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What Is Capacity for Instructional Leadership? Let's begin with a definition: an organization's capacity for instructional leadership is its ability to make and implement operational and improvement decisions. The reason you're the bottleneck for much of what happens in your school is that you're the only one who can make certain kinds of decisions...perhaps too many of the decisions that need to be made. The solution, of course, is distributed leadership-creating more leaders who can do the work that you're currently doing all by yourself. Distributed leadership is powerful, but hard to manage well. Let's take a look at why distributed leadership is uniquely challenging.

The Challenges of Distributed Leadership
Distributed leadership is much more than delegation. Delegation is fairly straightforward:

1. Decide that something needs to be done by someone else

2. Tell them what to do and how to do it

3. Make sure they do it, and provide guidance as needed

Pretty simple, right? But creating more leadership isn't merely a matter of delegation; you're still the bottleneck, because you still play a challenging and central role: decision-maker. We need to delegate not just discrete tasks, but the decisions themselves. And that's where we can get into hot water. It's easy to delegate certain types of decisions to people with titles that seem to come with the authority that those decisions require. If you have an assistant principal, no one will be surprised or bothered if you fully delegate decisions about student discipline or transportation. Yet the real power of distributed leaderships comes from involving teachers, especially in decisions that directly affect teaching and learning. But will handing over decision-making authority to teachers reduce the effectiveness of principal leadership? When we share the decision-making aspects of leadership, what happens to our own authority? Does it create chaos and confusion? The research is encouraging:
"Principals may be relieved to find out, moreover, that their authority does not wane as others' waxes. Clearly, school leadership is not a zero-sum game. 'Principals and district leaders have the most influence on decisions in all schools; however, they do not lose influence as others gain influence,' the authors write." -The School Principal As Leader: Guiding Schools To Better Teaching And Learning, quoting Learning From Leadership: Investigating the Links to Improved Student Learning: Final Report of Research Findings, Karen Seashore Louis, Kenneth Leithwood, Kyla L. Wahlstrom and Stephen E. Anderson, University of Minnesota and University of Toronto, 2010. (emphasis added)
So we don't have to worry about having less influence when we build greater capacity for instructional leadership in our organizations. But we do need to address potential confusion about who's really in charge, and why not everyone gets a say in everything.
Obnocracy: The Pitfalls of Open Discussion
Involving teacher-leaders in school-level decision-making doesn't mean turning your school into a direct democracy where all issues are decided by consensus or whole-staff vote. Nor does it mean that every issue is discussed in faculty meetings until everyone is satisfied. Turning decision-making over to the "consensus" of a staff discussion is a failure of leadership, pure and simple. When unmoderated discussion becomes the way decisions are made, it's not distributed leadership. It's what I call obnocracy. Simply put, in a group discussion, the most obnoxious and outspoken person usually has the most power. We'd never choose this form of decision-making on purpose, but I've seen it play out time and time again in schools, and it's not pretty. Everyone wants a voice, and everyone deserves a voice in some way for many decisions, but open discussion and obnocracy don't serve adult or student needs well. Instead, we need a structure for making decisions. We need a decision matrix.
Developing A Decision Matrix
A Decision Matrix clarifies three sets of agreements for various types of decisions:

Decisional Roles: Who makes the call?

Consultation Methods: How do we talk with one another about the decision?

Decision Methods: How do we reach final agreement?

The decisional roles define decisional authority:

The Decision Owner (DO) is responsible for ensuring that the decision is made, but may or not be the decision-maker

The Decision Maker (DM) makes the call, and may be an individual or a group

A Consulted Stakeholder (CS) provides input before the decision is made

A Represented Stakeholder (RS) has a voice through a designated representative

A Notified Stakeholder (NS) is kept in the loop, but not always before the decision is made

Non-Party (NP) stakeholders may be affected by the decision, but are not directly involved or notified

Find out more about the Decision Making Matrix and how you can create a Decision-Making Handbook in our course High-Performance Decision Making.

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How To Build Capacity for Instructional Leadership In Your Organization - The Principal Center

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What Is Capacity for Instructional Leadership? Let's begin with a definition: an organization's capacity for instructional leadership is its ability to make and implement operational and improvement decisions. The reason you're the bottleneck for much of what happens in your school is that you're the only one who can make certain kinds of decisions...perhaps too ...

