Full Description
"This essential guide for educational leaders skillfully blends scholarship with practice and integrates theory with real-world examples. Through case studies, the authors show the reader how to develop, support, and improve a collaborative, inquiry-action process for improving teaching and learning. If we are going to have schools that successfully educate all students to high standards, then we need principals who translate the lessons of this book into practice."
—Andrew Lachman, Executive Director
Connecticut Center for School Change
Enhance learning with a collaborative, inquiry-based system of leadership!
With sociopolitical forces prompting calls for school improvement, school leaders look for ways to expand their expertise in instructional leadership and strengthen their role in shaping classroom practice.
Leading With Inquiry and Action presents a systematic, ongoing process for collecting information, making decisions, and taking action to improve instruction and raise student achievement. The authors illustrate this collaborative inquiry-action cycle with a running vignette of an experienced principal and offer questions and exercises to guide individual reflection and group discussion. Thoroughly grounded in research, this book helps administrators:
Identify areas for instructional improvement
Determine community-supported solutions and build stakeholder commitment
Articulate an action plan based on multiple data sources
Take steps that support teacher development
Systematically evaluate program results
Educational improvement requires informed leadership. This practical guide provides an efficient and functional framework for transforming current or aspiring principals into inquiry-minded, action-oriented instructional leaders.
Contents
Foreword by Richard F. Elmore
Preface
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Part I. From Challenges to Possibilities
1. The Myth of the Great Principal
2. The Collaborative Inquiry-Action Cycle
Part II. The Collaborative Inquiry-Action Cycle in Action
3. What Are We Teaching? A Case of Curricular Alignment
4. What Do We Know? A Case of Data Informing Practice
5. What Do We Do in the Classroom? A Case of Changing Instructional Practice
Part III. Making It Happen
6. Roles the Inquiry-Minded, Action-Oriented Principal Plays
7. You Can Do It! Putting the Collaborative Inquiry-Action Cycle Into Practice
References
Index
