Leaders are readers! Elementary school principal Mandy Ellis offers practical, immediately actionable, fun ideas and strategies that will deeply embed books, reading, and literacy into your school culture. You'll learn how to make reading a joy for every member of your school community.

Clear, on-the-ground guidance for Reading Apprenticeship implementation Leading for Literacy provides tools and real-life examples to expand the benefits of a literacy approach that sparks students' engaged reading and thinking across disciplines, from middle school through community college. A companion to the landmark Reading for Understanding, this book guides teachers, leaders, and administrators through the nuts, bolts, benefits, and stumbling blocks of creating Reading Apprenticeship communities that extend a culture of literacy beyond individual classrooms. This book explains how to generate authentic buy-in from teachers and administrators, use the Reading Apprenticeship Framework to turn reform overload into reform coherence, and create literacy teams, professional learning communities, and Reading Apprenticeship communities of practice that sustain an institutional focus on a student-centered, strengths-based culture of literacy. Key insights from Reading Apprenticeship practitioners across the country address how to get started, build momentum, assess progress, and build partnerships and networks across schools, districts, campuses, and regions. Persistently low levels of adolescent literacy continue to short-change students, contribute to discredited high school diplomas, and cause millions of students to drop out of high school and community college. Forty percent or more of community college students require remedial reading courses as college freshman. The researchers at WestEd's Strategic Literacy Initiative developed the Reading Apprenticeship Framework to provide educators with a proven path to improving literacy for all students, and this book provides clear guidance on bringing the framework to life. How to integrate Reading Apprenticeship with existing reform efforts How to use formative assessment to promote teacher and student growth How to coach and empower teachers How to cultivate literacy leadership How to provide long-term support for a strong content-literacy program Nationwide classroom testing has shown Reading Apprenticeship to promote not only literacy and content knowledge, but also motivation and positive academic identity—leading to better student outcomes that reach beyond the classroom walls. Leading for Literacy lays out compelling ways to spread the benefits of Reading Apprenticeship, with practical guidance and real-world insight.

Directly linked with overall student achievement, graduation rates, and success in higher education, literacy is essential for reaching academic goals in a school or county. Adolescent literacy has become the focus of many school improvement efforts to meet the needs of secondary and high school students. Without the requisite expertise in literacy, administrators and other school leaders charged with literacy improvement initiatives need a systemic and sustained approach for improving student literacy and learning. Taking the Lead on Adolescent Literacy presents a concrete, user-friendly, and practical guide to developing, implementing, and monitoring a schoolwide or county-wide literacy action plan. Readers will find rubrics, tools, and processes developed and field-tested by the authors over more than 10 years of close work with schools across the country.

This book focuses on what school leaders need to know and understand about leadership for learning, and for learning to read in particular. It brings together theory, research and practice on leadership for literacy. The book reports on the findings from six studies that followed school principals from their involvement in a professional learning program consisting of five modules on leadership and the teaching of reading, to implementation action in their schools. It describes how they applied a range of strategies to create leadership partnerships with their teachers, pursuing eight related dimensions from a Leadership for Learning framework or blueprint. The early chapters of the book feature the use of practical tools as a focus for leadership activity. These chapters consider, for example, how principals and teachers can develop deeper understandings of their schools’ contexts; how professional discussions can be conducted with a process called ‘disciplined dialogue’; and how principals might encourage approaches to shared leadership with their teachers. The overall findings presented in this book emphasise five positive positions on leadership for learning to read: the importance of an agreed moral purpose; sharing leadership for improvement; understanding what learning to read involves; implementing and evaluating reading interventions; and recognising the need for support for leaders’ learning on-the-job.

Clear, on-the-ground guidance for Reading Apprenticeship implementation Leading for Literacy provides tools and real-life examples to expand the benefits of a literacy approach that sparks students' engaged reading and thinking across disciplines, from middle school through community college. A companion to the landmark Reading for Understanding, this book guides teachers, leaders, and administrators through the nuts, bolts, benefits, and stumbling blocks of creating Reading Apprenticeship communities that extend a culture of literacy beyond individual classrooms. This book explains how to generate authentic buy-in from teachers and administrators, use the Reading Apprenticeship Framework to turn reform overload into reform coherence, and create literacy teams, professional learning communities, and Reading Apprenticeship communities of practice that sustain an institutional focus on a student-centered, strengths-based culture of literacy. Key insights from Reading Apprenticeship practitioners across the country address how to get started, build momentum, assess progress, and build partnerships and networks across schools, districts, campuses, and regions. Persistently low levels of adolescent literacy continue to short-change students, contribute to discredited high school diplomas, and cause millions of students to drop out of high school and community college. Forty percent or more of community college students require remedial reading courses as college freshman. The researchers at WestEd's Strategic Literacy Initiative developed the Reading Apprenticeship Framework to provide educators with a proven path to improving literacy for all students, and this book provides clear guidance on bringing the framework to life. How to integrate Reading Apprenticeship with existing reform efforts How to use formative assessment to promote teacher and student growth How to coach and empower teachers How to cultivate literacy leadership How to provide long-term support for a strong content-literacy program Nationwide classroom testing has shown Reading Apprenticeship to promote not only literacy and content knowledge, but also motivation and positive academic identity—leading to better student outcomes that reach beyond the classroom walls. Leading for Literacy lays out compelling ways to spread the benefits of Reading Apprenticeship, with practical guidance and real-world insight.

Lead your students to success through masterful reading programs! The success of students almost always depends upon their mastery of literacy during the early years of school. This groundbreaking text demonstrates how the development of literacy during the crucial PreK-3 years is fundamentally related to school leadership. Principals, administrators, policymakers, and instructors will all benefit from the 20 years′ worth of research-based and tested information that Murphy compiles. Leadership for Literacy features a comprehensive approach to studying the link between leadership and literary instruction. Four primary areas of scholarship—instructional leadership, quality instruction, school effectiveness, and successful reading programs—are examined. This resource provides school leaders with the tools they need to: Achieve quality literacy programs through effective leadership Focus on the mastery of literacy among young children Influence the political decisions that affect literacy programs Prevent literacy problems in students before they lead to school failure Reach at-risk students and students of all levels and backgrounds Leadership for Learning does more than just prove the connection between leadership and literacy instruction; it demonstrates how successful literacy programs can become a reality in all schools. About the Author: Joseph Murphy is a professor of education at Peabody College of Education at Vanderbilt University. He is also chair of the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC).

Administrators will find a user-friendly, five-stage planning process with six essential rubrics for developing, implementing, monitoring, and sustaining a successful literacy initiative for Grades 4–12.

Simple steps that principals and other school leaders can take to foster literacy in the middle and secondary grades.

This seminal guide to school literacy programs offers an overview of the most successful strategies education leaders can use to build a powerful reading schools.

What makes a moral person moral? Who decides what morality means? What makes leadership practice moral? In today’s schools, what stands as moral leadership? These are questions that reflect the complexity integral to the calculus of human morality, especially in a world that is defined daily by its variant meanings of morality, its acts of immorality. The school as an educational setting is or should be a decidedly moral center of the society; it is the natural intersect between the family and the multi-dimensional nature of public life. Educational Leadership and Moral Literacy addresses these questions, situating the reader in a conversation that examines the meaning and nature of moral leadership through the lens of moral literacy and the dispositional aims of moral leadership in educational settings. The contributing authors extend an argument that the work of leader educators and practitioners alike must continuously be re-articulated around the dispositional aims aligned with a moral, democratic education. Educators must be concerned with developing the moral, intellectual, and aesthetic dimensions of the educational leader as a “moral person.”