How to Help Your School Thrive Without Breaking the Bank will help you improve your school without investing in externally developed, expensive, and time-consuming reform programs or initiatives. It's packed with replicable strategies and practical tools that educators in any school can incorporate to transform the culture and improve student achievement and professional practice. You'll learn how to * Hone your own leadership and grow new leaders among your staff; * Develop a vision and a mission for your school; * Promote excellence among both staff and students; * Make the most of your time and facilitate effective meetings; and * Mine and use data with purpose. For most schools, times are tough and money is tight—but school leaders must still focus on how to steadily improve student achievement. Academic performance will improve in the long term only if your school has a healthy culture marked by integrity, a strong work ethic, collaboration, and reflective risk taking. Strengthening those foundational elements will help you sustain positive change in your school, even in difficult economic times. The good news is that you already have the resources you need to help your school thrive. This book will help you to maximize them.

This book takes a practical look at how standards in education can be raised. It cuts through jargon and shows how ideas and intentions can be translated into effective action that will help a school.

Learn how successful principals make a difference in their school’s performance! Based on a ground-breaking study and numerous firsthand accounts, this illuminating book captures unique perspectives from 20 outstanding principals, representing a wide range of urban and rural schools. This resource includes: The nine personal characteristics that help principals lead high-performing schools Practical strategies for balancing both administrative responsibilities and instructional leadership Guidance on using a systems-development approach to support excellence at every level Discussion of the use of research and data for school improvement Tips and suggestions from effective principals, along with recommended resources for further learning

First Published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

"A hallmark volume by one of the nation′s most accomplished school improvement scholars. This is the most thoroughly researched, well-crafted, and useful volume on continuous improvement available. Smylie does for ′continuous improvement′ what Fullan did for change." —Joseph Murphy, Professor Vanderbilt University Discover what it takes to create lasting, positive change for your school, your teachers, and your students! Focusing on school change that improves teaching and learning, this guide for principals integrates evolutionary change theory with the research on continuous improvement. Mark A. Smylie begins with a succinct overview of organizational change that provides readers with the foundation they need to embark on a school change initiative. Interviews with educators involved with organizational change provide insightful examples and first-person responses to the challenges inherent in school change. Continuous School Improvement also addresses the major implementation problems that leaders face, such as: Building trust Creating a culture of mutual responsibility Building support Setting goals Responding to teachers′ stress in the face of change

As a field, education has largely failed to learn from experience. Time after time, promising education reforms fall short of their goals and are abandoned as other promising ideas take their place. In Learning to Improve, the authors argue for a new approach. Rather than “implementing fast and learning slow,” they believe educators should adopt a more rigorous approach to improvement that allows the field to “learn fast to implement well.” Using ideas borrowed from improvement science, the authors show how a process of disciplined inquiry can be combined with the use of networks to identify, adapt, and successfully scale up promising interventions in education. Organized around six core principles, the book shows how “networked improvement communities” can bring together researchers and practitioners to accelerate learning in key areas of education. Examples include efforts to address the high rates of failure among students in community college remedial math courses and strategies for improving feedback to novice teachers. Learning to Improve offers a new paradigm for research and development in education that promises to be a powerful driver of improvement for the nation’s schools and colleges.

Do you want your school or district to truly become a learning organization? How do you foster lasting and meaningful change? How do you avoid rejection of your new approach to teaching and learning? If you've been involved in a school change effort, you most likely have struggled with these questions. To ease this struggle, Douglas B. Reeves has proposed a new framework to promote effective change efforts through teacher leadership. In this book, you will explore not only cutting-edge research findings, but also practical applications that can help improve student achievement and educational equity. You can learn how to achieve lasting results as an educator and school leader. You can learn from other teacher researchers how to infuse your classroom, school, or district with enthusiasm, meaningful teaching, improved results, and greater satisfaction. Even as you strive for innovation, you naturally want to avoid having the next new thing become the latest old thing. To achieve lasting change, educators must embrace evidence-based decision making rather than the fact-free debate. Reeves has found that educators more readily accept decisions they disagree with if they believe the decision-making process was fair--not based on opinion or hierarchy. Reeves aims for you to help him build a network of teacher leaders based on this new evidence-based framework that will foster resilient learning organizations. Come along--explore, act, and share. Note: This product listing is for the Adobe Acrobat (PDF) version of the book.

The founder of Teach for America details the lessons learned during the organization's twenty-year existence and explains how the achievement gap in U.S. education can be closed.

In 1988, the Chicago public school system decentralized, granting parents and communities significant resources and authority to reform their schools in dramatic ways. To track the effects of this bold experiment, the authors of Organizing Schools for Improvement collected a wealth of data on elementary schools in Chicago. Over a seven-year period they identified one hundred elementary schools that had substantially improved—and one hundred that had not. What did the successful schools do to accelerate student learning? The authors of this illuminating book identify a comprehensive set of practices and conditions that were key factors for improvement, including school leadership, the professional capacity of the faculty and staff, and a student-centered learning climate. In addition, they analyze the impact of social dynamics, including crime, critically examining the inextricable link between schools and their communities. Putting their data onto a more human scale, they also chronicle the stories of two neighboring schools with very different trajectories. The lessons gleaned from this groundbreaking study will be invaluable for anyone involved with urban education.

Provides specific information on how to transform schools into results-oriented professional learning communities, describing the best practices that have been used by schools nationwide.