School Leadership That Works

School Leadership That Works PDF Author: Robert J. Marzano
Publisher: ASCD
ISBN: 141660314X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Book Description
This guide to the 21 leadership responsibilities that influence student achievement will help school leaders focus on changes that really make a difference.

Leaders of Learning

Leaders of Learning PDF Author: Richard DuFour
Publisher: Solution Tree Press
ISBN: 1935542680
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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

Turning Average Instruction Into Great Instruction

Turning Average Instruction Into Great Instruction PDF Author: John O'Connor
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 157886948X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 137

Book Description
Turning Average Instruction into Great Instruction details a clear and concise approach to school improvement, focusing school leaders on the critical factor that has the greatest impact on student achievement--classroom instruction. Decades of research demonstrate that what happens between teachers and students in our nation's classrooms has the greatest impact on how well those students learn. The current trend in school reform is to tackle all aspects of a school in order to improve student achievement, forcing school leaders to attempt to focus on the school culture, use of materials, community relations, teachers' pre-service training, the school's physical design, classroom decorations, and instruction. Unfortunately, such a wide scope leads to a lack of focus among school staff. With his singular focus on classroom instruction, what O'Connor suggests is an antithesis to that approach. School leaders will develop a common understanding of the high-impact instructional components that should be seen in every classroom. O'Connor maps out how school leaders can align all personnel to systematically build training, support, and monitoring mechanisms that ensure that effective instruction becomes part of every classroom routine.

District Leadership That Works

District Leadership That Works PDF Author: Robert J. Marzano
Publisher: Solution Tree Press
ISBN: 1935542362
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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.

Achievement Teams

Achievement Teams PDF Author: Steve Ventura
Publisher: ASCD
ISBN: 1416631208
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 166

Book Description
What if you had a collaborative process of looking at student data that could pinpoint student gaps in learning and suggest effective strategies to close those gaps? What if you knew not only what you should start doing to enhance student learning, but also what you should stop doing because it hasn't given you the hoped-for results? Enter Achievement Teams. This is not another program that's here today and gone tomorrow; it's a timeless approach that any school or district can replicate that focuses on the most significant variable in student achievement: teaching. In Achievement Teams, Steve Ventura and Michelle Ventura offer a framework based on John Hattie's Visible Learning research that makes teacher collaboration more efficient, rigorous, satisfying, and effective. Think of it as a systematic treasure hunt for best practices using real data on your students. The authors walk you through the Achievement Teams four-step meeting protocol: * In Step 1, teams focus on the evidence from a pre-assessment to provide specific feedback to students and teachers about concepts and skills that students did and did not learn. * In Step 2, teams use that evidence to establish SMART goals for both teachers and students. * In Step 3, teams summarize the collected data and make inferences around students' mastery levels. * In Step 4, teachers select high-impact strategies directly targeted to student needs. A post-assessment reveals what did and didn't work. The authors provide a plethora of resources along the way, including reflection activities to extend your thinking and a variety of helpful downloadable templates designed to facilitate the work. If you're a teacher or leader who is interested in maximizing student achievement, this book is for you.

Sharing Leadership Responsibilities Results in Achievement Gains

Sharing Leadership Responsibilities Results in Achievement Gains PDF Author: Lew Armistead
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 6

Book Description
Collective, not individual, leadership in schools has a greater impact on student achievement; when principals and teachers share leadership responsibilities, student achievement is higher; and schools having high student achievement also display a vision for student achievement and teacher growth. Those are just a few of the insights into school leadership presented in a new report, "Learning from Leadership: Investigating the Links to Improved Student Learning." Presented by the Wallace Foundation, the 338-page report attempted to connect leadership and learning. The study looked at "collective leadership" in schools which was defined as "the sum of influence exercised on school decisions by those educators, parents and students associated with the school." Positive effects were found comparing collective to individual leadership. Among them were: (1) Collective leadership has a stronger influence on student learning than any individual source of leadership; (2) Almost all people associated with high-performing schools have greater influence on school decisions than is the case with people in low performing schools; (3) Compared to all teacher respondents, teachers from high-performing schools attribute greater influence to teacher teams, parents, and students; (4) In all schools, principals and district leaders exercise the most influence on decisions; and (5) Teacher motivation had the strongest relationship with student achievement. When looking at parent involvement as part of collective leadership, the researchers found that greater district level support for greater parental involvement in schools led to more diversity of membership on site councils. However, district leadership did not impact how open principals were to community and parental involvement outside of site councils.

