Learning From Leaders

For many years, the authors have been fellow travelers on the journey to help educators improve their schools. Their first coauthored book focuses on district leadership, principal leadership, and team leadership and addresses how individual teachers can be most effective in leading students—by learning with colleagues how to implement the most promising pedagogy in their classrooms

If you are tasked with developing effective leaders, "teaching" just isn't going to be enough! Teaching leadership can be one of the most fulfilling, as well as challenging, tasks of a trainer. Learning for Leadership builds on foundational learning and development concepts and practices to help trainers and facilitators develop programs that meet these challenges and turn learners into leaders. Yael Hellman illustrates how a truly "facilitative" classroom is structured, and she shows why it is the best environment to learn leadership skills. The author does so through the lens of group dynamics and her own experience facilitating leadership courses for the Los Angeles Police Department. The facilitative approach invites learners to practice leadership by being accountable for reaching learning objectives, taking initiative to solve problems, and nurturing their own ideas rather than leaning on authority. This book includes everything you need to develop a facilitative leadership development course, including: icebreakers or warm-ups to focus learners on the session's agenda interactive instruction models to help them master content ideas for group work, including collective projects; experiential exercises or games and joint activities that immediately apply new material wrap-ups to summarize one session and link it to an upcoming one. Facilitation integrates techniques from many adult learning approaches to produce creative, transformative, practical learning and leaders who are prepared to lead.

How do leaders learn to lead? How do leaders set themselves up for success? This book explores the real-life experiences of a wide variety of leaders from different industries, sectors, and countries to bring to light new lessons on the importance of life-long learning. Consisting primarily of a series of probing interviews, Good Leaders Learn presents the challenges, triumphs, and reflections of 31 senior and high-profile leaders, offering insight into how they learned to lead during their careers. The book pulls important and useful perspectives into a robust theoretical framework that includes the importance of innate curiosity, challenging oneself, risk-taking, and other key elements of good leadership. With practical insights complemented by the latest leadership research and theory, this book will help current and potential leaders to build a solid foundation of the leadership qualities vital to their continuing success.

From EL Education comes a proven approach to student assessment Leaders of Their Own Learning offers a new way of thinking about assessment based on the celebrated work of EL Education schools across the country. Student-Engaged Assessment is not a single practice but an approach to teaching and learning that equips and compels students to understand goals for their learning and growth, track their progress toward those goals, and take responsibility for reaching them. This requires a set of interrelated strategies and structures and a whole-school culture in which students are given the respect and responsibility to be meaningfully engaged in their own learning. Includes everything teachers and school leaders need to implement a successful Student-Engaged Assessment system in their schools Outlines the practices that will engage students in making academic progress, improve achievement, and involve families and communities in the life of the school Describes each of the book's eight key practices, gives advice on how to begin, and explains what teachers and school leaders need to put into practice in their own classrooms Ron Berger is Chief Program Officer for EL Education and a former public school teacher Leaders of Their Own Learning shows educators how to ignite the capacity of students to take responsibility for their own learning, meet Common Core and state standards, and reach higher levels of achievement. DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of the e-book file, but are available for download after purchase.

Inspire yourself and others with the second edition of this best-selling book. With heartfelt advice, practical wisdom, and examples from the field, Todd Whitaker explains the qualities and practices that distinguish great principals. New features include: Developing an accurate sense of self Understanding the dynamics of change Dealing with negative or ineffective staff members One of the nation’s leading experts on staff motivation, teacher leadership, and principal effectiveness, Todd Whitaker has written over 20 powerful books for educators of every level. Discover what you can do differently.

You've got a rare empty slot in your diary today, squeezed between meetings, phone calls and dealing with the incessant incoming emails. You can grab a sandwich, power through and run yourself down, or you can STOP. You can pick up this book, choose a chapter that inspires you and learn something new. This isn't a time for standing still; developing and growing as a leader is imperative if you want your team and company to be successful. Lunchtime Learning for Leaders is an actionable guide to everything you need to know to be a successful leader. Each chapter is a short-burst overview of a key leadership challenge thousands of leaders before you have faced and successfully tackled with the help of the author Lucy Ryan. And all of them can be mastered in under an hour! From leading your team through change, adapting your leadership style to the task at hand, gathering influence to building resilience, this book is your essential guide to becoming the best leader you can be. Dedicate just a few hours and invest in Lunchtime Learning for Leaders. You will reap the benefits and come out better prepared for whatever comes next on your business leadership journey.

"We can't do that in our school district." "I don't have time to add that to my curriculum." "We're fighting against impossible odds with these students." Sound familiar? School improvement can often feel like a losing battle, but it doesn't have to be. In this fully revised and updated second edition of The Learning Leader, Douglas B. Reeves helps leadership teams go beyond excuses to capitalize on their strengths, reduce their weaknesses, and reset their mindset and priorities to achieve unprecedented success. A critical key is recognizing student achievement as more than just a set of test scores. Reeves asserts that when leaders focus exclusively on results, they fail to measure and understand the importance of their own actions. He offers an alternative—the Leadership for Learning Framework, which helps leaders identify and distinguish among four different types of educators and provide more effective, tailored support to - "Lucky" educators, who achieve high results but don't understand how their actions influence achievement. - "Losing" educators, who achieve low results yet keep doing the same thing, expecting different outcomes. - "Learning" educators, who have not yet achieved the desired results but are working their way toward excellence. - "Leading" educators, who achieve high results and understand how their actions influence their success. Reeves stresses that effective leadership is neither a unitary skill nor a solitary activity. The Learning Leader helps leaders reconceptualize their roles in the school improvement process and motivate themselves and their colleagues to keep working to better serve their students.

How Leaders Learn portrays the developmental experiences of educators seeking to become accomplished leaders in their schools. The author presents a new model of leadership knowledge: the Interpersonal-Cognitive-Intrapersonal (I-C-I) model. Through the stories of teacher leaders and administrators in several leadership development programs, the book depicts the evolution of understanding, skill, and self-confidence. These learners grapple with questions essential to all effective leadership: Does my leadership generate improved learning for the students in my school? What are my greatest assets as a leader? What are my greatest liabilities, and what do I do about them? Can I find a leadership role that is both productive and sustainable for me and for the school I serve? This dynamic professional development tool: Introduces a framework for thinking about how school leaders cultivate and support their own learning. Richly describes in leaders’ own words the deepening of interpersonal, cognitive, and intrapersonal leadership knowledge and action. Describes how to structure the Performance Learning cycle to support leadership that benefits students. Links recent literature and research to support new insights into the role of emotion, self-awareness, and interpersonal skills in leader learning.