Mismeasuring Schools’ Vital Signs

Mismeasuring Schools’ Vital Signs
Author: Steve Rees
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2022-09-29
Genre: Education
ISBN: 100064779X

This book helps school and district leaders avoid the pitfalls that await those making sense of their school’s data. Whether you're interpreting achievement gaps, graduation rates or test results, you're at risk of reaching a mistaken judgment. By learning about common errors and how they’re made, you'll be ready to choose safer, surer paths to making better sense of the wealth of data in your school or district. The authors help educators build better evidence, see conclusions more clearly, and explain the data more persuasively. Special features Include: "Questions to Spark Discussion" in each chapter encourage school site, district leaders, and board trustees to apply each chapter’s content to their own situations. Data visualizations, together with the authors’ interpretations, will help you learn how to do visual analysis (and reach the right conclusions). Practical tips provide clear guidance. Supplemental resources can be found at the book’s website, k12measures.com, including interactive data visualizations and analytic exercises to help you learn a concept by "doing."

Finding Your Path as a Woman in School Leadership

Finding Your Path as a Woman in School Leadership
Author: Kim Cofino
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2023-12-22
Genre: Education
ISBN: 100383180X

Featuring the experiences of over 70 successful female leaders in international, public, and private schools around the world, Finding Your Path as a Woman in School Leadership brings together interconnected stories about the realities of being a woman in K–12 school leadership today. Women face distinct and unique challenges in pursuing a leadership pathway in schools; unfortunately, most of the obstacles facing women are hidden and only become visible when encountered on the journey to leadership. This book uncovers these invisible obstacles and shares the personal journeys of real women who have overcome them. Chapters feature powerful stories woven together to provide takeaway strategies and address common themes for women in leadership, including unconscious bias and daily microaggressions; physical, linguistic, and cultural expectations of leaders; perception (or reality) of lack of opportunities for women; impostor syndrome and double standards; and availability of mentorship and guidance. This impactful book provides actionable steps for both aspiring leaders and established leaders ready to support growing leaders in their school communities.

When Black Students Excel

When Black Students Excel
Author: Joseph F. Johnson, Jr.
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2022-11-18
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1000771709

This book draws from the successes of award-winning schools, teachers, students, and parents to help leaders understand how they can positively change the educational experience of Black students. When Black Students Excel offers real-life examples of outstanding elementary, middle, and high schools where teachers and school leaders have rejected policies and practices built upon deficit perceptions about the capacity of Black students. Chapters highlight leadership implications and offer specific suggestions for educators who are seeking to transform their schools in ways that advance the success of Black students. This practical guide includes questions to ask students and their parents, self-assessment tools, and an array of leadership and teaching practices that are effective to empower Black students, elevate school attendance and academic engagement, and improve other important outcomes. Unpacking important themes that influence the success of Black students, this book is a useful tool for educators who are seeking to understand how they can change programs, procedures, and practices in ways that engage and empower Black students.

Coaching Education Leaders

Coaching Education Leaders
Author: Nancy B. Gutiérrez
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 151
Release: 2024-10-07
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1040124941

This exciting book is designed to help coaches, or individuals in a coaching and/or capacity-building role, support educators in becoming culturally responsive leaders. Coaching Education Leaders describes a unique Facilitative Competency-Based Coaching approach formulated by the nationally recognized nonprofit organization The Leadership Academy. Using six Equity Leadership Dispositions as its foundation, this model helps educators identify and directly address inequities in their schools to ensure the academic, social, and emotional success of all students. The strategies in this book help coaches plan the full arc of the coaching experience, from identifying goals and assessing progress, to designing each session to meet the individual learning needs of their coachees. To bring these coaching ideas to life, this book shares real stories from the field, illustrating the coach-leader relationship and takeaway tools for readers to immediately apply in their own work. The authors share practical coaching techniques to create a safe learning space and engage coachees in the deeper levels of dialogue required to identify and address systems-level adaptive challenges. This self-paced guide to coaching educators is a key resource for anyone interested in developing others’ for the sake of creating meaningful and sustainable change in their schools, school systems, and in the leaders who lead both.