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Great daily reminders, I need to have this made into a poster!

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A relatively new theory of leadership focuses on leaders dealing in a straightforward and honest way with followers. A prominent theory of authentic leadership views it as composed of four distinct components.

1. Self-Awareness ("Know Thyself"). A prerequisite for being an authentic leader is knowing your own strengths, limitations, and values. Knowing what you stand for and what you value is critical. Moreover, self-awareness is needed in order to develop the other components of authentic leadership.

2. Relational Transparency ("Be Genuine"). This involves being honest and straightforward in dealing with others. An authentic leader does not play games or have a hidden agenda. You know where you stand with an authentic leader.

3. Balanced Processing ("Be Fair-Minded"). An effective authentic leader solicits opposing viewpoints and considers all options before choosing a course of action. There is no impulsive action or "hidden agendas"-plans are well thought out and openly discussed.

4. Internalized Moral Perspective ("Do the Right Thing"). An authentic leader has an ethical core. She or he knows the right thing to do and is driven by a concern for ethics and fairness.

The roots of authentic leadership come from ancient Greek philosophy that focuses on the development of core, or cardinal, virtues. These virtues are Prudence (fair-mindedness, wisdom, seeing all possible courses of action), Temperance (being emotionally balanced and in control), Justice (being fair in dealings with others), and Fortitude (courage to do the right thing). [You can read more about these leadership virtues here.]

Becoming an authentic leader is not easy. It takes a great deal of self-reflection (getting to know oneself), and the courage to do the right thing. It involves a degree of selflessness. In a world full of morally corrupt and dysfunctional leaders, authentic leadership theory has become quite popular as people search for the "good" leaders.

Follow me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/#!/ronriggio

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What Is Authentic Leadership? Do You Have It?

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A relatively new theory of leadership focuses on leaders dealing in a straightforward and honest way with followers. A prominent theory of authentic leadership views it as composed of four distinct components. 1. Self-Awareness ("Know Thyself"). A prerequisite for being an authentic leader is knowing your own strengths, limitations, and values.

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I thought this went well with this weeks assignment.

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There's no doubt that instructional leadership requires the school principal to wear many hats. At various times, principals must be administrators, managers, diplomats, teachers and curriculum leaders, sometimes all within one school day. It is definitely a balancing act, and principals must be proficient in all of these areas, as well as able to fluidly move from one role to another.

Principals and school leaders continue to strive for balance and proficiency in their roles as instructional leaders. Among the reasons cited for a lack of proficiency and emphasis on instructional leadership in schools is a lack of comprehensive training. A deficit of time for executing instructional activities, unrealistic community expectations and a glut of paperwork were also cited as reasons for the shortfall.

Instructional leadership defined

Instructional leadership involves setting clear goals, managing curriculum, monitoring lesson plans, allocating resources and evaluating teachers regularly to promote student learning and growth. Quality of instruction is the top priority for the instructional principal. Instructional leadership is committed to the core business of teaching, learning and knowledge. Staff members should meet on a regular basis to discuss how to do their jobs better and ultimately help students learn more effectively.

4 instructional leadership skills principals must have

Four skills have been identified as essential for effective instructional leadership in principals.

1. Effective use of resources

It isn't sufficient for principals to just know their faculty's strengths and weaknesses. If specific resources can benefit the staff, the principal should be ready and prepared to provide them. They should also clearly recognize that teachers thrive on being appreciated and acknowledged for good performance.

2. Communication skills

Of course, instructional principals should be excellent communicators. Interpersonal or people skills are crucial to the success of a principal. They must be able to communicate their beliefs pertaining to education, including the conviction that every student is capable of learning. These skills inspire trust, spark motivation and empower teachers and students.

3. Serving as an instructional resource

Teachers rely on principals and other administrative officials to be sources of information related to effective instructional practices and current trends in education. Instructional leaders should be tuned in to all of the pertinent issues and current events related to curriculum, effective assessment and pedagogical strategies.

4. Being visible and accessible

Lastly, good principals should be a positive, vibrant and visible presence in the school. Modeling behaviors of learning, focusing on learning objectives, and leading by example are crucial to the success of an instructional principal.

In addition to these four qualities, a successful instructional principal should also have excellent planning and observation skills as well as proficiency in research and evaluation of both staff and student performance.

