District Leadership That Works


Book Description

Bridge the great divide between distanced administrative duties and daily classroom impact. This book introduces a top-down power mechanism called defined autonomy, a concept that focuses on district-defined, nonnegotiable, common goals and a system of accountability supported by assessment tools. Defined autonomy creates an effective balance of centralized direction and individualized empowerment that allows building-level staff the stylistic freedom to respond quickly and effectively to student failure.




School Leadership that Works


Book Description

Describes a variety of leaders hip responsibilities that have an effect on student achievement.







The Oxford Handbook of Leadership


Book Description

This book both acknowledges the complexity emerging from the three main components of leadership--the leader, the led, and the environment--while providing a sound, foundational structure in which the complexity of this area of study can be better understood.







Leaders of Learning


Book Description

For many years, the authors have been fellow travelers on the journey to help educators improve their schools. Their first coauthored book focuses on district leadership, principal leadership, and team leadership and addresses how individual teachers can be most effective in leading students—by learning with colleagues how to implement the most promising pedagogy in their classrooms




Linking Leadership to Student Learning


Book Description

Linking Leadership to Student Learning Linking Leadership to Student Learning clearly shows how school leadership improves student achievement. The book is based on an ambitious five-year study on educational leadership that was sponsored by The Wallace Foundation. The authors studied 43 districts, across 9 states and 180 elementary, middle, and secondary schools. In this book, Kenneth Leithwood, Karen Seashore Louis, and their colleagues report on what they found. They examined leadership at each organizational level in the school system—classroom, school, district, community, and state. Their comprehensive approach to investigating school leadership offers a balanced understanding of how the structures within which leaders operate shape what they do. The results within will have significant implications for future policy and practice. Praise for Linking Leadership to Student Learning "Kenneth Leithwood and Karen Seashore Louis offer a seminal new contribution to the leadership field. They provide a rich and authoritative evidence base that demonstrates clearly just why school leadership is so important and how it promotes successful student learning." —PAMELA SAMMONS, Ph.D., Professor of Education, Department of Education, University of Oxford, Oxford "This ambitious, groundbreaking, and thought provoking treatment of the link between school leadership and student learning is a testament to the outstanding work of these exemplary scholars. This is a 'must read' for academics and practitioners alike." —MARTHA McCARTHY, President's Professor, Loyola Marymount University, and Chancellor's Professor Emeritus, Indiana University "The question is no longer whether school and district leader's impact student learning, but rather how they do it. The authors provide a convincing answer, one that recognizes the crucial interaction between leader and locality." —DANIEL L. DUKE, Professor of Educational Leadership, University of Virginia




The Superintendent's Fieldbook


Book Description

"The goals and challenges for district leaders are constantly changing. Leadership and governance are only parts of the puzzle when other elements such as the NCLB legislation, budgets, standards and assessment, changing demographics, and public engagement are brought into the picture. Today's superintendent needs an effective tool to help steer the school district to success. Drawing on the experiences of nearly 200 superintendents over the past ten years, The Superintendent's Fieldbook offers guidance that can be referenced again and again. Written for current and future superintendents, principals, school board members and teachers, this valuable guide is divided into nine sections--each offering ideas to implement, practical lessons, exercises, and questions for reflective practice. The authors identify seven key "commonplaces" of the successful modern superintendent including: Leading within a governance structure; Understanding and addressing standards and assessment; Considering race, class, and the achievement gap; Developing your schools' principals from building managers to leaders of learning; Exploring collaborations with agencies of government and organizational allies; Engaging your community to construct a shared vision of the future. Vignettes describing real events and situations will help you connect lessons learned to your own district experiences, and help you and your district thrive in the rapidly changing world of education." -- Publisher.




Leading from the Middle


Book Description

The definitive playbook for driving impact as a middle manager Leading from the Middle: A Playbook for Managers to Influence Up, Down, and Across the Organization delivers an insightful and practical guide for the backbone of an organization: those who have a boss and are a boss and must lead from the messy middle. Accomplished author and former P&G executive Scott Mautz walks readers through the unique challenges facing these managers, and the mindset and skillset necessary for managing up and down and influencing what happens across the organization. You’ll learn the winning mindset of the best middle managers, how to develop the most important skills necessary for managing from the middle, how to create your personal Middle Action Plan (MAP), and effectively influence: Up the chain of command, to your boss and those above them Down, to your direct reports and teams who report to you Laterally, to peers and teams you have no formal authority over Anyone in an organization who reports to someone and has someone reporting to them must lead from the middle. They are the most important group in an organization and have a unique opportunity to drive impact. Leading from the Middle explains how.




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.