Fighting for Change in Your School: How to Avoid Fads and Focus on Substance
Fighting for Change in Your School: How to Avoid Fads and Focus on Substance

Author: Harvey Alvy

Publisher: ASCD

Published: 2017-08-15

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1416624139

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In this indispensable book for K–12 leaders, Harvey Alvy offers a thoughtful roadmap and guidance to help educators select, implement, and assess school- or districtwide initiatives that actually work. The book is filled with a wealth of resources—action checklists, principles to guide educators, and in-depth questions and protocols—for engaging in collaborative professional development activities that strengthen teaching and learning practices and improve student achievement. Alvy discusses in detail the six "red flags" that educators confront daily and a set of countervailing strategies (six practical guidelines) to pursue meaningful reforms, initiatives, and innovations: Red Flags * The Narrative Trap * Overpromising and Overloading * Minimizing the Enormous Difficulty of Implementation * Eyes off the Prize * Historical Amnesia * The Business “Solution” Guidelines * Building a Collaborative Learning Community * Effectively Using Human, Fiscal, and Material Resources * Respecting the Change Process * Sustaining a Coherent School Mission and Vision * Embracing Timeless and Eclectic Teaching Practices * Championing and Empowering the Underserved Selecting and implementing reforms, initiatives, and practices wisely is key if we truly want the best for our students--and skipping the necessary planning and forethought can be catastrophic. Fighting for Change in Your School: How to Avoid Fads and Focus on Substance is the book every educator needs to ensure the former and prevent the latter. The time to address these challenges is now.

Fighting for Change in Your School
Fighting for Change in Your School

Author: Harvey B. Alvy

Publisher: ASCD

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1416624155

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Harvey Alvy offers a thoughtful roadmap and guidance to help K-12 leaders select, implement, and assess school- or districtwide initiatives that actually work.

Stop Leading, Start Building!
Stop Leading, Start Building!

Author: Robyn R. Jackson

Publisher: ASCD

Published: 2021-02-16

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 1416629858

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You are a school administrator—a principal or maybe a district leader. You're doing everything "right"—poring over data, trying new strategies, launching annual initiatives, bringing in outside trainers. So why do the outcomes you seek still seem so far away? The problem isn't you; it's that you were trained in school leadership, and school leadership just isn’t up to the challenge. Each year, Robyn R. Jackson helps thousands of administrators stop wasting time and energy on flawed leadership approaches that succeed only with the right staff, students, parents, budget, and boss. As they have discovered, it's possible to transform your school with the people and resources you already have. The secret? Stop leading and start building! In this book, you'll learn to use Jackson's breakthrough Buildership Model™ to escape the "school improvement hamster wheel" and finally create the school your students and teachers deserve. The work involves a handful of simple shifts in how you approach . . . • Purpose: Instead of chasing tiny gains or the "next new thing" every year, you'll establish and use an ambitious vision, mission, and set of core values to galvanize your staff, keep everyone focused, and create true accountability for achieving your goals. • People: You’ll discover new ways to help every teacher grow one level in one domain in one year or less and, ultimately, develop high levels of both will and skill. • Pathway: Instead of trying to tackle every problem at once, you'll identify the biggest obstacle standing in your way right now and figure out exactly how to remove it once and for all. • Plan: You'll learn a new process for solution implementation that is iterative, cyclical, and capable of powering both short-term wins and ongoing transformation, year over year. When you stop leading and start building, you let go of the idea that you need to work harder to make your school "work better." You no longer settle for incremental improvement when what you really want is dramatic change and better learning outcomes for all. It's time to make the shift from leadership to buildership. Get ready to turn your school into a success story.