Instructional leadership roles: always evolving

The role of the instructional leader should also be expanded to incorporate a shift away from just "management," or working in terms of administrative tasks, and move toward an emphasis on leadership. In order to achieve this objective, a strong principal with solid ideas is not enough; success will require a redefinition of the role of the principal. Barriers to leadership must be removed by reducing emphasis on bureaucratic structures and procedures. Relationships must be reinvented.

The dramatically different role of the school principal as instructional leader has been described as one that must focus on building a vital community of learners. It also requires shared decision-making and, in a sense, getting back to basics. It will require the leveraging of time, the support of ongoing professional development for staff members, creating a climate of integrity, using resources to support a diverse educational game plan and, lastly, plenty of room for inquiry and improvement.

For principals to truly thrive in the role of instructional leader, they will have to work to liberate themselves from being mired in the bureaucratic aspects of teaching. They'll have to redouble their efforts in improving learning and teaching methods. Needless to say, improvement in instructional methods is a goal worth seeking. When successfully implemented, instructional teaching and learning allows students as well as teachers to create a more meaningful learning environment. Ultimately, it enables them to better control their destiny.

Tags: Educational Leadership, Leadership and Administration

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Four Instructional Leadership Skills Principals Need

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There's no doubt that instructional leadership requires the school principal to wear many hats. At various times, principals must be administrators, managers, diplomats, teachers and curriculum leaders, sometimes all within one school day. It is definitely a balancing act, and principals must be proficient in all of these areas, as well as able to fluidly move from one role to another.

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by Charlotte Danielson

School organization" refers to how schools arrange the resources of time, space, and personnel for maximum effect on student learning. The school's organizational plan addresses those issues that affect the school as a whole, such as the master schedule, the location of staff in different rooms, and the assignment of aides to teachers or teams. (Matters that affect only individual teachers or teams-how to form reading groups for all 2nd graders, for example-are addressed in Chapter 11: Team Planning.)

Relationship to the Framework

How a school is organized is a matter for the staff to determine, and a school's organization should reflect the staff's commitment to the success of all students. Every aspect of the instructional program will convey the values and goals of the staff toward students and their learning.

High-Level Learning for All Students

Through a school's organizational patterns-whether the school is divided into teams or houses, for example, or whether it adopts a traditional or a block schedule-the staff can convey to both students and their parents that learning is important, that the business of the school is learning, and that the different elements of the school's organization are structured to support that learning. The master schedule, for example, is not established merely for the convenience of the transportation department, although bus schedules are important and must be accommodated. Nor are teams established only so that members of the faculty who are friends can work together. All arrangements must reflect an unwavering focus on student learning.

A Safe and Positive Environment

The wise deployment of space can go a long way toward ensuring a physically safe environment, particularly for young children. If classrooms, the art room, restrooms, and the library are all within easy walking distance, and if the paths to each are safe, children will feel secure going alone. In addition, a school's arrangement of teachers into teams, houses, and the like can contribute to a feeling of community, and therefore emotional safety, for students; they should feel part of a group small enough that their absence or illness would be noticed.

A Culture of Hard Work and Opportunities for Success

A focus on success is not a matter of spoon-feeding. A good school organization will offer students the optimal degree of challenge, stretching them while at the same time ensuring that they can succeed if they exert the necessary effort. Students need to know (and may need to be reminded) that it is up to them to exert the effort. For example, elementary-school teachers might let their students know that they are free to go to the computer lab or learning center once they've completed their work and mastered certain tasks; similarly, students in middle or high school could be told that if they are willing to commit to a heavy workload and fill any gaps in their understanding, they can enroll in Spanish II or an advanced placement course. Such opportunities should not constitute an exclusive club, open only to a few students; they should be open to any students willing to commit to them. The master schedule must be arranged to permit students to make these commitments and demonstrate their desire to participate in the most challenging opportunities the school has to offer.

When a school adopts a success orientation, it also commits itself to a flexible deployment of resources: nothing is carved in stone, and no one adopts a "take it or leave it" attitude. Students are assumed to be capable learners, and the school accepts its obligation to ensure successful learning by all students. Students should be able to get additional help when they need it, and to challenge the curriculum when they so choose; they should not be obliged to sit through a year of algebra if they can demonstrate, through a valid assessment, that they already understand the content. On the other hand, a student struggling with how to write a clear paragraph, for example, should be able to get help as needed.

