The School Leader’s Year


Book Description

This practical handbook offers a month-by-month guide to the curriculum, assessment, progress, and leadership over the school year. It provides a clear, comprehensive, and coherent structure to the academic year helping school leaders to prioritise their time and workload, supporting them and their team to work as efficiently and effectively as possible. Considering the statutory and key leadership activities from admissions, induction, transitions, and parents’ evenings to coursework, timetabling, assessment, staff performance, and much more, the book provides a clear plan of action to ensure school leaders have prepared their work at the optimal time over the year. Each chapter features tried-and-tested strategies to help schools put robust systems and processes in place alongside guidance on sustaining pace, developing resilience, and exam preparation and technique. Full of practical tips to help improve progress and including real-world examples of leadership in action from leaders working in primary and secondary schools, this is essential reading for all school leaders that want their students to be as successful as they can possibly be in every lesson, every day.




Culturally Responsive School Leadership


Book Description

Culturally Responsive School Leadership focuses on how school leaders can effectively serve minoritized students—those who have been historically marginalized in school and society. The book demonstrates how leaders can engage students, parents, teachers, and communities in ways that positively impact learning by honoring indigenous heritages and local cultural practices. Muhammad Khalifa explores three basic premises. First, that a full-fledged and nuanced understanding of “cultural responsiveness” is essential to successful school leadership. Second, that cultural responsiveness will not flourish and succeed in schools without sustained efforts by school leaders to define and promote it. Finally, that culturally responsive school leadership comprises a number of crucial leadership behaviors, which include critical self-reflection; the development of culturally responsive teachers; the promotion of inclusive, anti-oppressive school environments; and engagement with students’ indigenous community contexts. Based on an ethnography of a school principal who exemplifies the practices and behaviors of culturally responsive school leadership, the book provides educators with pedagogy and strategies for immediate implementation.




School Leadership that Works


Book Description

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




What School Leaders Need to Know About Digital Technologies and Social Media


Book Description

Facebook, Twitter, Google...today's tech-savvy students are always plugged in. However, all too often their teachers and administrators aren't experienced in the use of these familiar digital tools. If schools are to prepare students for the future, administrators and educators must harness the power of digital technologies and social media. With contributions from authorities on the topic of educational technology, What School Leaders Need to Know About Digital Technologies and Social Media is a compendium of the most useful tools for any education setting. Throughout the book, experts including Will Richardson, Vicki Davis, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, Richard Byrne, Joyce Valenza, and many others explain how administrators and teachers can best integrate technology into schools, helping to make sense of the often-confusing world of social media and digital tools. They offer the most current information for the educational use of blogs, wikis and podcasts, online learning, open-source courseware, educational gaming, social networking, online mind mapping, mobile phones, and more, and include examples of these methods currently at work in schools. As the book clearly illustrates, when these tools are combined with thoughtful and deliberate pedagogical practice, it can create a transformative experience for students, educators, and administrators alike. What School Leaders Need to Know About Digital Technologies and Social Media reveals the power of information technology and social networks in the classroom and throughout the education community.




The Leader in Me


Book Description

Children in today's world are inundated with information about who to be, what to do and how to live. But what if there was a way to teach children how to manage priorities, focus on goals and be a positive influence on the world around them? The Leader in Meis that programme. It's based on a hugely successful initiative carried out at the A.B. Combs Elementary School in North Carolina. To hear the parents of A. B Combs talk about the school is to be amazed. In 1999, the school debuted a programme that taught The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Peopleto a pilot group of students. The parents reported an incredible change in their children, who blossomed under the programme. By the end of the following year the average end-of-grade scores had leapt from 84 to 94. This book will launch the message onto a much larger platform. Stephen R. Covey takes the 7 Habits, that have already changed the lives of millions of people, and shows how children can use them as they develop. Those habits -- be proactive, begin with the end in mind, put first things first, think win-win, seek to understand and then to be understood, synergize, and sharpen the saw -- are critical skills to learn at a young age and bring incredible results, proving that it's never too early to teach someone how to live well.




