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.

Increase student learning by developing teacher leaders! This 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 tool for school improvement, this volume covers such important topics as: The principal’s critical role in supporting teacher leadership Cultivating teacher leadership through professional development Overcoming organizational barriers that hinder teacher leadership How teacher leadership can help advance school improvement efforts

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.

The restructuring of schools systems across the world has been controversial. Have reforms been driven by a desire to cut educational budgets or the need to improve the quality of educational provision? This book explores the restructuring movement, with a particular emphasis on how decentralisation of power has affected the quality of education. It provides a broad and international picture of educational 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.

This report examines a 30-year history of educational change to identify differing perspectives, strategies, and useful principles. The three most influential perspectives in educational change are the rational-scientific perspective, which proposes that change is created through the dissemination of innovative techniques; the political perspective, which generates change through legislation and other directives outside the school district; and the cultural perspective which seeks improvement through value changes in organizations. There are four strategies for implementing change: fix the parts, fix the people, fix the schools, and fix the system. Systemic education reform offers new hope because it brings together the technical knowledge needed for improvement with a locally sensitive education strategy. Through the Goals 2000 Initiative, the U.S. Department of Education supports reform efforts within the framework of the six National Education Goals. The Department and the Office of Educational Research and Improvement support standards-based assessment techniques. They also assist states in developing curriculum frameworks and help disseminate sound research and practice-based knowledge. A reference bibliography, illustrative programs, and additional sources are included. (JPT)

Capturing insights from 20 successful principals, this illuminating book presents real-world strategies that help school leaders refine their administrative skills and generate dramatic improvements in schoolwide achievement.

The Sharp Edge of Educational Change conveys the realities of reform as they affect educators' practice. The collected chapters each focus on particular current reform and reveal the technical and logistical complications, social and political dynamics, cognitive disjunctures and limitations, and emotional demands of reform. In so doing, they provide new and rich conceptual perspectives on the contemporary nature of teachers' and administrators' work in classrooms, schools and other educational settings.