School Organization

The research on school organization is clear: in general, small schools yield better results than large ones. This suggests that educators at large schools can help more students learn by creating subunits-schools within a school. Moreover, studies on teacher collaboration and teaming have shown that students benefit when teachers work together to promote student learning. Some schools in rural areas, of course, are too small, unable to provide a reasonable range of curricular or extracurricular offerings. But while educators in large schools can generally devise ways to break up into smaller units, those in small schools can't usually do much about their limited resources (although the Internet now provides students with learning opportunities that were not previously available).

Components of School Organization

Of course, most school staffs inherit a preexisting organizational structure. For many educators, certain aspects of the school's organization-such as the number of classes in the master schedule in a high school or the houses in a middle school-are part of the school's very identity. This reality can make altering the school's organization slow and difficult. Still, educators should consider the following aspects of the school to determine which ones, if any, should be changed.

At the elementary-school level, units are usually instructional teams or grade-level groups, in which teachers work with students from classes other than their own homerooms. For example, three 4th grade teachers might choose to work together to teach all 100 children in the grade. Many middle schools have houses in place, which might be led for instance by four teachers, each representing core curricular areas, working together with a group of 100-125 students. (When these are multi-age groups and students remain with the same teachers over several years, teachers and students grow to know one another particularly well.) Many high schools establish schools-within-a-school to create smaller and more personal learning communities. Some of these are grade-based, whereas others are organized around an instructional focus, such as technology or the arts.

Master Schedule

The influence of the master schedule is hard to overstate. The schedule structures the pace of the interactions between students and teachers, and class length affects the nature of instruction and the depth to which students are able to go at any given time. At the elementary- and middle-school levels, the master schedule conveys the relative importance of different areas of study: for example, when language arts are allocated 90 minutes a day, and science is allocated 30 minutes twice a week, students and teachers receive powerful messages about the supposed value of each subject.

Alternatives to traditional scheduling practices at the middle- and high-school levels have been widely discussed in the educational literature under the general heading of "block scheduling." Although not a panacea, block scheduling can materially affect the quality of student-teacher interactions and the nature of teacher collaboration. The main characteristic of these approaches is that they organize instructional time into longer blocks than the traditional pattern, thus allowing teachers and students greater flexibility in how they use their time. With longer blocks of time, students can embark on projects that would be difficult to complete in only 43 minutes. Teachers accustomed to relying on lecturing find that they need to vary their approach under block scheduling, enabling students to engage in deeper and more sustained exploration of content.

Deployment of Instructional Personnel

Most elementary schools assign classroom teachers groups of 20-30 students, although there are usually other teachers available as well: specialists for subjects such as art, music, and physical education; state-funded remedial reading or math teachers; Title I teachers; and teachers funded through district or external funds to serve migrant students, ESL learners, or "gifted" students. In fact, some elementary schools have more "extra" teachers than they do regular ones! The situation is different at the middle- and high-school levels, where students rotate among content specialists. In schools committed to enhancing student learning, teachers go to considerable effort to integrate "special" subjects with more "academic" disciplines. Even when the schedule demands that a class of 3rd grade students goes to art class at, say, 11:00 a.m. on Thursdays, the art teacher and the home-room teacher work to ensure that what the students are learning in the two classes is not completely separate.

Many schools-particularly at the elementary level, and sometimes motivated by state statute or by the promise of additional funds-have created more classes with fewer students in each. These efforts have had mixed results, partly because when overall class sizes are reduced, other expenses are inevitably increased-for more classroom space and for additional content specialists (and the classroom space that they need). In addition, there are frequently not enough qualified teachers to teach the new classes, especially at very large schools, resulting in at least a short-term reduction in teaching quality.

Although the research on class size has been inconclusive, studies suggest that reductions in size don't have much of an effect on student achievement unless the classes consist of 15 students or fewer. In any case, it is not the size of the homerooms that matters, but the size of instructional groups; consequently, if the entire teaching staff can be deployed in a manner that greatly reduces the size of instructional groups, results are likely to improve. A school organizational structure that supports the use of all teaching staff (including those paid for by categorical funds) to provide basic instruction can result in much smaller instructional groups than are traditionally found in schools. (For more on this subject, see Chapter 12: Learning Support.)

