Leading School Culture through Teacher Voice and Agency helps school leaders uncover, understand, and build the skill set to engage teachers in the work of school culture as they navigate the changes needed to improve the achievement for all students. This book presents a Framework for School Culture that explores how school culture, when acted upon through teacher voice and agency, is an untapped resource that can move schools forward. By supporting teacher voice and agency, the school and its teachers and leaders move toward taking collective responsibility for sustaining a culture of improvement that is stronger and more responsive. This research-grounded book is rich in practical tools to help leaders work with teachers, ensuring all the educators in a school are taking ownership over their own learning and developing the skills to reshape school culture to ensure students, teachers, and community members thrive.

School leaders are busy, overwhelmed, and may not always be cognizant of the latest cutting-edge theories and practices in the field of instructional improvement. Drawing from research, Creating a Culture of Excellence is a resource that serves as a guide to the best practices in teaching, curriculum, professional development, supervision, and evaluation. Attending to these five processes, utilizing best practices in the field of research and practice, will ensure high-quality instruction in any school. This book is replete with engaging learning activities and vignettes to reinforce ideas and concepts.

Packed with hands-on activities, this practical handbook shows you how to be the transformational leader your school needs to enact a culture change and improve student outcomes.

This practical book shares key lessons learned from highly effective, award-winning National Blue Ribbon Schools. Teacher Leadership Practice in High-Performing Schools explores the important role teachers have in leading schools, the balance administrators must strike between providing teachers with support and trusting them as professionals, and the ways that educators in these schools frequently collaborate across roles and do not operate in isolation. Following vignettes inspired by real schools, each chapter explains and unpacks key lessons learned, situates these lessons within the literature, offers readers robust tools to apply these lessons in their own schools, and includes questions designed to encourage reflection on school practices. This exciting new book helps schools, leadership teams, and individual educators reflect on teacher leadership practice in their schools and determine concrete next steps to increase and improve the impact of teacher leadership.

Featuring the experiences of over 70 successful female leaders in international, public, and private schools around the world, Finding Your Path as a Woman in School Leadership brings together interconnected stories about the realities of being a woman in K–12 school leadership today. Women face distinct and unique challenges in pursuing a leadership pathway in schools; unfortunately, most of the obstacles facing women are hidden and only become visible when encountered on the journey to leadership. This book uncovers these invisible obstacles and shares the personal journeys of real women who have overcome them. Chapters feature powerful stories woven together to provide takeaway strategies and address common themes for women in leadership, including unconscious bias and daily microaggressions; physical, linguistic, and cultural expectations of leaders; perception (or reality) of lack of opportunities for women; impostor syndrome and double standards; and availability of mentorship and guidance. This impactful book provides actionable steps for both aspiring leaders and established leaders ready to support growing leaders in their school communities.

A Leadership Playbook for Addressing Rapid Change in Education provides educational leaders with a simple, step-by-step approach for addressing rapid change. Drawing on the model of appreciative inquiry, this book provides detailed examples of educational problems and provides the who, what, where, when, why, and how to achieve change. Author Teresa L. San Martín emphasizes the traits of outstanding and exceptional leaders: trust; collaborative efforts; communicating with empathy and care. Detailed play-by-play examples are provided that show how school administrators are able to solve relevant problems of practice such as how to create productive and focused high school teacher teams, how educational leaders can increase teacher retention, and how district administrators can provide innovative and meaningful staff development opportunities. This timely book—which supports educators as they continue to grapple with the effects of the pandemic—provides real solutions, equipping school administrators with the tools necessary to confront perpetual change occurring in today’s complex educational environment.

This book draws from the successes of award-winning schools, teachers, students, and parents to help leaders understand how they can positively change the educational experience of Black students. When Black Students Excel offers real-life examples of outstanding elementary, middle, and high schools where teachers and school leaders have rejected policies and practices built upon deficit perceptions about the capacity of Black students. Chapters highlight leadership implications and offer specific suggestions for educators who are seeking to transform their schools in ways that advance the success of Black students. This practical guide includes questions to ask students and their parents, self-assessment tools, and an array of leadership and teaching practices that are effective to empower Black students, elevate school attendance and academic engagement, and improve other important outcomes. Unpacking important themes that influence the success of Black students, this book is a useful tool for educators who are seeking to understand how they can change programs, procedures, and practices in ways that engage and empower Black students.

The sacrificial nature of juggling instructional, operational, managerial, and collegial goals often leaves school leaders feeling so desperate to resolve conflicts that they lose self, abandoning their core values and forgetting their "why." In this timely and impactful resource, author and professor "Dr. O" draws on her own leadership journey– a journey where she remained true to her beliefs and commitment to serve BIPOC communities, even when that meant choosing the road less traveled--offering nine anchor principles to help guide educational leaders in returning to their core values; communicate and build trusting relationships with staff members, students, and parents; and recognize their self-worth beyond their role on school campuses. Lead with Truth is an interactive text that invites you to identify learning objectives and reflect on guided questions throughout the chapters, each of which ends in activities geared to help you make personal connections with the content. This engaging resource is for current and aspiring school leaders who aim to make lifelong impacts and transform their practice, while remaining true to their own beliefs.

This is a book by educators, for educators. It grapples with the complexities, the humanity and the possibilities in education. In a climate of competing accountabilities and measurement mechanisms; corporate solutions to education ‘problems’; and narratives of ‘failing’ schools, ‘underperforming’ teachers and ‘disengaged’ students; this book asks ‘What matters?’ or ‘What should matter?’ in education. Based in the unique Australian context, this book situates Australian education policy, research and practice within the international education narrative. It argues that professionals within schools should be supported, empowered and welcomed into policy discourse, not dictated to by top-down bureaucracy. It advocates for a flipping, flattening and democratising of the education system, in Australia and around the world. Flip the System Australia: What matters in education brings together the voices of teachers, school leaders and scholars in order to offer diverse perspectives, important challenges and hopeful alternatives to the current education system.

Improving Teacher Morale and Motivation discusses a key issue for school leaders: motivating teachers to improve learning for students. Immense and unprecedented changes in education—primarily with the pandemic and "great resignation"—have affected all areas of teaching and learning, including teacher morale and motivation. This engaging book takes an in-depth focus on student learning as it relates to teacher motivation, providing specific examples of how to motivate teachers during challenging times. Specific tools, templates, and strategies are incorporated throughout the book to help leaders understand and act on issues of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, collaboration and trust, growth mindset, effective feedback, and more. Further, this text incorporates a broader look at how school leaders can shape their school and make it a place where teachers want to work, where they are committed to the success of students, and where they see themselves remaining well into the future. This timely book is appropriate for all school leaders, including teacher-leaders and district leaders.