Evaluating Programs to Increase Student Achievement

Evaluating Programs to Increase Student Achievement PDF Author: Martin H. Jason
Publisher: Corwin Press
ISBN: 1452211426
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
This updated edition on evaluating the effectiveness of school programs provides an expanded needs-assessment section, additional methods for data analysis, and tools for communicating program results.

School and District Leadership in an Era of Accountability

School and District Leadership in an Era of Accountability PDF Author: Bruce G. Barnett
Publisher: IAP
ISBN: 1623963842
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Book Description
Our fourth book in the International Research on School Leadership series focuses on school leadership in an era of high stakes accountability. Fueled by sweeping federal education accountability reforms, such as the United States’ No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top (R2T) and Australia’s Performance Measurement and Reporting Taskforce, school systems around the world are being forced to increase academic standards, participate in high-stakes testing, and raise evaluation standards for teachers and principals. These results-driven reforms are intended to hold educators “accountable for student learning and accountable to the public” (Anderson, 2005, p. 2, emphasis in original). While policymakers and the public debate the merits of student achievement accountability measures, P-12 educational leaders do not have the luxury to wait for clear guidance and resources to improve their schools and operating systems. Instead, successful leaders must balance the need to create learning communities, manage the organizational climate, and encourage community involvement with the consequences testing has on teacher morale and public scrutiny. The chapters in this volume clearly indicate that as school leaders attend to these potentially competing forces, this affects their problem-solving strategies, ability to facilitate change, and encourage community involvement. We were delighted with the responses from colleagues around the world who were eager to share their research dealing with how leaders are functioning effectively within a high-accountability environment. The nine chapters in this volume provide empirical evidence of the strategies school leaders use to cope with problems and negotiate external demands while improving student performance. In particular, the voices and actions of principals, superintendents, and school board members are captured in a blend of quantitative and qualitative studies. The breadth of studies is impressive, ranging from case studies of individual principals to cross-district comparisons to national data from the National Center for Education Statistics. To highlight important findings, we have organized the book into five sections. The first section (Chapters 2, 3, and 4) highlights the problem-solving strategies used by principals and superintendents when pressured to turn around low-performing schools. In the second section (Chapters 5 and 6), attention is devoted to ways in which school leaders act as “buffers” by reducing the impact of external demands within their local school contexts. Next, Chapters 7 and 8 explore creative ways in which financial analyses can be used to assess the cost effectiveness of programs and services. Chapters 9 and 10 examine how principals enact their instructional leadership roles in managing curriculum reforms and evaluating teachers. Finally, in the last section (Chapter 11), Kenneth Leithwood synthesizes the major themes and ideas emerging across these chapters, paying particular attention to practical issues influencing school leaders in this era of school reform and accountability as well as promising areas for future research.

The Leader in Me

The Leader in Me PDF Author: Stephen R. Covey
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 147110446X
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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.

Balanced Leadership for Powerful Learning

Balanced Leadership for Powerful Learning PDF Author: Bryan Goodwin
Publisher: ASCD
ISBN: 1416620885
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 125

Book Description
What makes a great school leader? Contrary to what many believe, the answer is not tied to a certain kind of personality but to specific behaviors and actions that have positive effects on student achievement—behaviors and actions that any school leader can learn and put into practice. Over the last decade, thousands of school principals have done that, by implementing “balanced leadership,” an approach that recognizes the need to both maintain and challenge the status quo in order to move schools forward. Building on the analysis that was first reported in School Leadership That Works, the authors of Balanced Leadership identify the 21 responsibilities associated with effective leadership and show how they relate to three overarching responsibilities: * Establishing a clear focus—keeping the work and the conversations targeted on the issues that matter most; * Managing change—understanding how to skillfully steer through the challenges associated with making improvements, both large and small; and * Developing a purposeful community—creating a sense among all teachers and staff that they are invested in student outcomes and that they can make a difference. For each of these areas, key points and specific practices are described in detail and illustrated with stories from school principals who have successfully learned how to become great leaders. Step-by-step tools provide clear guidance for readers who are ready to make the same kind of journey—one with the potential to transform them and the schools they serve.