Grouping Strategies

A school aiming to improve student performance must develop a reasoned approach, even a philosophy, toward the grouping of students for instruction. Such an approach should not include permanent tracking. When elementary-school students are clustered as "bluebirds" or "canaries" according to their real or perceived abilities, the groups often become permanent: those who are identified early on as particularly able tend to be the ones permitted to enroll in advanced courses in high school.

Permanent tracking harms all but the highest-performing students, who themselves gain only slightly from the practice. Short-term skill grouping, however, can be highly beneficial for all students. Students who do not understand, say, subtraction with regrouping should receive targeted instruction on the concept before moving on to a skill that depends upon it (such as division). But there is no reason for students who have already grasped subtraction with regrouping to spend any more time on the topic; they should instead be more productively engaged in other topics. Hence teachers need the flexibility to create skill groups when needed, particularly for concepts that are prerequisites for later lessons.

The school's approach to scheduling and deployment of staff must support the formation of short-term skill groups when needed. In addition, the school's organization must allow for skill groups to be formed quickly and changed frequently; flexibility, in other words, is the key.

Implications for Different Levels

I have discussed the above issues separately, as though educators addressed them one at a time. In reality, of course, the various aspects of a school's organizational structure are highly intertwined and tightly related to other aspects of the school, such as curriculum, student assessment, and learning support. Still, there are important differences among schools at different levels.

Elementary Schools

Teacher teams at the elementary-school level may comprise anywhere from two to eight teachers each; more than eight, however, can become unwieldy. These teams may be organized around a single grade level (a "2nd grade team") or as "family" teams of, for example, the 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades. Each arrangement has its advantages and disadvantages. Students in single-grade teams, of course, tend to be closer to one another academically than are those in family teams. On the other hand, these same students must relearn the ropes each year with a different group of teachers, and the teachers must become acquainted with a large new group of students. Academic levels may vary in family teams, but students stay with the same group of teachers for several years, reducing the startup time required at the beginning of the school year.

Middle Schools

The "middle-school philosophy"-which recognizes that young adolescents learn best when given a fair degree of autonomy, while at the same time "belonging" to a relatively small group of teachers and other students-has become dominant in schools serving the 5th or 6th to 8th grades. Students at this period in their lives experience rapid physical, emotional, and intellectual growth, matched in scope only by the first three years of life; they are experiencing fast and sometimes confusing changes. Middle schools, therefore, must provide both stability and stimulation, respecting the students' age-related concerns.

I have already suggested the major recommendation for middle schools: teachers should work in small teams, composed typically of four teachers, representing the core subjects. Additional subjects should be offered as "exploratory" opportunities for students. In addition, time should be scheduled- and instruction provided. in long blocks, permitting teachers the maximum degree of flexibility to meet student needs (and to alter internal arrangements as these needs change). When the school organization allows for the integration of various . support. teachers. Title I, remedial, migrant, gifted, and so on. teachers within each team have the best opportunity to arrange a combination of core and supplementary instruction for each student.

High Schools

Some high schools institute schools-within-a-school (SWAS), often for their 9th grade students. This structure is designed to mirror (and hence ease the transition from) the middle-school experience. If they can be managed, SWAS are recommended, as they provide students with smaller instructional units and permit them to learn the ropes of the high school-by interacting with a greater number of students and teachers, not to mention abiding by typically more structured rules of conduct-without also having to learn how to find a classroom or juggle the multiple demands of too many different courses.

Scheduling is the main aspect of school organization at the high-school level. Many high schools have by now implemented some form of block scheduling, in which students attend three to four classes on any given day rather than seven to nine. There are two basic patterns for block scheduling: four-by-four and A/B. In four-by-four schedules, students complete four "yearlong" courses each semester in periods of about 90 minutes each day. In the A/B schedule, classes are held on alternate days over the entire year; students may still be carrying six to eight courses, but they attend only half of them on any given day.

In general, block scheduling is advantageous because it provides longer instructional time and more opportunities for engaged learning. When teachers must plan for 90-minute classes, they are likely to employ different approaches than when classes are limited to 40 minutes; they can engage students more deeply in investigations, and will probably vary their instruction more. On the other hand, if teachers don't plan their time effectively, much of it may be wasted; students might devote considerable class time to independent work, for example, that might otherwise be assigned as homework. But in general, block scheduling tends to improve the school climate, with fewer discipline referrals, fewer class changes each day, greater student commitment to the work, and the potential for more engaging instruction.

