voice is fully realized, schools will look and feel different. Cooperation will replace competition and conflict, collaboration will replace isolation, and confidence will replace insecurity. Most important, the entire school community will work in partnership with one another for the well-being of students and teachers.




Learning to Lead Together


Book Description

Never before has there been such strong recognition of the importance of community-based green spaces to local communities and urban redevelopment. This book is an autoethnographic account of the challenges and breakthroughs of learning to lead together. The interwoven stories provide first-hand, evocative examples of how an ecological and community approach to organisational development and urban regeneration helped shift the business as usual paradigm. It will help you identify and step beyond individualistic and 'heroic' notions of leadership, and will inspire you to find your own way of embracing natural and shared authority. The book focuses on the experiences of developing an environmental education charity in London; Global Generation. It shows how action research, nature practice and storytelling has successfully grown shared purpose, trust and collaboration, both within Global Generation and in the wider community. The style and structure of the book reflects the participatory approach that it presents. The author, Jane Riddiford, deliberately challenges the norms of authorship, which is shaped by the dominant Western narrative - objective, authorless and 'othered'. This book goes beyond this narrow framework, combining different styles of writing, including traditional and autobiographical storytelling, diary entries and co-writing. Along with practice accounts of what happened, challenges raised and lessons learned, each chapter will also include other people's descriptions of their experience of being involved in the process.




Leading in Sync


Book Description

Teacher leadership holds great promise for improving the quality of teaching and ensuring student success. But for co-performance of leadership to be effective, teachers and principals need to lead in sync.Leadership coach Jill Harrison Berg guides educators through the process of creating a shared vision for student success and effective teaching, developing a mutual understanding of each person's role in achieving that vision, establishing a schoolwide culture of teacher leadership, and building the trust needed to bring it all together. Leading In Sync: Teacher Leaders and Principals Working Together for Student Learning provides principals, assistant principals, coaches, department leaders, grade-level and content team leaders, mentors, professional development leaders, and in fact all teachers with the strategies and tools needed to: * Examine their own thinking about what constitutes quality teaching. * Tap faculty members who are already leading. * Identify who has the knowledge, skills, and dispositions required for particular leadership roles. * Support leadership collaboration through efficient, effective communication. * Develop trust within the school community. Berg offers thought-provoking context and reflection questions so that educators can examine their own unique settings; real-world examples of teachers and principals co-performing leadership to improve student success; and dozens of strategies, tools, and templates to facilitate leading in sync.




Leading Change Together


Book Description

“If we can get adult development right, we can change the world!” Adult development . . . in schools? Yes. In fact, understanding and sharing ideas—and implementing practices—that help adults explore experiences and assumptions is a powerful driver of school change. Eleanor Drago-Severson and Jessica Blum-DeStefano share expertise that has evolved from their many decades of research and work with educators and show you how to Deepen your understanding of adult development and its role in systemic and schoolwide change and educational improvement, Connect theory to practice with developmentally oriented structures and strategies that enhance collaboration, communication, and feedback, Support individual and organizational growth with a differentiated approach to leadership and capacity building, and Build trust, capacity, collegiality, and sustainability with developmental practices that meet adult needs. Whether you work in a school, district, university, educational institution, or other learning organization, you’ll learn how to infuse leadership, collaboration, communication, and capacity building with a deep understanding of individuals’ experiences and capacities—and how they influence our day-to-day work. Leading Change Together explains how you and other adult learners can effect tremendous change in schools and systems.




Affective Learning Together


Book Description

'Affective Learning Together' contains in-depth theoretical reviews and case studies in the classroom, of the social and affective dimensions of group learning in a variety of educational situations and taught disciplines, from small groups working on design projects or debating topics in biology and in history in schools.