Five Practices for Equity-Focused School Leadership


Book Description

This timely and essential book provides a comprehensive guide for school leaders who desire to engage their school communities in transformative systemic change. Sharon I. Radd, Gretchen Givens Generett, Mark Anthony Gooden, and George Theoharis offer five practices to increase educational equity and eliminate marginalization based on race, disability, socioeconomics, language, gender and sexual identity, and religion. For each dimension of diversity, the authors provide background information for understanding the current realities in schools and beyond, and they suggest "disruptive practices" to replace the status quo in order to achieve full inclusion and educational excellence for every child. Assuming that leadership to create equity is a unique practice, the book offers * Clear explanations of foundational terms and concepts, such as equity, systemic inequity, paradigms and cognitive dissonance, and privilege; * Specific recommendations for how to build support and sustainability by engaging colleagues and other stakeholders in constructive dialogues with multiple perspectives; * Detailed descriptions of routines and roles for building effective equity-leadership teams; * Guidelines and tools for performing an equity audit, including environmental scans; * A change framework to skillfully transform your system; and * Reflection activities for self-discovery, understanding, and personal and professional growth. A call to action that is both passionate and practical, Five Practices for Equity-Focused School Leadership is an indispensable roadmap for educators undertaking the journey toward an education system that acknowledges and advances the worth and potential of all students.




#EdJourney


Book Description

Your formula for managing innovation and transforming learning #EdJourney: A Roadmap to the Future of Education is a refreshing change from the negativity so common in the world of education today. Over the course of a 3-month solo road trip across the United States, author Grant Lichtman discovered that there is much to be positive about in today's K-12 schools. Lichtman, one of the country's leading experts in educational innovation, interviewed over 600 teachers, administrators, students, parents, and trustees to find out what kind of innovations they're doing right—and how others can leverage their successes. Innovation in education takes hard work, planning, and cooperation. With examples from around the country and findings from the latest education research, #EdJourney maps out how administrators and teachers can embrace the innovation process that schools and learners need now. Today's 21st century education presents unique challenges and opportunities to students, and this is a trailblazing practical guide to making sure education is ready for the future. #EdJourney focuses on four key questions: What new learning strategies are the top schools implementing to prepare our students for their future rather than for our past? How do teachers and administrators manage transitions to new types of teaching and learning? What are the key obstacles to shifting away from the assembly line model of education? How can we all leverage the lessons of success from the most innovative schools? The concrete examples and advice in this book will help you bring innovation and educational design concepts into your school. #EdJourney goes beyond the theoretical need for change—by now a familiar topic to almost everyone—and takes a real-world approach to achieving transformative education in any school.




21st Century School Leader


Book Description

This ground-breaking book titled The 21st Century School Leader: Leading Schools in Today's World focuses on effectively leading schools in the digital age (21st Century and beyond) where a majority of all stakeholders including students, staff, parents, community members, and business owners are digital natives. Written by an award-winning practitioner and international scholar, the author infuses this approach as it applies to all aspects of school leadership. Chapters include Leading Schools in Today's World, Social Media for School Leaders 101, The Importance of Being a Life-Long Learner, Closing the Achievement Gap, Ethics and Leadership, Professional Standards for Educational Leaders, School Climate and School Culture, Work-Life Balance, Professional Learning Network, Leading for Inclusiveness, Educational Policy, School Law, School Finance and Human Resources, and Tips for School Leaders.




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




The Distance Learning Playbook for School Leaders


Book Description

Effective school leadership is effective leadership, regardless of where it occurs In March 2020, there was no manual for leading schools and school systems during a pandemic. School leaders had to figure things out as the crisis unfolded. But starting now, leaders have the opportunity to prepare for leading schools through distance learning with purpose and intent—using what works best to accelerate students’ learning all the while maintaining an indelible focus on equity. Harnessing the insights and experience of renowned educators Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and John Hattie, The Distance Learning Playbook for School Leaders applies the wisdom and evidence of the VISIBLE LEARNING® research to understand what works best. Spanning topics from school climate at a distance, leader credibility, care for self and colleagues, instructional leadership teams, stakeholder advisory groups, and virtual visibility, this comprehensive playbook details the research- and evidence-based strategies school leaders can mobilize to lead the delivery of high-impact learning in an online, virtual, and distributed environment. This powerful guide includes: Actionable insights and hands-on steps for each module to help school leaders realize the evidence-based leadership practices that result in meaningful learning in a distance environment Discussion of equity challenges associated with distance learning, along with examples of how leaders can work to ensure that equity gains that have been realized are not lost. Analysis of the mindsets that empower leaders to manage change, rather than technology Space to write and reflect on current practices and plan future leadership strategies The mindframes for distance learning that serve leaders well in any instructional setting and will position schools after the pandemic to come back better than they were before The Distance Learning Playbook for School Leaders is the essential hands-on guide to leading school and school systems from a distance and delivering on the promise of equitable, quality learning experiences for students.