Educational Leadership: Books

Drawing from Louis Farrakhan's decades of teaching on education and leadership this volume brings his ideas into the educational leadership discourse.

Drawing from the ideas of Michel Foucault, this book offers a critical examination of today's dominant discourse of educational leadership. Foucault's understanding of critique is as a 'permanent' ethos in which humans explore the nature of their existence but at the same time query the limits imposed upon them, and probe opportunities for increasing freedom. This book outlines the key concepts in the work of Foucault, and demonstrates how his concepts of discourse, power/knowledge, and governmentality offer an understanding of how ideas of educational leadership and management have emerged.

Educational Leadership for a More Sustainable World argues that current crises in educational policies and practice, including the recruitment and retention of educational leaders, ultimately derive from the interactions between four key challenges which also underpin current global and societal issues of sustainability: A culture of consumption, Global energy demands, Climate change, and Emerging population patterns Mike Bottery argues that problems in dealing with these four global challenges, as well as many crises in education, are in large part due to a failure to appreciate their complex interactions and effects, and of the need for sufficiently complex responses. The result is that many policies in many areas hinder rather than facilitate appropriate solutions. However, by showing that the dynamics of crises in educational sustainability have many similarities to those of global systems, this book argues that the adoption of a number of core practices and values can help educational leaders develop greater sustainability, not only in their own area of activity but can also help them make a valuable contribution to greater sustainability at the global level as well.

This book identifies core knowledge that educational leaders need to learn in pre-service preparation and throughout in-service professional development. The contributors discuss established pedagogical and experiential learning models as well as provocative new paradigms of their own to help prepare leaders and reinforce leadership effectiveness.

School leaders must know how to analyze, interpret, and use data so that they can make informed decisions in all areas of education, ranging from professional development to student learning. This book offers strategies and tools to help launch or fine-tune efforts to become a performance-driven school. Based on the authors' extensive work with 12 schools, the book includes an examination of such essential topics as: establishing a data culture, investing in an information management system, selecting the right data, and analyzing and acting on data to improve performance

This book shares stories of historical figures from the past as well as contemporary school superintendents and principals. The present nature and complexity of leadership is heavily dependent on the past, as we cannot fully understand or appreciate the current context without going back and exploring the past. To ignore great leaders from the past would run the risk of having current and aspiring school leaders not completely knowing, understanding, and appreciating these exemplary lessons the contemporary context. These stories help us to understand the values, beliefs, and morals of contemporary school leaders; they help us define what it means to be a school leader in contemporary America. We can learn history in terms of stories, either through telling stories or listening to the stories of others. But, it is more than telling and listening. It is learning, for not only those who wish to be school leaders, but learning for those who currently are in positions of school leadership.

This book explores the principal's role in meeting high expectations for student achievement. It provides detailed tips and strategies to show you what principals need to do to: assess and promote a culture and climate for school improvement, build teams and support the work their work, create the conditions so that teacher leaders can emerge, and monitor school improvement efforts.

In these times of rapid change, including a global pandemic, educational leaders need tools and frameworks that can adapt to evolving shifts in real time. What might happen if a leadership framework could make sense of this complexity in ways that are humane, ethical, culturally responsive, and multifaceted? This book examines how a flux leadership mindset and corresponding tools promote the conditions for educational change that uplift stakeholders and generate contextualized data during emergency situations. The educational leaders at the heart of this book employed a flux leadership tool through a process called "rapid-cycle inquiry," which allows for collaborative inquiries to take place in real time to answer tough questions and surface stories that are often silenced in times of sudden change. Featuring narratives of what happened to schools during COVID-19, Flux Leadership introduces a generative framework for agile, responsive, anti-racist, trauma-informed, healing-centered leadership for times of crisis and beyond.

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.

Blending Leadership provides all school leaders with a unique approach to utilizing technology for more effective learning and leadership. As the online aspects of schools become just as important as their brick-and-mortar counterparts, leaders must be as effective screen-to-screen as they are face-to-face. Drawing from research, experience, and real-world examples, this book explores and unpacks six core beliefs necessary for the blended leader to succeed. Between email, websites, apps, updates, tweets, attachments, infographics, YouTube, and unceasing notifications, most people are inundated with digital detritus, and they either grow to ignore it or get swept under it. Effective blended leaders see these distractions as spurs to action, models, test cases, remixable commodities, and learning opportunities. Blending Leadership gives you the perspective you need to excel and the knowledge to leverage the tools at your disposal.

Today's school principals are charged with the responsibility of creating learning organizations that emphasize success for all students. Framing decisions in standards that are grounded in research and best practice, this book provides a structure for learning and growth for both current and aspiring principals.

The benefits of distributed leadership are yours with this research-based change process. Distributed leadership-engaging the many rather than the few in school improvement-has long been a promising theory. It's time to make it a reality. This book shows why harnessing educators' collective expertise leads to better student outcomes, and details the collaborative processes to make distributed leadership happen.