Lead with Truth

Lead with Truth
Author: Qiana O'Leary
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 121
Release: 2022-12-30
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1000816672

The sacrificial nature of juggling instructional, operational, managerial, and collegial goals often leaves school leaders feeling so desperate to resolve conflicts that they lose self, abandoning their core values and forgetting their "why." In this timely and impactful resource, author and professor "Dr. O" draws on her own leadership journey– a journey where she remained true to her beliefs and commitment to serve BIPOC communities, even when that meant choosing the road less traveled--offering nine anchor principles to help guide educational leaders in returning to their core values; communicate and build trusting relationships with staff members, students, and parents; and recognize their self-worth beyond their role on school campuses. Lead with Truth is an interactive text that invites you to identify learning objectives and reflect on guided questions throughout the chapters, each of which ends in activities geared to help you make personal connections with the content. This engaging resource is for current and aspiring school leaders who aim to make lifelong impacts and transform their practice, while remaining true to their own beliefs.

A Leadership Playbook for Addressing Rapid Change in Education

A Leadership Playbook for Addressing Rapid Change in Education
Author: Teresa L. San Martin
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2023-03-17
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1000841782

A Leadership Playbook for Addressing Rapid Change in Education provides educational leaders with a simple, step-by-step approach for addressing rapid change. Drawing on the model of appreciative inquiry, this book provides detailed examples of educational problems and provides the who, what, where, when, why, and how to achieve change. Author Teresa L. San Martín emphasizes the traits of outstanding and exceptional leaders: trust; collaborative efforts; communicating with empathy and care. Detailed play-by-play examples are provided that show how school administrators are able to solve relevant problems of practice such as how to create productive and focused high school teacher teams, how educational leaders can increase teacher retention, and how district administrators can provide innovative and meaningful staff development opportunities. This timely book—which supports educators as they continue to grapple with the effects of the pandemic—provides real solutions, equipping school administrators with the tools necessary to confront perpetual change occurring in today’s complex educational environment.

The Principal as Human Resources Leader

The Principal as Human Resources Leader
Author: M. Scott Norton
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2014-07-17
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1317688457

Increasingly, personnel administrative duties within schools have been delegated to the local school principal. This accessible book arms school leaders with the knowledge and skills required to be an effective human resources leader and shows them how to fold these additional duties seamlessly into their daily routines. This practical resource provides school administrators with guidance on personnel selection, growth and development, orientation and placement, school climate, legal processes, leadership for classified staff and other important human resources processes. Special Features: • Grounded in extensive research and interviews with practicing principals • Provides a wealth of examples, strategies, tips, and best practices for leading the human resources function at the school level • Chapter exercises and case studies explore the skills and knowledge needed for effective human resource leadership • Details the significance of developing a positive school climate • Legal aspects of human resources administration are made digestible and understandable

The Mismeasure of Man (Revised and Expanded)

The Mismeasure of Man (Revised and Expanded)
Author: Stephen Jay Gould
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 458
Release: 2006-06-17
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0393340406

The definitive refutation to the argument of The Bell Curve. When published in 1981, The Mismeasure of Man was immediately hailed as a masterwork, the ringing answer to those who would classify people, rank them according to their supposed genetic gifts and limits. And yet the idea of innate limits—of biology as destiny—dies hard, as witness the attention devoted to The Bell Curve, whose arguments are here so effectively anticipated and thoroughly undermined by Stephen Jay Gould. In this edition Dr. Gould has written a substantial new introduction telling how and why he wrote the book and tracing the subsequent history of the controversy on innateness right through The Bell Curve. Further, he has added five essays on questions of The Bell Curve in particular and on race, racism, and biological determinism in general. These additions strengthen the book's claim to be, as Leo J. Kamin of Princeton University has said, "a major contribution toward deflating pseudo-biological 'explanations' of our present social woes."

Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice

Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice
Author: Ingrid Robeyns
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2017-12-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1783744243

How do we evaluate ambiguous concepts such as wellbeing, freedom, and social justice? How do we develop policies that offer everyone the best chance to achieve what they want from life? The capability approach, a theoretical framework pioneered by the philosopher and economist Amartya Sen in the 1980s, has become an increasingly influential way to think about these issues. Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice: The Capability Approach Re-Examined is both an introduction to the capability approach and a thorough evaluation of the challenges and disputes that have engrossed the scholars who have developed it. Ingrid Robeyns offers her own illuminating and rigorously interdisciplinary interpretation, arguing that by appreciating the distinction between the general capability approach and more specific capability theories or applications we can create a powerful and flexible tool for use in a variety of academic disciplines and fields of policymaking. This book provides an original and comprehensive account that will appeal to scholars of the capability approach, new readers looking for an interdisciplinary introduction, and those interested in theories of justice, human rights, basic needs, and the human development approach.