Restructuring Leadership For School Improvement And Reform

The quality of school leadership has a big impact on improvement and inspection outcomes. Good school leaders ensure that their teachers have the resources they need to be successful. They also create a positive culture where teachers feel supported and appreciated. This leads to better morale and higher retention rates. Additionally, good school leaders can effectively communicate the school's vision to all stakeholders. This ensures that everyone is on the same page and working towards the same goals. Restructuring Leadership for School Improvement and Reform investigates cooperation, staff development, resource supply, vision transparency, workplace stress management, and professional development for school leaders as methods for creating a healthy school culture. This premier reference source is ideal for administrators, instructional designers, researchers, academicians, scholars, practitioners, instructors, and students.

(Published in cooperation with The Center on Innovation & Improvement) As suggested by the title, the purpose of this Handbook on Restructuring and Substantial School Improvement is to provide principles for restructuring and substantially improving schools. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, the Center on Innovation & Improvement (CII) engaged leading experts on restructuring and school improvement to prepare modules for this handbook to assist states, districts, and schools in establishing policies, procedures, and support to successfully restructure schools. The Handbook is organized into three sections. The topic of the Handbook’s modules – restructuring with a focus on the district as the impetus for dramatic improvement – is relatively new in the nation’s education history. For this reason, the module authors were selected because they are highly experienced experts in their fields and can be counted on to judiciously weigh the less than definitive evidence and to state useful guiding principles.

"Schlechty's common-sense approach to restructuring is combined with a strategic planner's vision and the translation of beliefs into action... A wide audience, including principals and superintAndents, can find in this book practical outlines for restructuring, and a distinctive and focused view of their role in the educational system sof the twenty-first century." --The School Administrator Schlechty provides an innovative, adaptable framework for helping leaders in all areas of education to identify where change is needed in order to make schools more useful and responsive to children and society.

School reform is a top priority for governments today. This timely and challenging book, edited by leading international researchers, Kathryn Riley and Karen Seashore Louis, offers a rich comparative perspective on leadership for change and school reform. Contributors form North America, Europe and Australia demonstrate how school leadership is influenced by global pressures, differing national and state contexts and local concerns. They illustrate the limitations of reform initiatives which focus on school leaders tot he exclusion of the many other organisations which affect school, such as national and local governments, professional associations and school communities. This book raises some important questions such as: *How can school leaders create intelligent, thinking schools? *How can leadership and learning be linked together? *What are the characteristics of effective local education authorities and school districts? *What is the role of teacher organisations in educational reform and change? *What happens if businesses, teachers, parents and local communities have different views of what makes a good school? The text illustrates the ways in which leadership is rooted in learning, and identifies new directions for school leadership. It challenges conventional notions of leadership, offering an expanded view, which sees leadership just as an individual role-based function, but as a network of relationships among people, structures and cultures. This lively and provocative book should be read by all those interested in education reform.

Through specific examples, qualitative research, and portraiture, the author illustrates how and why some schools are able to achieve significant, sustainable change while others cannot.

While many factors influence the success rate of schools, none are more influential than the impact of effective local school leadership by way of a principal. Socio-Cultural Leadership suggests many aspects that impact effective school leadership; however none are more substantial than the following tenets of Socio-Cultural Leadership: As the instructional leader, the principal must supervise and evaluate instruction to make sure that students are given optimal learning opportunities. As the emotional leader, the principal must ensure that teachers are intellectually equipped, emotionally stimulated, and encouraged to assume decision-making positions of leadership in schools to increase student achievement. As a community leader, the principal must inspire and/or provide incentives for student-centered communal learning. As the facilitator of culture, the principal must also realize the limitations of leadership on student achievement and begin to shape and reshape school culture. Socio-Cultural Leadership is the result of a four-year-long immersion into school improvement efforts from around the world, not to mention my own experiences as a teacher, assistant principal, principal, district trainer, director of school improvement, and adjunct professor.

