Learning Forward

Here is a simple test: Identify leaders in your school system or school who are advocates for professional learning. The people you identify can be from any role group: school board member, central office administrator, principal, teacher leader, or classroom teacher. There is only one restriction: The primary focus of […]

Finding out what instructional leadership looks like is at the center of a new trend in leadership development: videos of practice. These range from minimally edited videos of a leader’s own practice to highly edited clips that focus on successful leadership actions in authentic school settings. While videos of practice […]

Administrative demands, crisis management, and political challenges often strand superintendents miles away from the day-to-day work of teachers and students in the classroom. Even when superintendents strive to focus their work on the instructional core — the interactions among student, teacher, and content (Cohen & Ball, 1999; Elmore, 2002) — […]

The idea of teacher leadership holds an immense and intuitive appeal. Most educators agree that teacher leaders are essential to fostering a climate of authentic and robust leadership and learning across a school. Teacher leadership is peer leading at its most authentic, demanding, and empowering. While the value of teacher […]

During a statewide literacy meeting, talk turned to reading resources and how to build literacy in schools across the state. “Our reading specialists are instrumental to improving literacy in our buildings,” said one administrator. The executive director of literacy in another district said that her district had made huge strides […]

Bob Bender had been teaching for only three years when in 2005 he was tapped as principal of P.S. 11, a struggling elementary school in New York City. Many might have called his hiring foolish. After all, how could a novice teacher possibly be ready to turn around a school? […]

Q&A with Anthony Muhammad SD: Tell us how your beliefs about teaching and learning took shape over the course of your trajectory as a leader. Muhammad: I grew up in Flint, Mich., which is a city notorious for its level of unemployment. The school I went to was not very child-centered […]

More than a decade of school leadership research from The Wallace Foundation highlights not only the critical role of the principal but also the practices that effective school leaders undertake. A recent brief (The Wallace Foundation, 2011) distills these practices into five key functions: Shape a vision of academic success […]

Principals and the Common Core In a newly published brief from Learning Forward, Meet the Promise of Content Standards: The Principal, Joellen Killion explores the role of principals and the support they require from school systems to ensure the implementation of Common Core standards. Published as part of the initiative […]

DALLAS—Dec. 6, 2012—Learning Forward announces the release of Standards Into Practice: School-based Roles, the first volume of a series that highlights Innovation Configuration (IC) maps for educators in 12 distinct roles in education who share responsibility for professional learning. The first volume focuses on four school-based roles: teacher, teacher leader/coach, school […]