While the demands of teaching continue to escalate, teacher development has changed relatively little over time, leaving many of today's teachers feeling underprepared, overwhelmed, or demoralized with few opportunities to make real change. Teacher leadership holds promise for both addressing challenges within schools and empowering teachers.…

The heart and soul of any successful organization is outstanding leadership. In education, school divisions are always striving to increase school achievement and as such hold school leaders accountable for this growth. Leaders require explicit leadership skills. This article shares a proposal in which school leaders participate in direct literacy…

The majority of school-age children with or displaying characteristics of a mental health disorder do not independently seek help, often go undiagnosed or undetected, and fail to receive treatment or intervention leaving them susceptible to and at risk for poor school and life outcomes. In response to these concerns and in an effort to improve the…

"Pathways to Personalization" offers an innovative five-step framework to help school leaders and teacher teams design and implement blended and personalized learning initiatives based on local needs and interests. The book draws on principles of improvement science and change management, as well as work in nearly five hundred…

Principals in the United States are responsible for creating educational environments that enable students, including those with disabilities, to achieve both academic and postschool goals. Unfortunately, many principals lack the preparation necessary to effectively lead special education programs. To support principals and ensure that students…

Time is a highly contested resource in today's schools. Proactive physical educators and savvy school administrators are acknowledging the benefits of devoting time during the school day, beyond regular physical education classes, for students to engage in physical activity with an eye toward enhancing student's health and well-being, as well as…

This report summarizes Austin Independent School District elementary principals' comments from a December 2017 discussion about the process for choosing bilingual and English as a second language programs for their schools in the 2018-2019 school year.

This paper presents a model for developing an interdisciplinary principal preparation program, an MBA in Education Leadership, which integrates best practices in both education and business within an educational context. The paper addresses gaps that exist in many traditional principal preparation programs and provides an alternative model, which…

The increasing emphasis on the myriad of leadership preparation standards have caused university principal preparation programs to necessarily focus on the more secular aspect of leading schools. For the Catholic school principal, this has left little focus on the development of critical strategies to lead for Catholic Identity and faith…

In this webinar, Dr. Stephanie Hirsh, Executive Director of Learning Forward, presented the research on effective PLCs and shared her experiences in creating, assessing, and leading PLCs. This Q&A addressed questions participants had for Dr. Hirsh following the webinar. The webinar recording and PowerPoint presentation are also available.

This case deals with a university program which is well respected but requires changes to be made to it as enrolments dwindle. Pressure from administration is making the Program Head and Program Committee members as well as Senior Instructional Designer LeFort consider new options for its delivery. Online learning is not a well-established…

School principals should lead for social change, particularly in support of vulnerable or marginalized students. An important social justice issue in which principals must provide strong leadership, but may not be adequately prepared in university training, is creating positive and inclusive school environments for lesbian, gay, transgender,…

Comprehensive School Physical Activity Programs (CSPAPs) have been identified as an intervention toward improving physical activity opportunities for youth throughout the school day. One of the five elements of a CSPAP is afterschool programming. This paper translates the varied research about youth engagement in physical activity into a…

In the second of two continuous improvement briefs on selection, UIC Center for Urban Education Leadership researchers and UIC Ed.D. program administrators describe how they build program capacity to assess & measure the characteristics they associate with school leader success. [For Part I, see ED622510.]

Effective principals run effective schools--this much we know. Accurately measuring principal effectiveness, however, has long been an elusive goal for school administrators. In this indispensable book, author James H. Stronge details the steps and resources necessary for designing a comprehensive principal evaluation system that is based on sound…