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It can be difficult to think clearly and deeply when a decision must be made, especially for principals and other administrators barraged with information, questions, and demands on their time. When even the smallest mistake can negatively affect students and staff, strong decision-making skills are crucial. By focusing on key questions, however, school leaders can find a path through the complex decisions they encounter every day. What If I'm Wrong? and Other Key Questions for Decisive School Leadership guides you past the pitfalls of split-second instinct, groupthink, prejudice, and the rush to judgment. Leadership coach and former principal Simon Rodberg pulls together true stories from his own experience, examples of a range of school issues, and the latest research in cognitive science into a five-question framework for school leaders to ask themselves when facing a decision: - What am I missing? - What's one small step? - Where's the trade-off? - Does it have to be this way? - What if I'm wrong? By prompting you to reflect on your own thought processes and cognitive blind spots, Rodberg's approach helps you build good habits of strategic decision making. Learn to navigate both tough dilemmas and everyday challenges as a decisive school leader.
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.
Organizational crisis and chaos create drama that is complicated, layered and difficult to unravel without a roadmap. New leaders, especially those who find themselves in an organization in crisis need to hear how others have experienced that challenge and managed to emerge trusted, supported and having moved the entire organization to a new and better place without losing themselves in the process. This book provides a crisis identification checklist, ten strategies for managing chaos and reflection questions to support the leader’s health and wellness. Utilizing the familiar story of the Wizard of Oz and specifically Dorothy’s experience as a young, female, new leader, anchors the work and provides a familiar and comforting backdrop for managing this extraordinarily difficult and specific leadership challenge.
School leadership is messy, but coaching conversations offer an opportunity to step back from the demands of everyday work and focus on developing leadership capabilities. Although every coaching conversation is personalized and every context is unique, many school leaders face similar issues. In Embracing MESSY Leadership, Alyssa Gallagher and Rosie Connor—directors of global educational leadership nonprofit BTS Spark—synthesize the experience gained from coaching more than 20,000 school leaders around the world and highlight the universal challenges. Here, the authors unpack the key traits and mindsets of the MESSY leadership model, which embraces the human side of school leadership and provides practical strategies and tools that strengthen leadership capabilities. Coaching conversations that encourage leaders to adopt these specific mindsets will make it easier for them to lead in a complex world: • Meaning Making: Create a shared vision and engage others by collaborating more effectively. • Emotional Connection: Build deeper, more trusting relationships to give feedback and hold difficult conversations. • Sensing the Future: Think creatively and tackle entrenched school improvement problems through experimentation and innovation. • Seizing Momentum: Be proactive, gain control of how you prioritize your time, and embrace new ways of working. • Your Presence: Build confidence by identifying the barriers that hold you back and learning how to overcome them. Intentional coaching conversations tap into the potential power of school leaders and develop them to their fullest. Let Embracing MESSY Leadership structure those conversations and create school leaders that matter.
Responsible elementary schools strive to ensure that all pupils know more today than they knew yesterday thereby better preparing the youngsters for tomorrow’s lessons. However essential that aim, achieving the goal faces serious challenges due to what confronts quality classroom teachers daily: “It’s not the budget crisis or standardized testing…It’s the enormous variation in the academic level of students coming into any given classroom…” Our current educational system’s rigid graded format, i.e., first grade, second grade, is unable to accommodate this extraordinary pupil diversity. By habit rather than wise thinking, schools assign 25-30 children to classrooms and a teacher’s curriculum on the basis of age with no consideration for skills, a flawed approach called “lumping.” Doing so, even superior teachers are forced by time constraints to ignore many youngsters’ educational strengths and weaknesses thereby increasing the likelihood those schoolkids will suffer discordant “curriculum mismatches.” The book provides teachers and principals an effective alternative to the antiquated “one-size-fits-all” approach that ignores both advanced and struggling pupils, leaving many school children without essential everyday skills. The promising option offers all youngsters—low achievers, high achievers, and those in between—the opportunity to advance through the curriculum as far and as fast as their acquired skills allow.
The role of school principals and their executive staff has changed rapidly. They are now required to be not only leading educators but also effective business persons. This book assists school leaders in developing the understanding, knowledge and skill of business processes that they need to perform this 'new' role effectively.
How to Help Your School Thrive Without Breaking the Bank will help you improve your school without investing in externally developed, expensive, and time-consuming reform programs or initiatives. It's packed with replicable strategies and practical tools that educators in any school can incorporate to transform the culture and improve student achievement and professional practice. You'll learn how to * Hone your own leadership and grow new leaders among your staff; * Develop a vision and a mission for your school; * Promote excellence among both staff and students; * Make the most of your time and facilitate effective meetings; and * Mine and use data with purpose. For most schools, times are tough and money is tight—but school leaders must still focus on how to steadily improve student achievement. Academic performance will improve in the long term only if your school has a healthy culture marked by integrity, a strong work ethic, collaboration, and reflective risk taking. Strengthening those foundational elements will help you sustain positive change in your school, even in difficult economic times. The good news is that you already have the resources you need to help your school thrive. This book will help you to maximize them.
Good Strategy/Bad Strategy clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world. Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to—and approach for—overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, he debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.” He introduces nine sources of power—ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth—that are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can easily be put to work on Monday morning, and uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples range from Apple to General Motors, from the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, from a small local market to Wal-Mart, from Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, from the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, from Cisco Systems to Paccar, and from Global Crossing to the 2007–08 financial crisis. Reflecting an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of the human character, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy stems from Rumelt’s decades of digging beyond the superficial to address hard questions with honesty and integrity.