A happy, healthy, five-year-old girl develops a frightening disorder. Her parent's anxious search for the cause leads them to her school, one of the most prestigious in the country, and the alma mater of the forty-fourth president of the United States. They unveil a health risk to thousands of children and desperately work to protect them and their daughter while facing a clueless, slow moving institution, and an apathetic community.
Dr Helen Woodley's critical action research in a growing field of education is an investigation into the effect of working on a toxic schools on teacher mental health and wellbeing. Ross Morrison McGill adds accessible conclusions to each chapter.
Helen Woodley's critical important action research in a growing field of education is an investigation into the effect of working on a toxic schools on teacher mental health and wellbeing. Four teachers share their experiences of working in toxic schools across a variety of settings. And strategies for coping in such schools are shared including a wider look at how school culture can be developed to better support staff.
Detoxing America Schools: From Social Agency to Academic Urgency examines the issue of toxicity in public education institutions. Today’s students are exposed to personal beliefs, lifestyle practices, and politicized educational policies—many of which are in contrast to the values of their upbringing. The innate toxic intentions of some teachers are revealed by their unabashed calls for students to take sides through avenues of shaming and even civil disobedience. Schools have become vessels of social agency. The time has come to detox American education and to call for teachers to return to the urgent, fundamental mission of educating students academically. Too many teachers are following the paradigm found on many college campuses, as they use prior experience to stir up students and bring new levels of emotion into their classrooms. The classroom environment has flipped and what was once tolerance has become the new toxic intolerance. Fractious Americans seem addicted to the use of polarized issues as social and emotional intoxicants. Groups are strategic in seizing upon differences to ensure augmentation and marginalization upon ideological lines, intensified often by the flames of social media and intolerant activism. College students emerging from Gen Z are more radicalized from their time at college. Unless American educators agree to step back from certain poisonous rhetoric and noxious activism, our nation will continue to lose sight of the academic urgency before us, and with it a generation of children.
Leading School Renewal explores how school principal leadership behaviour impacts on school change endeavours, and in particular pedagogic renewal, which is a form of educational improvement that is primarily concerned with the growing of the knowledge, skills and beliefs of education in a manner that optimises students’ life options. The authors identify attributes of principals who have engaged in school renewal and examine the influences on their leadership behaviours and disposition towards renewing their schools while also acknowledging the influence of site-specific contextual variables. The authors propose that certain leadership behaviours exhibited by school principals are integral with renewing a school’s pedagogic focus. They argue renewal is a preferred form of sustainable educational change because it relates to deep-seated cultural changes in approaches to pedagogy, curriculum and school structures. Whilst also maintaining that leadership is at the heart of school improvement and principal leadership practices which are based on a clear sense of purpose, values and beliefs about learning and teaching can transform a school into a learning organisation. Including a foreword by Professor John Hattie, this book is appropriate for all school leaders and educators who want to learn more about school leadership behaviours and highly effective school change.
Your school is a lot more than a center of student learning—it represents a self-contained culture with traditions and expectations that reflect its unique mission and demographics. In School Culture Rewired, education experts Steve Gruenert and Todd Whitaker offer strategies and advice for defining, assessing, and transforming your school's culture into one that is positive, productive, and actively working to enrich students' lives. Drawing from decades of research on organizational cultures and school leadership, the authors provide everything you need to optimize both the culture and climate of your school. In this revised and retooled second edition of their bestselling book, Gruenert and Whitaker * Explore the difference between school culture and school climate. * Show how to ensure developmentally appropriate culture change. * Contrast collaborative and toxic school cultures. * Address the symbiotic relationship between culture management and leadership. * Present a framework for pinpointing the type of culture you have, the type you want, and how to bridge the two. Though often invisible to the naked eye, a school's culture influences everything that takes place under its roof. Whether your school is urban or rural, proficient or struggling, School Culture Rewired helps you make sure its culture is guided by what's best for your students.
