This Toolkit is a professional development tool for individuals or groups. It is designed to help policy makers, practitioners and relevant stakeholders to analyse their current school leadership policies and practices and develop a common ...

First published in 2011. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book explores what specialists are saying about system leadership for school improvement. Case studies examine innovative approaches to sharing leadership and to leadership development programmes for system improvement.

Based on an OECD study of school leadership practices and policies around the world, this book identifies four policy levers and a range of policy options to help governments improve school leadership now and build sustainable leadership for the future.

Leading for Instructional Improvement Educational experts agree that quality teaching is the single most important factor in improving educational outcomes for all students. Teaching is a highly sophisticated and complex endeavor requiring deep expertise on the part of teachers and school leaders. This book shows how teacher, school, and district leaders can cultivate the expertise of teachers to deliver high quality instruction for all students. Leading for Instructional Improvement captures the nationally acclaimed work conducted by the Center for Educational Leadership at the University of Washington in its effort to improve the quality of teaching and leadership in schools across the country. The book provides extensive practical guidance grounded in theory and research, along with powerful stories and examples from classrooms, schools, and districts. Many of the tools, protocols, and frameworks contained in this book can be accessed electronically by visiting the Center for Educational Leadership website at www.k-12leadership.org. Praise for Leading for Instructional Improvement "This book offers insights that are invaluable to educators who seek to enhance teacher effectiveness now. The ideas presented are practical and applicable to schools in a variety of settings." PEDRO A. NOGUERA, Ph.D., Peter L. Agnew Professor of Education, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Development and executive director, Metropolitan Center for Urban Education "A deep and thoughtful look at how the issue of expertise is cultivated. Seizing upon their Center's research-based instructional framework, the authors provide important insights and tools." DR. BEVERLY HALL, superintendent, Atlanta Public Schools "In this age of intense focus on how we evaluate teachers, we have to remember that any evaluation is only as good as the evaluator. This extremely useful book provides an excellent roadmap for how principals can become more effective in the most important aspect of their work, instructional leadership." JERRY D. WEAST, Ed.D., superintendent of schools, Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland "Fink and Markholt offer practitioners a guide to effective teaching. Leading for Instructional Improvement asks us to heed the lessons within and support the kind of teacher education that will improve student achievement for today's schools and those of tomorrow." BARNETT BERRY, president, Center for Teaching Quality

The School Portfolio Toolkit is a book that includes over 300 tools, strategies, templates, and examples for use in building school portfolios and for planning, implementing, and evaluating continuous school improvement. The Toolkit was written to support school personnel with the mechanics of putting together a school portfolio, as well as to offer processes and strategies to move whole school staffs into and through continuous improvement. The tools in the Toolkit will help staffs create, implement, and maintain school portfolios and begin the journey of continuous improvement. Each chapter deals with one topic related to the school portfolio and comprehensive school improvement, with related documents and tools. The School Portfolio Toolkit book provides templates, tools, examples, and strategies that will help you analyze your school's data, create a vision that is truly shared by the school staff, build a continuous school improvement plan to implement the school vision, formulate a leadership structure to implement the vision, involve parents, community, and business in implementing the vision, embed up to forty different powerful professional development designs into your school plan, evaluate your continuous school improvement work, and create a School Portfolio that will organize and serve as a framework for the continuation of this work