This concise guide offers monthly themes for reflection and professional development, advice from award-winning principals, space for planning and goal setting, and suggestions for increasing parent involvement.

"Jorgenson has designed an amazingly easy-to-use tool that captures the complexity of the principalship in a precise, yet personal manner. This user-friendly resource significantly impacts day-to-day practice." —Christopher Peal, Principal Meadowbrook Elementary School, Novi, MI "An ideal gift for superintendents to give to their principals. It can be used for administrator mentoring, especially for interactive collaboration between colleagues. This book supports the critical survival habit of today′s administrators: reflection." —Rick Miller, Superintendent Oxnard School District, CA Find resilience and optimism in your role as a school principal! Today′s school principals face increasing pressure and new challenges every day. However, by setting aside time for personal reflection and planning, both novice and seasoned administrators can build on their individual strengths and achieve important professional goals. Written in a concise, practical format, A Reflective Planning Journal for School Leaders is part planning calendar, part reflective journal, and part inspirational guide to help principals become focused, proactive leaders. Olaf Jorgenson has organized this step-by-step resource around the school year and offers numerous suggestions, reflective exercises, and features, including: Month-by-month themes that guide individual professional development and reflective practice Advice from award-winning elementary and secondary school principals Space for weekly and monthly planning and goal setting Guidelines for focusing on priorities Tips for increasing parent involvement, initiating change in schools, and making time for professional development Strengthen your professional practice and leadership effectiveness by making personal reflection and planning a daily priority.

This book about valuation processes in educational administration has a particular focus on the notions community and professionalism. The topic is addressed comprehensively bringing together the work of some of the best-known and most respected philosophers, theorists and researchers working in this field. It will be of interest to university faculty, graduate students and educational administrators.

Make the most of your time—and your leadership Is your school’s vision getting buried under paperwork? If you spend more time picking up pieces than putting them together, this is your book. Written by seasoned school principals, this plan of action will get you back to the essence of your job: instructional leadership. By using educational technology to maximize efficiency, you’ll improve teaching, student achievement, resource management, and school culture. This comprehensive guide features: Easy-to-follow, single-topic chapters Standards–based scenarios and questions Time-management self-assessments Easily adaptable experiential exercises Strategies for battling the “silent time thief”

While social and emotional learning (SEL) is most familiar as compartmentalized programs separate from academics, the truth is, all learning is social and emotional. What teachers say, the values we express, the materials and activities we choose, and the skills we prioritize all influence how students think, see themselves, and interact with content and with others. If you teach kids rather than standards, and if you want all kids to get what they need to thrive, Nancy Frey, Douglas Fisher, and Dominique Smith offer a solution: a comprehensive, five-part model of SEL that's easy to integrate into everyday content instruction, no matter what subject or grade level you teach. You'll learn the hows and whys of Building students' sense of identity and confidence in their ability to learn, overcome challenge, and influence the world around them. Helping students identify, describe, and regulate their emotional responses. Promoting the cognitive regulation skills critical to decision making and problem solving. Fostering students' social skills, including teamwork and sharing, and their ability to establish and repair relationships. Equipping students to becoming informed and involved citizens. Along with a toolbox of strategies for addressing 33 essential competencies, you'll find real-life examples highlighting the many opportunities for social and emotional learning within the K–12 academic curriculum. Children’s social and emotional development is too important to be an add-on or an afterthought, too important to be left to chance. Use this books integrated SEL approach to help your students build essential skills that will serve them in the classroom and throughout their lives.

Everyone in your school community benefits when you invest in YOU. While accountability to standards and assessment are foundational to education and learning, the emotional needs of the educators at the center of the work have been overlooked. These brief, thought-provoking daily reflections emphasize a leader’s social and emotional awareness as the key to reinvigorating, renewing, and sustaining any learning community. Using the core CASEL skills presented in six modules, this book will help you: · Become more self-aware of what each CASEL skill means for leadership · Engage community stakeholders confidently and inclusively · Build stronger relationships throughout schools, classrooms, and communities · Increase credibility and approachability

How do different contexts influence the nature and character of school leadership? This book is predicated on the simple, yet profound, observation that school leadership can only be understood within the context in which it is exercised. The observation is particularly valid in relation to post-conflict societies especially when they have eventuated from new-wars. Schools in these contexts face highly complex circumstances and a level of environmental turbulence requiring different kinds of leadership from those operating in less complicated and relatively stable situations. By assembling an impressive array of international experts, this book investigates a much neglected area of research. Each chapter highlights the importance of context for understanding the realities of school leadership, and reveals the challenges and influences that school leaders face as well as the strategies they adopt to deal with the complexities of their work. In particular, valuable insights are provided into how intractable problems faced by schools can affect student, professional and organizational learning agendas. There are also important glimpses of the progression that can be made in schools by: -Enhancing the curriculum -Energizing teaching capacity; and -Optimising leadership capacity. Depictions of post-new war environments include Angola, Ghana, Sri Lanka, Rwanda, Kenya, Solomon Islands, Lebanon, Kosovo, Timor-Leste and Northern Ireland. The book will be key reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying educational leadership, comparative education and education policy.

The unwavering culture of continuous improvement efforts to bring about school change has irrevocably changed the role expectations for the school leader. The school leader in the 21st century is increasingly perceived as an instructional leader expected to implement whole-school reform models that can shape teacher practice and influence student outcomes. The significant changes in role expectations for school leaders present considerable challenges to an educational system that was not designed to incorporate these conceptualizations. In light of the increased acceptance of changed leadership expectations, the elements that are needed for developing, supporting, and sustaining instructional leaders who can lead systemic change efforts are frequently not present, are fragmented, or are observed at various developmental stages throughout the pK-20 pipeline. This book is centered on the learning and changed behaviors of school leaders, who engaged in a sustained job-embedded professional learning community, facilitated through a university-district partnership. The learning from the findings, suggested that job-embedded learning with their peers, can be instrumental for these principals to build the capacity to lead systemic change efforts. The findings further suggested that creating conditions for new understanding to occur, and sustained opportunities to apply new learning in context to their role, entailed a collaborative effort by a partnership involving two separate institutions with different priorities. The author makes a case for the educational pipeline, to prioritize the support and understanding of complex systemic change efforts and innovations, as they are linked to school improvement.