Leverage Leadership 2.0

A Practical Guide to Building Exceptional Schools

Paul Bambrick-Santoyo

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119496601
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

Cut through the mystique to learn the real drivers of great school leadership

Leverage Leadership 2.0 answers the basic question: what do great school leaders do that separates them from the rest? Rooted in the observation and training of over 20, 000 school leaders worldwide, Leverage Leadership 2.0 offers a practical, updated and easier-to-use follow-up to the original, with field-tested techniques and actionable advice. As educational leaders around the world implement Leverage Leadership ideas, their collective stories have revealed a simple framework by which the seven levers may be implemented: See It, Name It, Do It. This book aligns classic Leverage Leadership principles with this proven framework to streamline implementation and help good leaders become great. Expert discussion and real-life success stories prove that effective leadership is not about innate charisma, charm, or personality—it's about how a leader uses their time.

Aimed at all levels of school leadership, this book shows you what to do, and how and when to do it. The companion DVD includes 30 real-world videos that showcase effective leadership happening in our schools right now, and all templates, tools, and other professional development materials have been fully refreshed with a renewed focus on real-world implementation. Informational, inspirational, and highly motivational, this book explores both the separate components of success and what it looks like as a whole.

• Learn the core principles of effective leadership
• Understand what success looks like on the ground
• Practice the seven levers of leadership that allow transformational growth
• Adopt the tools and techniques that facilitate a schoolwide transformation

Educational leaders from a diverse array of schools around the world have found unprecedented success using the key principles detailed in Leverage Leadership, and this book is inspired — and informed — by their stories. Leverage Leadership 2.0 is the practical resource school leaders need to start making real change happen today.

Part 1
Instruction

Chapter 1
Data-Driven Instruction

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Peer-to-Peer: Thirty Minutes That Tell It All

One of the most remarkable places to observe at Truesdell Education Campus in Washington, DC, is not just the classroom but the conference room. At 11:15 on a Monday morning, the third-grade team has gathered during their prep period around the conference table, accompanied by principal Mary Ann Green Stinson. The walls are not covered with beautiful pictures but rather by multiple charts from previous meetings. You see charts describing what students need to know and do around fractions as well as how to write an effective argument after reading a passage. That is where the teachers' attention is now.

As one teacher is charting, the others are scanning the chart to identify the biggest gap in student learning. One by one, the teachers speak up, unassuming but confident. “I think they could benefit from more work on sentence expansion,” says one teacher, Ms. Mack. “They're expressing ideas, but they're not extending them by using ‘because.’”

Another teacher nods. “You can see in the second example, there's kind of a big run-on because they're not using the sentence expansion correctly,” she says. “And also, the selection of evidence here is not necessarily text-dependent.”

Mary Ann nods. “So thinking about some of those misconceptions, what do you think the one key misconception is that we should focus on for the reteach?” A third teacher, Ms. Isaac, speaks up. “I think, looking big-picture, it's twofold,” she says. “Selection of text-dependent evidence, and then expanding that, explaining.”

“Okay,” Mary Ann agrees. From there, the group goes on to plan their reteach, developing a concrete action plan to address what their students still need the most support to learn.

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WATCH Clip 2: Stinson—See It, Name It (Gap)—Weekly Data Meeting

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In 2010, Mary Ann Green Stinson was seeking a job as a principal in Washington, DC. She'd been inspired by her work in the classroom and as an assistant principal in Richmond, Virginia, and she was eager to be in a position where she could impact more children's lives. The only trouble was, the chancellor of DC Public Schools wasn't sure where to place Mary Ann.

“Just give me your toughest school,” Mary Ann told the chancellor. Somewhat reluctantly, the chancellor agreed.

That's how Mary Ann began her career at Truesdell Education Campus. As she walked through the school prior to starting, she understood all too well why her supervisor had hesitated to place a first-year principal at this site. The conditions were, as she puts it now, “chaotic,” making her concerned not only for students' education but also for their safety. Academics were suffering so deeply that 80 percent of students were reading below grade level, and some students were expressing their frustrations at school violently. Mary Ann came away from those early visits with a nonnegotiable mission: “to guarantee Truesdell was a safe place to teach and learn.”

So Mary Ann dove into her new leadership role with two sharply pointed areas of focus: student culture and student learning. You'll read more about student culture in Chapter 5; for learning, Mary Ann asked herself two basic questions:

• How do we know whether students are learning?
• And when they're not, what do we do?

“We had to fix instruction,” recalls Mary Ann. “With so many students falling behind, that was a tier 1 move.” That meant that even with so many different demands on Mary Ann's time and energy to improve student culture, she also had to ensure that she was focusing on learning: “I had to transition from being a disciplinarian to being an instructional leader.” That act of tuning into learning can be called data-driven instruction.

Over the course of the next few years, the impact of Mary Ann's work was stunning. Right away, she and her colleagues began seeing children move, slowly but surely, from below grade level to almost on grade level to unquestionably on target. Today, more Truesdell students than ever before are reading on grade level—and those numbers are still climbing (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Washington, DC, Assessment: Truesdell Education Campus, Percentage at or Above Proficiency

In just a few short years, Mary Ann completely altered the learning environment—and outcome...