Leadership in Perspective is a book for everyone to read or to study. By reading this preview, you will read the entire book, and in the process, you will learn and become a better leader—ready to carry the burdens of society and institutions with grace and love. The book is ideal for undergraduate and postgraduate students, so that they can attain a solid foundation of the theories, styles, and application of the principles of leadership. The book is also ideal, as an energizer, for individuals who are in leadership, especially education leaders in the challenging and changing time in education leadership. It is written in a simple language, and in a straightforward style. As it is now obvious to many people, leadership is a simple but complex phenomenon that has existed in society, in every race or tribe, and in every culture or politics for a very long time. Beginning with families as units of society, leadership has never lacked, and its true intention has always been for the service of the greatest good of all in society. But until now, the deplorable state of leadership in education and in communities, influenced by tribe, race, and hatred cannot be underestimated. Are we primarily evil that we are in the process to implode? Regardless of the triumphs and setbacks of leadership in democratic, autocratic, tribal, religious, monarch, and racist societies, the basic intentions and tenets of leadership have always been to harmonize the needs of society and to safeguard the lives of all living in that society. Depending on the leaders’ intelligence and whether they have the nature of good in themselves, there arises a leadership that is good and exemplary or extremely toxic, evil, and destructive. Good leaders want every citizen and their neighbors to enjoy the dividends of society and the products of creation. Destructive leaders are corrupt, and they are, in fact, ignorant of what they ought to do or abstain from doing. They set communities into conflict as a political calculation for them to remain in power. They create environments of fear and hatred in communities or institutions. They surround themselves with people who only listen to them. Corrupt leaders take greater share of the good things and a lesser of the burdens and troubles that they create. Because of these actions, corrupt leaders are unequal, and they can drive communities, institutions, or societies into tribal, religious, or racial conflicts. Through this sort of error, corrupt leaders lack the achievement of moral goodness. Since being unjust is a voluntary choice, it elicits blame and conviction.
The assault on public school teachers' integrity, livelihood, and professionalism started in 1983 with the publication of A Nation at Risk. Based on the results of our education system performance, they were indirectly accused of failing our children. Still, it peaked in 2004, when Rod Paige, then George W. Bush's secretary of education, called the country's leading teachers union a "terrorist organization." Teachers felt dehumanized then. In 2009, Barack Obama blamed them for "letting our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other nations outpace us." Teachers felt let down again. In 2017, President Donald Trump lamented how "beautiful" students had been "deprived of all knowledge" by our nation's cash-guzzling public school system. Teachers felt humiliated and rejected. Currently, in states like Florida, public school teachers are besieged by politically motivated laws and unrealistic demands from parents, politicians, and noneducation experts. They have lost their freedom to teach as they see fit to meet the needs of their students. Teachers feel more disrespected, devalued, unappreciated, and under attack than ever. The bad news is that a recent NEA survey revealed that 55 percent of currently employed teachers are seriously considering leaving their jobs. If that rate of resignations continues to grow, the question is, Will there be a public school system in America in the future?
This book is intended for students, leaders and managers who wish to explore the personal relevance and conceptual bases of educational leadership and organizational management and to develop their expertise in this field. It is a book written for both scholars and practitioners. The general public will also appreciate the accessible language in the book. There are two goals in the experiential learning process. One is to learn the specifics of a particular subject matter, in this case, educational leadership and organizational management. The other is to learn about one’s own strengths and weaknesses as a learner. This book is focused on the analysis of prevalent theories and concepts and their application to the development of leadership and management skills, and the knowledge and attitudes required to solve real world problems in the workplace. For decades, students have focused their studies of educational leadership and organizational management theories in classroom settings without actual opportunities to apply these theories in the workplace. A profound and significant lesson learned in history is that we must follow the principle of integrating theory with practice (unity of theory with practice). Then, we can follow the policy of walking on two legs, an analogy made by the late Chinese chairman, Mao Ze Dong.
