The School Leadership Playbook

A Field Guide for Dramatic Improvement

Jean Desravines, Benjamin Fenton

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781119044215
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119044253
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

A proven framework for whole-school improvement

The School Leadership Playbook is a practical guide for education leaders looking to push their school's and students' achievement to the next level. Developed by renowned leadership preparation program New Leaders, the Transformational Leadership Framework focuses on the five categories that drive a school's success: Learning and Teaching, School Culture, Talent Management, Operations and Systems, and Personal Leadership. This book illustrates how each of these factors contributes to breakthrough gains, and outlines a plan for implementing changes in your own school. You'll learn how to accurately diagnose the current state of your school's academics and culture and create an action plan for the year ahead. The TLF is grounded in the latest research and case studies of the highest-gaining turnaround schools, and shows you the specific actions you can take to attract, retain, and support high-performing teachers; improve school culture; successfully involve parents and the community; and ultimately drive student success.

New Leaders developed the UEF to pinpoint what schools achieving significant student academic gains were doing, and how they were doing it. This book provides a practical breakdown of the framework to help you begin leading these changes in your own school.

• Ensure rigorous goal- and data-driven teaching and learning
• Build and manage a high-performance faculty aligned to the school's vision
• Implement effective and efficient operations and systems
• Model the tone you would like to see from students and teachers school-wide

By matching the needs of the school to effective principal actions and school practices, leaders can create a plan for transformational change.

Chapter 1
Learning and Teaching

THE LEARNING AND TEACHING CATEGORY DESCRIBES STRATEGIES and practices adults can use to plan for and provide the content necessary to prepare students for college.

As we have learned from our experience in selecting, training, and supporting leaders, highly effective principals work with their teachers to improve the quality of instruction through four levers:

• Aligning curriculum to both state and college-readiness standards
• Ensuring consistent and high-quality classroom practices, routines, and instructional strategies
• Utilizing diverse student-level data to drive instructional improvement
• Focusing on student-centered instruction

In schools that are improving student achievement rates, leaders and their teams work to ensure that research-based curriculum and instruction align to the specific learning goals of their students, while working to help students meet and exceed expectations. Using either district-level or school-created curriculum, these schools work to develop common definitions of rigor that are well understood throughout the building and are translated into rigorous units of study that guide the day-to-day planning of teachers.

Over time, how students are taught is increasingly consistent across classrooms, teachers improve their planning to maximize instructional time, and instruction is designed to meet the needs of individual students while not compromising expectations.

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TRANSFORMATIONAL PRINCIPALS IN ACTION

Claudette Yarbrough

To align instruction across classrooms, all new and returning teachers at Higgs, Carter, King Gifted & Talented Charter Academy in San Antonio, Texas, participated in a learning session focused on schoolwide routines for organizing and planning lessons and on classroom management of students. Principal Claudette Yarbrough set the agenda and led much of the training herself. Yarbrough said that because she was personally involved, she could “make sure that the teachers know what I expect them to know. I know what gets said in the training and what we train on, so I can hold people accountable.” Throughout the training, Yarbrough employed techniques and activities that she expected teachers to employ in the classroom with their students. She said, “In the school's first several years, I didn't lead the summer training. I just planned it. But I saw that many teachers still didn't know what was expected of them after the training. There had been too much telling and explaining during the training sessions and not enough good teaching. Teachers had been told what to do, but not shown how to do it. My goal now is to model the kind of teaching we expect to see in our classrooms.”

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Teachers also modify instruction based on ongoing review of data generated by student work, checks for understanding, assessments, and projects.

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TRANSFORMATIONAL PRINCIPALS IN ACTION

Tatiana Epanchin-Troyan

New Leader Principal Tatiana Epanchin-Troyan of Monarch Academy in Oakland, California, realized that having teacher teams analyze data together set a collegial and supportive environment where teachers could look to their peers for ideas on how to teach content, so she established a system of convening grade-level team meetings that facilitate meaningful collaboration within her teacher teams. Their grade-level meetings, called Data Talks, are structured conversations during which teachers work together to analyze students' formative and interim assessment data to track mastery of content and skills. To support high-quality conversations that are driven by data, Epanchin-Troyan developed and shared a common set of protocols for analyzing student data and targeting instruction based on the findings. During the Data Talks, teachers are expected to offer each other support in analyzing the data to determine where the weaknesses are and to give advice on developing strategies to address those needs.

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Students who have not yet mastered content are given extra support in small groups during class time and are referred to additional tiers of intervention as needed. These interventions buoy students who are performing below grade level, so as to facilitate their ability to make more than one year of progress.

Throughout the Learning and Teaching category, we describe how these four levers support instruction that prepares students for success in the twenty-first century.

LEVER 1: Aligned curriculum

ACTION 1: Scope and Sequence

	PRINCIPAL ACTIONS	SCHOOL ACTIONS
STAGE 1	Articulate a common definition of rigor in order to develop a shared understanding of what rigorous student work looks like in every course and grade Ensure that curriculum maps clearly recommend pacing and address standards for each grade level and content area Iden...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• About the Authors
• About New Leaders
• Leadership for School Improvement
• Chapter 1: Learning and Teaching
• Chapter 2: School Culture
• Chapter 3: Talent Management
• Chapter 4: Operations and Planning
• Chapter 5: Personal Leadership
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Methodology of the New Leaders Research Study
• Glossary
• Bibliography and Works Cited
• Index
• End User License Agreement