The quality of school leadership has a big impact on improvement and inspection outcomes. Good school leaders ensure that their teachers have the resources they need to be successful. They also create a positive culture where teachers feel supported and appreciated. This leads to better morale and higher retention rates. Additionally, good school leaders can effectively communicate the school's vision to all stakeholders. This ensures that everyone is on the same page and working towards the same goals. Restructuring Leadership for School Improvement and Reform investigates cooperation, staff development, resource supply, vision transparency, workplace stress management, and professional development for school leaders as methods for creating a healthy school culture. This premier reference source is ideal for administrators, instructional designers, researchers, academicians, scholars, practitioners, instructors, and students.

"Schlechty's common-sense approach to restructuring is combined with a strategic planner's vision and the translation of beliefs into action... A wide audience, including principals and superintAndents, can find in this book practical outlines for restructuring, and a distinctive and focused view of their role in the educational system sof the twenty-first century." --The School Administrator Schlechty provides an innovative, adaptable framework for helping leaders in all areas of education to identify where change is needed in order to make schools more useful and responsive to children and society.

Increase student learning by developing teacher leaders! Research over the years has consistently identified leadership as a critical component of school change and, as initiatives to reform the educational system have emerged, one significant line of work emphasizes teachers assuming greater leadership roles within their organizations. Connecting Teacher Leadership and School Improvement is the first book to synthesize theoretical, empirical, and practice-based literature in order to provide a comprehensive look at what is known about teacher leadership and what works to support it. The first part of the book explores the core concepts of teacher leadership, while the second part shows readers how to establish the context in their school or district to cultivate and support teacher leaders. A vital piece of equipment in the school improvement toolbox, this book covers such important topics as: The principal's critical role in supporting teacher leadershipCultivating teacher leadership through professional developmentOvercoming organizational barriers that hinder teacher leadershipHow teacher leadership can help advance school improvement efforts Presenting a comprehensive model of this successful change strategy, author Joseph Murphy examines the ideological and empirical basis of teacher leadership and offers strategies to help teachers and principals create productive relationships that will strengthen our nation's schools.

Through specific examples, qualitative research, and portraiture, the author illustrates how and why some schools are able to achieve significant, sustainable change while others cannot.

This report examines a 30-year history of educational change to identify differing perspectives, strategies, and useful principles. The three most influential perspectives in educational change are the rational-scientific perspective, which proposes that change is created through the dissemination of innovative techniques; the political perspective, which generates change through legislation and other directives outside the school district; and the cultural perspective which seeks improvement through value changes in organizations. There are four strategies for implementing change: fix the parts, fix the people, fix the schools, and fix the system. Systemic education reform offers new hope because it brings together the technical knowledge needed for improvement with a locally sensitive education strategy. Through the Goals 2000 Initiative, the U.S. Department of Education supports reform efforts within the framework of the six National Education Goals. The Department and the Office of Educational Research and Improvement support standards-based assessment techniques. They also assist states in developing curriculum frameworks and help disseminate sound research and practice-based knowledge. A reference bibliography, illustrative programs, and additional sources are included. (JPT)

While many factors influence the success rate of schools, none are more influential than the impact of effective local school leadership by way of a principal. Socio-Cultural Leadership suggests many aspects that impact effective school leadership; however none are more substantial than the following tenets of Socio-Cultural Leadership: As the instructional leader, the principal must supervise and evaluate instruction to make sure that students are given optimal learning opportunities. As the emotional leader, the principal must ensure that teachers are intellectually equipped, emotionally stimulated, and encouraged to assume decision-making positions of leadership in schools to increase student achievement. As a community leader, the principal must inspire and/or provide incentives for student-centered communal learning. As the facilitator of culture, the principal must also realize the limitations of leadership on student achievement and begin to shape and reshape school culture. Socio-Cultural Leadership is the result of a four-year-long immersion into school improvement efforts from around the world, not to mention my own experiences as a teacher, assistant principal, principal, district trainer, director of school improvement, and adjunct professor.

Combining both the theory as well as the practice of the education reform process, this unique breakthrough volume focuses on every aspect of the change process in high school education today. Short- and long-term strategies for each phase of the process-provoking, creating, managing, supporting, and sustaining reform-are covered. Based on the real-life experiences of the author and others, this book recognizes that most high school reform is short-lived. It stresses the ways to create and maintain positive change, making the process a long-lasting, worthwhile mission for the school's leadership and ultimately the students. Short, useful summaries of high school reform provide true-life pictures of what really happens in the midst of changing the way educational institutions operate. These stories cover school-based management, collaborative or shared leadership, school-within-a-school groupings, interdisciplinary instruction, school-based budgeting, new models for professional development, and others. Through these examples, readers can understand how reform strategies work and how to apply and adapt them to their own situations. As an added feature, this book provides the names and locations of schools attempting each reform as well as the names and addresses of school reform networks that readers can contact in their own efforts.