Capacity Building For School Improvement

At a time when there is a high demand for capacity building in schools, many administrators and practitioners find little if any empirical studies on how this can be achieved in practice. Through the eyes of an experienced researcher, schoolteacher, senior administrator and university lecturer, this book captures how a low decile school in New Zealand successfully built its capacity for improvement. Dr. Patricia Stringer allows the reader, who could be anyone with an interest in education, leadership and school development, to identify contextual problems and difficulties that limit capacity building and suggests pathways to overcome them. This is an easy to read and enjoyable book, but, one that digs deep into practice. The researcher spent over a year working with the staff, board and parents of this school discovering and recording authentic information about this school’s successful journey to success. For the researcher, this was an exciting experience; one that needs to be shared with the wider educational community. A must read book.

Leadership, Capacity Building and School Improvement provides a fresh and original perspective on the most important issues confronting today’s practitioners and academics in the field of educational leadership. New and exciting concepts are introduced such as the research-engaged school of the future. While its theoretical and evidence-based approach raises to a robust level the discussion on the most important leadership challenges of the day, the book is at the same time intensely practical in addressing everyday issues faced by contemporary policy makers and school practitioners. Underpinning the eleven chapters is a conceptual framework founded on the notion of leadership as capacity building, giving the book a coherence that many others on school leadership lack. Among the themes actively discussed are: Conceptualising and Contextualising Leadership – what is leadership? What distinguishes good from mediocre and poor leaders? What are the traits, dispositions and attributes that make for good leadership? How does context influence leadership? How appealing is leadership as a career? What are the components of capacity building leadership? Contemporary Leadership Themes – what is learning-centred leadership and how can it best promote good teaching and student learning? How can leaders distribute leadership across the school, and what are the pitfalls? How can leaders capitalise on the notion of the school as a professional learning community? How can leaders best be nurtured and developed? Policy, Leadership Practice and Impact – what new forms of leadership are presaged by the specialist schools policy as a means of school improvement? How can schools combine a focus on academic achievement with the need to prepare students for the changing twenty-first century workplace? Leadership, Capacity Building and School Improvement provides an up-to-date authoritative, critical and insightful account of school leadership. It combines advocacy and argument with evidence-based practice drawn from the most plausible and robust sources. This book will prove a valuable tool for those taking higher degrees in school leadership and management: school leaders on NPQH courses and school practitioners as a whole interested in interfacing with the latest empirical evidence and ideas, as well as academics teaching and researching in the area of educational leadership. Since the book adopts an international perspective, drawing its examples and evidence from both the Anglo-American and the Asian contexts, it will be found relevant to academics, policy makers and practitioners across these regions. Clive Dimmock is Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Education in Singapore and Professor Emeritus at the University of Leicester, UK.

Offers a perspective on the relationship between leadership and school improvement. This book emphasises the importance of maximising the leadership capabilities of all those within the organization, and provides guidance about the way in which this is achieved. It contains case study illustrations.

The book discusses the idea of the learning community as a vehicle for professional learning and school development. As the authors show, the learning community develops in response to building capacity in three domains: personal, interpersonal and organizational. In the personal domain, educators deconstruct and reconstruct their professional narratives to enhance student learning and professional practice. In the interpersonal domain, educators generate norms and values that foster experimentation and critical analysis of educational practice and that promote collective and individual learning. In the organizational domain, visible and invisible structures are constructed that enable community members to enact educational practices in support of profound improvement in teaching and learning. This revised and updated edition of Profound Improvement not only brings this important work up-to-date but also shows how the authors thinking has changed and developed since the book was originally written. The book focuses on the life of educators as it relates to professional learning and growth. It is concerned with human growth and development, human cognition and affect and human interactions and actions in the context of a school community. For the new edition the authors also: elaborate more fully the notion of learning communities based on living systems and ecological perspectives develop their capacity building model They show that building a learning community is a dynamic process that engages the individual, the group and the organization in embedded interdependencies and mutual influences. As the authors clearly demonstrate: education is a living system as opposed to a managed system.

As societies continue to set educational goals that are, on current performance, beyond the capacity of the system to deliver, strategies for enhancing student learning through school and classroom intervention have become increasingly important. Yet, as David Hopkins argues in his book, many of the educational initiatives recently developed under the umbrella of school improvement are inadequate or unhelpful. Simply blaming teachers and delegating financial responsibility, he maintains, has little positive impact on classroom practice. This is the bleak context within which school improvement has to operate today. School Improvement for Real offers a genuine alternative: a strategy for educational change that focuses on student achievement by modifying classroom practice and adapting the management arrangements within the school to support teaching and learning. It outlines an approach to school improvement that has a medium term, systemic orientation, providing both principles and suggestions for better practice. The author's experience in the field of school improvement ensures that the text is informed by a practical wisdom that is so often lacking from the more typical managerial texts on improvement and effectiveness.

In this text, the authors present current research in the study of capacity development opportunities and challenges and capacity building in education, health and capital. The topics discussed include capacity building for school improvement; unique challenges in developing capacity in rural and remote Australia; women with disabilities in urban Cambodia and vocational training; capacity building and sex workers in South-east Asia; capacity building in old industrialised regions of Europe and in non-profit organisations using blended learning as a gateway to practitioner education; and capacity development research in public health and the environment in the Caribbean.

This book aims to demystify the principles and practice of school improvement by demonstrating how successful classroom and school improvement occurs. It outlines the conditions, strategies and approaches that promote sustainable improvement and provides an overview of the main theoretical perspectives in this area. This accessible text will be useful for practitioners working within schools and with schools, offering clear guidance for those keen to raise standards and improve achievement. The What's In It For Schools? series aims to make educational policy issues relevant to practitioners. Each book in the series focuses on a major educational issue. The author sets the issue in context, looks at how it impacts on the daily lives of schools and teachers, and raises key questions. The books are grounded in sound theory, recent research evidence and best practice, and will make an excellent addition to any staffroom bookshelf.

When schools are being hit with staff turnover, budget cuts, and changing priorities, how do you ensure that improvements stick, educators keep learning, and student performance continues to advance? In this follow-up to her ASCD best-seller Building Leadership Capacity in Schools, Linda Lambert answers that question and explains how to sustain a learning community where everyone takes ownership of improvement efforts and acts with a shared sense of purpose. Use the charts and action steps to analyze your school's leadership capacity, spot the participation patterns in your community, and identify new professional development opportunities for building leadership. Real-life examples from schools with high leadership capacities offer tips on how to overcome the resistance to change, find time for teacher collaboration, and encourage parents to take on leadership responsibilities. Handy rubrics and surveys help you assess and guide the leadership capacity of any school.