The two major approaches to high-school block scheduling carry different advantages and disadvantages. Before implementing one or the other, educators are well advised to consult one of the many excellent books that have been written on the subject.

Summary

A school's organizational structures can go a long way toward promoting student learning. At all instructional levels, the school's organizational pattern can materially affect the manner in which students and teachers interact. All of these schoolwide structures should be designed to maximize teacher and student flexibility, encourage in-depth teaching and learning, and integrate as many different resources as possible.

The chart on the following page is intended to help educators examine their own school's approach to school organization and determine whether changes should be made. I have provided a similar chart at the end of each subsequent chapter.

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by Charlotte Danielson School organization" refers to how schools arrange the resources of time, space, and personnel for maximum effect on student learning.

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Whether you're the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, or a teenage entrepreneur just starting out, communication skills are vitally important. Great leaders motivate, encourage and inspire. They also train people, share new ideas and negotiate. These activities have one thing in common: They all require excellent communication.

Here are five communication skills that make good leaders great:
1. Interpreting Body Language
In his book, Introducing Body Language - A Practical guide, Glenn Wilson writes: "Where body language conflicts with the words that are being said, the body language will usually be the more 'truthful' in the sense of revealing true feelings." That's why the most successful leaders are always paying attention to people's unseen language and nonverbal cues.

When you're able to read thoughts and sentiments that aren't revealed by a person's words, you have many clear advantages. Take interviewing, for example. By learning non-verbal signs, you can oftentimes determine how honest a candidate is being with you. You can also tell if someone is comfortable with what you're saying, and whether the person feels confident in what they are saying to you. Reading body language also gives you an advantage during negotiations, selling, delivering presentations and speeches, and conducting meetings.

Also, when you know how to read body language, you'll be able to master the art and science of projecting effective body language to those around you. Exuding honesty, confidence and leadership is just as important as being able to read these traits in others.
2. Video Skills
As a leader in today's visual-centric world having skills when it comes to video is paramount. No, I don't mean shooting cat videos, not that there's anything wrong with that. What I am referring to is how you present yourself in video form and the quality of the video itself.

See below for the verbal skills needed as these will also apply to video, of course. Speaking is not just for in person after all.

As for the quality or production of the video, a lot will depend on the size of the company or brand you're working for. If you're the CMO or leader at a big company you more than likely have access to either an in-house agency or external agency to handle your video needs. Or if you're a CMO at a smaller company or entrepreneur you may want to look at using companies such as Fiverr, Freelancer.com or GigBucks for a quality freelancer.

The production quality of a video is just as important as the words you use.
3. Listening Carefully
In our modern, global society, the skill of listening has taken a back seat. Voice inflections, verbal pauses and eye contact have been replaced with texts, thumbs-up icons and emoticons. While electronic communications make long-distance interaction easier than ever before, it has unfortunately hindered our ability to really listen during an information-rich conversation. This is unfortunate, because skillful listening enables you to catch details that others miss. Many epiphanies and business solutions have been reached thanks to a good listener's ability to pick up on a hidden gem.

One excellent way to immediately improve your listening ability is to practice empathetic listening. Try to feel excited when the person you're listening to is excited, or concern when the other person is concerned. Reflect the other person's emotions not only verbally, but also with your facial expressions. It isn't always easy, and it takes a bit of energy, but it will help you tune in to the thoughts and emotions of anybody you're having a conversation with.
4. Crystal Clear Verbal Communication
As a general rule, people do not listen attentively. Therefore, it's your job as a leader to speak as clearly and effectively as possible. So don't use words that aren't understood by most people. Not only will your message be lost, but you'll run the risk of sounding arrogant. Remember, the goal of communication is clarity.

Also, prepare your conversations in advance. There's no rule that says a conversation needs to be purely improvised. When you know you are going to have an important discussion, take as much time as needed to plan your words and sentences. Think about objections people may have toward your opinions or solutions, and prepare convincing answers to the objections. Preparation always pays off.

Another way many people improve their verbal communication skills is to read more often. Whether it's your favorite business journal, a well-authored blog, or even a sci-fi novel, reading from articulate authors greatly helps your verbal communications.

