Principal’s Leadership Resource Pack

The books included in this insightful pack are:

– The Principal 50: Critical Leadership Questions for Inspiring Schoolwide Excellence: Why do I lead? With this deceptively simple question, best-selling author Baruti K. Kafele begins a powerful examination of what it takes to make a school community achieve the greatest success in the classroom and beyond. In The Principal 50: Critical Leadership Questions for Inspiring Schoolwide Excellence, Kafele, a veteran school administrator, guides motivated school leaders through 50 self-reflection exercises designed to yield a deeper understanding of the meaning behind the work that they do. Brimming with passion, written from the heart, and informed by hard-earned experience, this transformative book is essential reading for principals and other building-level administrators determined to reinvigorate their practice, revitalize their staff, and—most importantly—guarantee the strongest outcomes for students.

– School Culture Rewired: School Culture Rewired – How to Define, Assess, and Transform It: Your school is a lot more than a centre of student learning—it also represents a self-contained culture, with traditions and expectations that reflect its unique mission and demographics. In this groundbreaking book, education experts Steve Gruenert and Todd Whitaker offer tools, strategies, and advice for defining, assessing, and ultimately transforming your school’s culture into one that is positive, forward-looking, and actively working to enrich students’ lives. Though often invisible to the naked eye, a school’s culture influences everything that takes place under its roof. Whether your school is urban or rural, prosperous or struggling, School Culture Rewired is the ultimate guide to making sure that the culture in your school is guided first and foremost by what’s best for your students.

– Formative Classroom Walkthroughs – How Principals And Teachers Collaborate To Raise Student Achievement: Revolutionise the walk-through to focus on the endgame of teaching: student learning. Authors Connie M. Moss and Susan M. Brookhart present the proven practice of formative walkthroughs that ask and answer questions that are specific to what the student is learning and doing. Drawing upon their research and extensive work with K–12 teachers and administrators, Moss and Brookhart delve into the learning target theory of action that debuted in Learning Targets: Helping Students Aim for Understanding in Today’s Lesson and show you how to develop a school-wide collaborative culture that enhances the learning of teachers, administrators, coaches, and students. They present detailed examples of how formative walkthroughs work across grade levels and subject areas, and provide useful templates that administrators and coaches can use to get started—now. Grounded in the beliefs that schools improve when educators improve and that the best evidence of improvement comes from what we see students doing to learn in every lesson, every day, Formative Classroom Walkthroughs offers a path to improvement that makes sense—and makes a difference.

– Sparking Student Creativity: Teaching isn’t merely transmitting knowledge to students; it’s also about teaching students to approach learning in engaging and unexpected ways. In Sparking Student Creativity: Practical Ways to Promote Innovative Thinking and Problem Solving, author and researcher Patti Drapeau explores and explains research related to creativity and its relevance in today’s standards-based, critical thinking–focused classroom. The book vividly and comprehensively shows: how creative lessons can meet and extend the expectations of curriculum standards such as the Common Core State Standards;  how to incorporate creativity and assessment into daily classroom practices; how to develop a “Creativity Road Map” to guide instruction; and how to design lessons that prompt and support creative thinking. In addition, the book includes 40 “grab and go” ideas that infuse lesson plans with a spirit of exploration. No matter what grade levels or content areas you teach, Sparking Student Creativity will help you to produce creative lesson components that directly address critical content, target specific standards, and require thoughtful products from students as they grow into independent learners and become successful students and adults.

– Change Leader – Learning What To Do What Matters Most: We live in a challenging, complex, inter-connected and unpredictable world beset by a range of seemingly insoluble problems. But, says Michael Fullan—an internationally acclaimed authority on organisational change—we have an increasing understanding of how to tackle complex change. This involves developing a new kind of leader: one who recognises what is needed to bring about deep and lasting changes in living systems at all levels. These leaders need a deep understanding of what motivates us as human beings and how we tap into and influence other people’s self-motivation. Throughout the book Fullan argues that powerful leaders have built bedrocks of credibility, have learned how to identify the few things that matter most, and know how to leverage their skills in ways that benefit their entire organisation. The author shows leaders how to avoid policies and strategies that focus on shallow and short-term goals and develop leadership skills for long-term success. With a wealth of illustrative examples from business, education, nonprofit, and government sectors Change Leader provides a much-needed leadership guide for today’s turbulent climate.

– Building Teachers Capacity For Success – A Collaborative Approach For Coaches And School Leaders: Educators know that teachers are a school’s most essential strength. In Building Teachers’ Capacity for Success, authors Pete Hall (winner of the 2004 ASCD Outstanding Young Educator Award) and Alisa Simeral offer a straightforward plan to help site-based administrators and instructional coaches collaborate to bring out the best in every teacher, build a stronger and more cohesive staff, and achieve greater academic success. Their model of Strength-Based School Improvement is an alternative to a negative, deficit-approach focused on fixing what’s wrong. Instead, they show school leaders how to achieve their goals by working together to maximise what’s right. Filled with clear, proven strategies and organised around two easy-to-use tools—the innovative Continuum of Self-Reflection and a feedback-focused walk-through model—this book offers a differentiated approach to coaching and supervision centred on identifying and nurturing teachers’ individual strengths and helping them reach new levels of professional success and satisfaction. Here, you’ll find front-line advice from the authors, one a principal and the other an instructional coach, on just what to look for, do, and say in order to start seeing positive results right now.