Coherent School Leadership
Coherent School Leadership

Author: Michael Fullan

Publisher: ASCD

Published: 2019-08-20

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 1416627928

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While leaders may desire or have been told that they must put certain structures into place in order to enhance their leadership capabilities, they may not know exactly what structures are needed, or the skills that are required for implementation. Authors Michael Fullan and Lyle Kirtman go beyond simply telling you what you need to put in place to enhance leadership—they detail the route to successful leadership. Coherent School Leadership will show you how to combine the components of Fullan's Coherence Framework (the Framework) with Kirtman's 7 Competencies for Highly Effective Leaders (the Competencies) to drive coherence—the shared depth of understanding about the nature of the work and how it impacts the results desired for student achievement—to change the culture in schools from reactive to proactive. Fullan and Kirtman, whose work is based in practice, will: - Show you how to use specific competencies to drive coherence - Provide examples that show how other leaders have successfully created coherence - Guide you through the day-to-day distractions/stresses so that you can stay on course - Show you how to use the Competencies in relation to the Framework Taking a world view of the forces that could destabilize education and the work of coherence, Coherent School Leadership will show how proven frameworks such as the Framework and the Competencies can help you cope with even the most complex scenarios.

The Learning Leader
The Learning Leader

Author: Douglas B. Reeves

Publisher: ASCD

Published: 2020-08-31

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 1416629416

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"We can't do that in our school district." "I don't have time to add that to my curriculum." "We're fighting against impossible odds with these students." Sound familiar? School improvement can often feel like a losing battle, but it doesn't have to be. In this fully revised and updated second edition of The Learning Leader, Douglas B. Reeves helps leadership teams go beyond excuses to capitalize on their strengths, reduce their weaknesses, and reset their mindset and priorities to achieve unprecedented success. A critical key is recognizing student achievement as more than just a set of test scores. Reeves asserts that when leaders focus exclusively on results, they fail to measure and understand the importance of their own actions. He offers an alternative—the Leadership for Learning Framework, which helps leaders identify and distinguish among four different types of educators and provide more effective, tailored support to - "Lucky" educators, who achieve high results but don't understand how their actions influence achievement. - "Losing" educators, who achieve low results yet keep doing the same thing, expecting different outcomes. - "Learning" educators, who have not yet achieved the desired results but are working their way toward excellence. - "Leading" educators, who achieve high results and understand how their actions influence their success. Reeves stresses that effective leadership is neither a unitary skill nor a solitary activity. The Learning Leader helps leaders reconceptualize their roles in the school improvement process and motivate themselves and their colleagues to keep working to better serve their students.

Passionate Leadership
Passionate Leadership

Author: Salome Thomas-EL

Publisher: Corwin Press

Published: 2019-05-31

Total Pages: 137

ISBN-13: 1544345682

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Reignite your passion for serving children! Have you fallen into a rut? Has your position become simply a "role" or a "job?" The authors of this book will remind you why education, the most important profession in our society, demands passionate leadership. Passionate Leadership is an aspiring call to action for teachers and principals around the world to recommit to passionately serving children, building the communities children deserve, and celebrating our successes. Take ownership, push to new heights, and break old boundaries by following the strategies in this book. Discover Practical ideas and suggestions for how to serve as a beacon of hope in the field First-hand experiences from enthusiastic leaders modeling what passionate leadership looks like Charts and graphs that will help you assess your strong points and identify areas you can improve on Student success and growth begin with leaders who commit to taking courageous action!

Uprooting Instructional Inequity
Uprooting Instructional Inequity

Author: Jill Harrison Berg

Publisher: ASCD

Published: 2022-01-21

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1416630708

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Noted leadership coach Jill Harrison Berg offers a comprehensive guide to help school and teacher leaders amplify the power of collaborative inquiry as a means for identifying, interrogating, and addressing instructional inequity. At the center of the book is Berg's i3PD Planning Map, an invaluable tool for enhancing inquiry-based professional development experiences so that they become engines for schoolwide transformation. The map guides teachers to recognize and reform ways their instructional practice may be contributing to inequity, bolsters facilitators' abilities to help their colleagues become more effective agents of their own learning, and cultivates a culture of organizational learning in schools. Berg lays out the process in four parts: 1. Establishing a solid foundation for your improvement cycle with a deep understanding of the three components of your instructional core: content, participants, and facilitators. 2. Attending to the three Rs—relevance, rigor, and relationships—representing the connections among the core components. 3. Designing your improvement cycle and planning it out as a series of session agendas. 4. Planning for impact by thinking through what you will accept as evidence of success and how you will use that information to take your school to the next level. If you're ready to see your school start to work smarter toward instructional equity, and if you're eager to be a part of that change, Uprooting Instructional Inequity provides the design principles and sample tools you need to get the transformation started.

