A Principal Manager's Guide to Leverage Leadership 2.0

How to Build Exceptional Schools Across Your District

Paul Bambrick-Santoyo

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781119496649
• eBook ISBN: 9781119496656
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Build better schools by training better leaders

A Principal Manager ' s Guide to Leverage Leadership answers the question that district leaders have been asking across the country: if Leverage Leadership is a roadmap for principals on how to lead great schools, what can principal managers and districts do to support them on that path? A Principal Manager ' s Guide to Leverage Leadership offers a step-by-step guide to coaching principals to the highest levels of achievement, and it is rooted in studying the most successful principal managers and districts across the country. It can be used by principal managers/supervisors, superintendents, district and state leadership, and principal training organizations to accelerate the growth of principals in your community. Used in conjunction with Leverage Leadership 2.0, this book identifies the key actions principal managers should take to create exceptional school leaders, integrating the seven levers of leadership into district culture from the principal manager on up. With a particular emphasis on the two "super-levers" of data-driven instruction and student culture, this book is packed with advice, professional development materials, and real-world videos of principal managers in action, offering principal managers a valuable resource for bringing about change.

A Principal Manager's Guide to Leverage Leadership introduces a new unifying approach that is also highlighted in Leverage Leadership 2.0: See It, Name It, Do It. It gives you the tools to See it (see models of effective practice and identify gaps), Name it (name concrete actions for improvement) and Do it (provide means to practice these action steps until a principal masters them)

With A Principal Manager ' s Guide to Leverage Leadership in hand, principal managers, superintendents and principal training organizations can facilitate district-wide and state-wide transformations and hasten the benefit to the students and community as a whole.

Part 1
What to Coach

Chapter 1
A Primer on Leverage Leadership

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Stop Here

This chapter is a primer on the seven levers of leadership as captured in Leverage Leadership 2.0. If you have already read Leverage Leadership 2.0, feel free to skip this chapter. Reading Leverage Leadership 2.0 before you dive into this book will give you the most complete understanding of this book, as it will give you common language to describe the best practices of effective principals. However, if time is not on your side, we offer this primer to you. So, depending on your level of familiarity with Leverage Leadership 2.0, skip to Chapter 2 or keep reading!

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Lifting the Super-Levers

August 2017: The Student Culture Rehearsal

Annie Webb Blanton Elementary School looks ready for the beginning of a school day. It's 7:30 a.m., teachers are placing a healthy breakfast on each desk, and desks are arranged with a brightly colored name tag for every student. Those seats are even occupied—but not by the students. That's because it's 7:30 a.m. several days before school starts, and the staff of Blanton are on campus to rehearse exactly what they'll have to do when the students arrive to make sure everything goes smoothly.

Walking up and down the halls is principal Laura Garza, praising her staff for what they're already getting right—and delivering quick feedback on what she wants to see improved by the real Day 1. “Nice posture,” she tells fourth-grade teacher Tania Fuentes, smiling. At another classroom door, she points to a teacher who is playing the role of a reluctant student, prompting that “student's” teacher, Nancy Cazares, to address her behavior.

After the staff has rehearsed the entire breakfast routine, Laura pauses the rehearsal and brings her teachers together. “How did what we practice reflect the action plan we named when we first rolled out our breakfast routine?” she asks her team. One teacher, Emily Sapoch, shares that rehearsing the breakfast routine so quickly made her realize how efficient it was, and how it would set a tone of urgency for the whole school day. Nancy—the same teacher whom Laura prompted to make a behavioral correction—says that clear expectations of what students should be doing during breakfast made it easier to know what to say and do during a redirect.

Laura beams. “Excellent,” she says. “Well done, everyone! Let's move into the next phase of our rehearsal. On my signal, transition to classrooms!”

October 2017: The Weekly Data Meeting

A few months into the school year, Laura Garza is meeting with her first-grade team. Each teacher has come prepared with recent samples of student work, which they're now reviewing together.

One teacher, Katherine Dominick, excitedly shares that most of the students in her class who have been struggling with a new guided reading skill—keeping track of character change in a story—have now mastered it. “What seemed to make the difference was prompting them to state how the character was different at the beginning versus the end,” she says. Another teacher, Mauricio Garcia, says this prompt has been effective in his classroom as well, and everyone has the opportunity to share the progress his or her students have made since the previous week's data meeting.

Laura joins in celebrating these successes with her teachers, pointing out that the strategies students are now able to use successfully reflect that they have overcome a key conceptual misunderstanding that had been holding them back from mastering standards. “We flagged last week that they were having trouble keeping track of changes over the course of the story, and now they're improving,” she says. “Well done, everyone! Now let's take a look at the students who are still struggling with this. What is the gap between what these successful students are doing and what's happening with the students who still aren't comprehending?”

For the next two minutes, teachers quietly look back over incorrect student work, looking for key conceptual misunderstandings. Then they share out, pooling their knowledge about their students to find the best next steps. Katherine comments, “The root issue might be that they're still struggling with cause and effect—that's something we flagged for both Sofia and Victor earlier in the year.”

The group nods, and Laura asks: “So how shou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for A Principal Manager's Guide to Leverage Leadership 2.0
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• DVD Video Content
• DVD Additional Materials
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Introduction
• Part 1: What to Coach
• Part 2: How to Coach
• Part 3: Systems
• Part 4: Professional Development
• Index
• End User License Agreement