Lastly, spend some time watching speeches, debates, or presentations on YouTube. When you listen to people of inspiration speak convincingly to an audience, you'll quickly discover that your own verbal skills improve.
5. Writing Skills
It's true that smart executives and entrepreneurs can use agencies or hire freelancers who specialize in the complete production process of video & animation for fairly routine projects like speeches and presentations. However, it's still very important that you're able to write well on a day-to-day basis. After all, you certainly can't hire someone every time you need to write a convincing email.

Well you probably could but it woudln't be very cost effective.

You don't have to dig through your attic and dust off your old English Grammar textbooks. You do, however, need to be concise and direct when you write. One way to write better is to remove unneeded words. Excellent writers say a lot with as few words as possible. For example, compare the following sentences:

Sentence A: "After the morning meeting has been completed and everyone is dismissed, there will be a networking event with coffee and donuts for those of you who choose to attend."

Sentence B: "After the morning meeting, we hope you'll join us for coffee and donuts at the networking event.

Sentence B not only sounds better. It's quicker for the audience to read.
Great Communicators Are Made, Not Born
If you lack any or all of these skills, don't be discouraged. Spend a little bit of time each day learning, reading, and practicing essential communication techniques. It may seem difficult to become an excellent communicator, but with practice, you'll soon discover that you can do it. And who knows? You might even discover that you're a natural.

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Five Communication Skills That Make Good Leaders Great

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Whether you're the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, or a teenage entrepreneur just starting out, communication skills are vitally important. Great leaders motivate, encourage and inspire. They also train people, share new ideas and negotiate. These activities have one thing in common: They all require excellent communication. Here are five [...]

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Online June 2017 | Volume 74
Gearing Up for Change Pages 8-14

Naomi Thiers

The accountability movement has tried to put maximum pressure on teachers to get results-and it doesn't work because teachers need to know how to do the right thing, not just that the right thing should be done. Building accountability into our working lives is one of the key actions I talk about in Six Secrets that will lead everyone in a school to be more productive. But if you want to motivate teachers, you can't just try to convince them through, for example, research evidence. That doesn't work. Nor can you motivate people just through moral exhortation. You convince them by giving them experience as teachers in relatively nonthreatening circumstances, with others who can be helpful. And then when they start to experience success with their students, with other teachers, they really get motivated. Then it kind of accelerates.

Andy Hargreaves and I call it collaborative professionalism. It's the teacher with a degree of autonomy interacting with other teachers, figuring out the best things to do to get results for the particular students they're working with.

The overall thrust of our work is to strengthen the middle (districts) and the bottom (students and their schools) so that they're less at the mercy of policies coming from the top. At the same time, we see schools and communities as proactive partners moving upward as they take into account and influence policy.
What kind of accountability would promote motivation and positive change among teachers?
Richard Elmore said 15 years ago, "No amount of external accountability will be effective in the absence of internal accountability." So what's internal accountability? It's when the group individually and collectively has a sense of responsibility about their work. When we look at collaborative cultures, the districts, the schools, even some of the systems that have strong degrees of collaboration, they have built in a growing and increasing sense of responsibility about what they're doing and how they need to explain themselves-not just to themselves, but to the wider system.

To have accountability that works means to have a framework of goals, to monitor the results that come from those goals, but to be transparent and specific about the evidence that people themselves are using to improve. And once you have trust, transparency, specificity, evidence, and nonjudgmentalism, you get a constellation of conditions that make progress possible. In effect, this turns accountability on its head. Such accountability is built at the level of action, which in turn interfaces with the external accountability system-inside-out more than the reverse.
In Freedom to Change, you note that research from the business world finds that employees need freedom from constraints like micromanagement to contribute their best. How does this concept of "freedom from" play out in education organizations?
There is a big difference between "freedom from" constraints and what you do with "freedom to" once you get it. This idea of "freedom to" has a long history, starting with sociologist Erich Fromm around 1930. Here's the essence of it: What people try to do first-because we all want "freedom from"; we want to not be imposed upon-is to get rid of constraints. So accountability is a big constraint. How do we reduce that? How do we reduce testing? Educators work to get rid of a whole bunch of constraints like that.

If you work on those things and you're successful, there's an inclination to declare victory. We got rid of the constraints! But what people realize once that happens is, now that they have the freedom to change, they're kind of at sea. They don't know where to go. And that's the part we've been working on-to provide educators with individual and small-group autonomy connected to collaboration.