Dream Team
Dream Team

Author: Aaron Tait

Publisher: ASCD

Published: 2018-12-17

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 1416626646

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The world needs great individual educational changemakers capable of identifying problems and creating bold, scalable solutions. But the world also needs Dream Teams —groups of talented administrators, teachers, staff, students, and community members who are passionate about making things better for kids, believe that school-based change is the means to this end, and are willing to roll up their sleeves and work together to achieve it. This book is for Dream Teams in the making. In it, rising global education leaders Aaron Tait and Dave Faulkner share the models and methods of 10 brilliant leadership teams at urban, suburban, and rural schools in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Informed by these successes, the authors provide specific, sometimes audacious advice for navigating what they call the Change Leader Journey: how to move from Dream Team assembly and problem analysis all the way through to solution generation, piloting, promotion, and evaluation. Innovative educators come in all forms, and they require lots of options. Here, you'll find a collection of practical ideas and tools designed to fuel transformational leadership without sacrificing instructional excellence or anyone's sanity. Whether your team is a group of fearless rebels, more cautious types, or somewhere in between, Tait and Faulkner's flexible approach can help you figure out where you want your school to go, build a more collaborative and creative culture, and generate the solutions that best serve your students.

It’s Time for Strategic Scheduling
It’s Time for Strategic Scheduling

Author: Nathan Levenson

Publisher: ASCD

Published: 2023-07-03

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1416632077

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An accessible guide to creating schedules that amplify school and district priorities, support best practices in teaching and learning, heighten student engagement, and enhance equity. A school’s schedule can be as important to education outcomes as its budget or strategic plan. The secret to making the schedule a tool for school improvement is to approach schedule design not as a technical task, centered on making everything fit like Tetris blocks, but as a strategic one. In this book, informed by research and their work with hundreds of schools, scheduling experts Nathan Levenson and David James explore how strategic scheduling can turn a "good enough" schedule into one that supercharges learning and engagement without additional costs or more FTEs. If you are ready to * Figure out which schedule type is best for your students and staff; * Disrupt harmful tracking and ensure every student has access to highly skilled teachers and rigorous curriculum; * Deliver optimum hours of core instruction while expanding electives and providing opportunities for student voice and choice; * Precisely match staffing to course enrollment to free up personnel and funds for other purposes * Find time for critical intervention and enrichment blocks; and * Communicate scheduling decisions more effectively to parents, families, and district leaders ... then it’s time for strategic scheduling. Offering targeted advice for best-practice scheduling at the elementary, middle, and high school levels, this book will help school and district leaders—and the teachers and students they serve—make the most of every school day and every school year.

Unstuck
Unstuck

Author: Bryan Goodwin

Publisher: ASCD

Published: 2018-04-25

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1416625933

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Good ideas, the best intentions, and a stirring vision aren't enough to effect change in schools. Unstuck offers a road map to help schools change from the inside out instead of the top down. Inside-out approaches are designed to encourage schools to become more innovative and entrepreneurial, finding better ways to help students learn and pursue their own intellectual passions and talents—while also maintaining a healthy skepticism and reliance on data to make sure new approaches and ideas are working. This process involves seven steps: starting with moral purpose, unleashing curiosity, building on bright spots, peer coaching toward precision, leading from the inside out, and moving the goal posts. This book's tips, real-life examples, and next steps will help leaders get from where they are now to where they want to be.