Qualitative data were collected over a four-year period where a team of researchers, including the author, made annual visits to the schools to conduct interviews with school staff as well as district administrators. The interviewees included district administrators, school administrators, teachers and members of the support staff. Over 100 interviews were conducted and analyzed for this study. This study examines the restructuring of school leadership at two schools implementing comprehensive school reform models---specifically the Comer School Development Program and Edison Schools models---and investigates the impact these new organizational structures have had on teacher leadership. The impact on teacher leadership was assessed by examining teacher participation in the decision-making process, opportunities for teachers to participate in and lead professional development sessions and the nature and frequency of faculty cooperation and collaboration. To get a full picture of the restructuring process the degree to which these new structures differed from traditional structures was investigated as well as the factors that help or hindered the change process. The research findings indicate that while the structure implemented at the Edison site differed greatly from traditional school leadership structures, as it distributed leadership influence and enhanced the scope and nature of teacher leadership, the structure instituted at the Comer site closely resembled the typical school organizational structure and had little impact on teacher leadership. In part, this was due to differences in the level of implementation of each reform model. Frequent and ongoing contact with the design team and strong site leadership were factors that affected the degree of implementation. The findings also indicate that specific structural elements are required if teacher leadership is to flourish. These elements include procedures that allow teachers play a greater role in the decision-making process; programs that supply teachers with frequent and ongoing opportunities to participate in, produce and deliver professional development training; and systems that create scheduled opportunities for teachers to cooperate and collaborate with their colleagues. The results of this research have implications for how structural changes can be used to influence the nature and scope of teacher leadership practice.

Combining both the theory as well as the practice of the education reform process, this unique breakthrough volume focuses on every aspect of the change process in high school education today. Short- and long-term strategies for each phase of the process-provoking, creating, managing, supporting, and sustaining reform-are covered. Based on the real-life experiences of the author and others, this book recognizes that most high school reform is short-lived. It stresses the ways to create and maintain positive change, making the process a long-lasting, worthwhile mission for the school's leadership and ultimately the students. Short, useful summaries of high school reform provide true-life pictures of what really happens in the midst of changing the way educational institutions operate. These stories cover school-based management, collaborative or shared leadership, school-within-a-school groupings, interdisciplinary instruction, school-based budgeting, new models for professional development, and others. Through these examples, readers can understand how reform strategies work and how to apply and adapt them to their own situations. As an added feature, this book provides the names and locations of schools attempting each reform as well as the names and addresses of school reform networks that readers can contact in their own efforts.

"A 'must read' for anyone who cares about schools, education, or the nation's future." --James W. Guthrie, professor of education and director, Policy Analysis for California EducationRestructuring Schools provides administrators, state policymakers, teachers, and other educators with an understanding of what can and cannot be achieved through particular restructuring efforts and of the role they can play as individuals to make such efforts succeed.

Increase student learning by developing teacher leaders! Research over the years has consistently identified leadership as a critical component of school change and, as initiatives to reform the educational system have emerged, one significant line of work emphasizes teachers assuming greater leadership roles within their organizations. Connecting Teacher Leadership and School Improvement is the first book to synthesize theoretical, empirical, and practice-based literature in order to provide a comprehensive look at what is known about teacher leadership and what works to support it. The first part of the book explores the core concepts of teacher leadership, while the second part shows readers how to establish the context in their school or district to cultivate and support teacher leaders. A vital piece of equipment in the school improvement toolbox, this book covers such important topics as: The principal's critical role in supporting teacher leadershipCultivating teacher leadership through professional developmentOvercoming organizational barriers that hinder teacher leadershipHow teacher leadership can help advance school improvement efforts Presenting a comprehensive model of this successful change strategy, author Joseph Murphy examines the ideological and empirical basis of teacher leadership and offers strategies to help teachers and principals create productive relationships that will strengthen our nation's schools.