Leadership For Resilient Schools And Communities

Combining proven strategies with new information for developing resiliency in schools, this edition emphasizes the critical role of school leaders and features updated exercises for implementing change.

Resilient School Leaders answers a fundamental question: "How can leaders move ahead in the face of adversity?" Every education leader faces difficult situations and seemingly impossible odds. Where do they find the confidence and energy to keep working for what they believe in, despite setbacks and opposition? Drawing on current research in a variety of disciplines, including performance psychology, physiology, and education, Jerry L. Patterson and Paul Kelleher first outline the three sources of resilience capacity: personal values, efficacy, and energy. Then they share the personal insights of 25 highly regarded educational leaders, including Gene Carter, Roland Barth, and Michael Fullan. These insights illustrate how leaders can increase their own resilience. Patterson and Kelleher, lifelong educators themselves, distill their research into the six strengths that enable resilient leaders to powerfully influence organizational culture: * Accurate assessment of the past and current reality * Positive views of the future * True commitment to personal values * Strong sense of personal efficacy * Wise investment of personal energy * Courage to act on convictions Premised on a belief in hope and optimism in the face of life's storms, Resilient School Leaders offers a reliable road map for navigating through the modern-day challenges in our schools. You ll come away from this book with renewed confidence in your ability to achieve your goals, no matter what obstacles you encounter along the way.

Over the past decade, resilience has gained significant traction across the nation and innovative programs are showing exciting progress in building resilient communities. For communities to be prepared for future extreme weather and climate events, as well as the chronic daily stressors, the momentum of implementing and taking action to build community resilience should continue to be fostered and expanded. Building on its many efforts dedicated to increasing and enhancing resilience, the Resilient America Roundtable hosted the State of Resilience Leadership Forum and Community Workshop on June 28 and 29, 2016. This activity brought together diverse decision makers, experts, practitioners, and community stakeholders, including representatives from academia, government, the private sector, foundations, and nonprofit organizations, to consider the results of years of investment, experimentation, and research in building resilience, take stock of these many initiatives and efforts, and share their experiences in building more resilient communities. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.

As the importance of public education increases both globally and nationally, partnerships between schools and their community become key to each other's success. Examining the intersection of schools with their communities reveals the most effective strategies for supporting school populations that are traditionally marginalized or underserved in both rural and urban areas. Cases on Strategic Partnerships for Resilient Communities and Schools is an essential publication that uncovers the problems and pitfalls of creating strategic partnerships between schools and other members of the community in which the schools are situated that include for-profit businesses, not-for-profit entities, and private organizations. The book reveals that schools that are thriving effectively do not do so in isolation but as vibrant members and centers of the communities in which they serve students and families. Moreover, it examines the difficulty in advocating for the schools and the leadership of the schools within these communities so that they can be better served. Highlighting a wide range of topics including leadership, community-based outreach, and school advocacy, this book is ideally designed for teachers, school administrators, principals, school boards and committees, non-profit administrators, educational advocates, leadership faculty, community engagement directors, community outreach personnel, entrepreneurs, researchers, academicians, and students.

In eight concise chapters, the authors show how caring people in an educational setting can foster resiliency in themselves, in the classroom, and among individual children. Also provided is a broad range of activities that have been tried in school and community settings, and which provide assessment and evaluations tools with which to monitor the process of changing schools to enhance protective factors in the lives of students and teachers. --foreword, p. ix.

This book unpicks the complex, dynamic blend of individuals’ psychological and professional assets, workplace conditions and leadership support which enable teachers who stay in teaching to continue to make a difference in their careers, regardless of shifts in policy, workplace, professional and personal circumstances. Whilst much has been written over the years about teacher stress and burnout, there is very little research which reports on the conditions which are essential for teachers to sustain their commitment and effectiveness over their professional lives, in contexts of challenge and change. Drawing upon a range of educational, psychological, socio-cultural and neuro-scientific research, together with vivid accounts from teachers in a variety of primary and secondary schools internationally, and from their own research on teachers’ work and identities, the authors discuss the dynamic nature, forms and practices of teacher resilience. They argue that resilience in teachers is not only their ability to bounce back in extremely adverse circumstances but that it is the capacity of teachers for everyday resilience which enables them to sustain their commitment and effectiveness in responding positively to the unavoidable uncertainties inherent of their professional lives. The authors conclude that resilience in teachers can be nurtured by the intellectual, social and organisational environments in which teachers work and live, rather than being simply a personal attribute or trait, determined by nature. Resilient Teachers, Resilient Schools will be of key interest to policy makers, head teachers, teachers and training and development organisations who wish to improve quality and standards in schools.

In this updated edition of Resiliency Education, Henderson and Milstein offer scores of new resources for resilience education as well as an action plan you can use right now to build inner strength and flexibility in your students and staff.