Collaborative professionalism is fueled by both good autonomy and good teamwork. Autonomy is not isolation. If you have good autonomy, it means that you're your own person; you're trying things. But you have to be connected and learn from the group, otherwise your autonomy won't get stronger. You have to contribute to and learn from the group. These conditions of "freedom to" are the real solution to the dilemma that if you're completely free, it won't work, and if you're completely subsumed by the group, it won't work.

So this sophisticated type of freedom to change is really the part we're moving towards now. I think we're making progress getting rid of constraints, so there's a real opportunity. One thing I say to principals and teachers and district people is, your job is not to implement government policy. It's to exploit government policy for local priorities, to be less on the receiving end and more on the initiation end. So it's a proactive solution.
Can you give an example of a district or a local entity doing this?
Our team has been working a lot in California for the last five years. California has a thousand districts and seven million students. Five years ago, at all levels-the governor, the state superintendent of education, the key districts-California took a strong interest in our theory of school change, which values capacity building over compliance, moving towards coherence and internal accountability. Some key districts have been working proactively with the governor's policy of decentralization of resources, or local control in the context of a state policy of continuous improvement and accountability. This has liberated local districts, and we see several of them taking advantage of that. But interestingly, the "freedom to" problem shows up here. There's more leeway for local initiative, but some districts don't know how to do it. So they haven't taken advantage of the freedom the way they could.
Let's talk about how successful leaders perceive obstacles to school change.
One of my mentors, Seymour Sarason, said in 1970 that school principals and other leaders perceive more barriers than actually exist in the system. In other words, they're not pushing hard enough. I think part of how you treat obstacles resides in the individual leader. Those individuals who show more initiative, who have a greater sense of efficacy, will do more under the same conditions than somebody else who might say, well, I'm not allowed to do that. It's having a growth mindset.

The school district or the state education department may not even be forbidding certain things. Those who are able to do something don't ask for permission a lot. If they think it's going to work, they try to do it. You have to be proactive in every system and do the teamwork and capacity building that will enable you to go further.

There's another even deeper obstacle. Some people have called it-it's an odd phrase- pedagogical legacy or cultural legacy. This means that you as a teacher are used to a certain culture. You're used to teaching in a certain way. You want to change, and you even start to change-but you find yourself slipping back into the old, comfortable way. We need to help educators persist at the early stages of promising change to get the payoff.
How might a school leader confront pedagogical legacy?
Research shows that the biggest factor in the effectiveness of a principal is the degree to which he or she "participates as a learner" working with teachers to get to a solution. Let's take a principal that goes into a school that's siloed: Teachers are teaching on their own. There's very little interaction. So what would an effective principal do in relation to the teachers? In my experience, that leader would do two things. One, he or she would start to interact with teachers individually and collectively as a learner, creating a climate where teachers are encouraged to take risks, to work together, to be supportive. A climate of trust, but one focused on results.

The other thing the leader would do is "use the group to change the group." Teachers are less likely to fall back into that pedagogical legacy if a whole bunch of teachers-helped by the principal-are pushing for what's more effective.

For example, Park Manor, a grades 6-8 school just west of Toronto that I worked with, uses this procedure: Every Friday, the three grade 6 teachers sit down together-as do the three teachers in grades 7 and 8-and use a protocol to examine the progress of one student from each of their classes. Let's say one of the grade 6 teachers says, here's Student X and here's what I'm trying with Student X. This is working, but I need some advice on that. Over the course of an hour, they discuss one student from each of their classes, every Friday, week after week. When you do that, you're pushing one another for what works. You pull out the knowledge.

So it's changing the culture-and I want to use the word culture -of the school and the culture of the district. Such a culture establishes the conditions for sustainability.
"Seeking balance between autonomy and cooperation" is one of the four important actions for change you mention in Freedom to Change. What does it look like when teachers in a school are both autonomous and connected?
First of all, we want to bring it into the open, to name these principles of autonomy and connectedness as two crucial aspects of the organization. We don't want to be, like, "I want people to be autonomous and collaborative, but I'm not going to tell anybody." This means that everybody knows that people have a degree of autonomy in this culture-they can be their own person-but they also have a responsibility to interact with one another.

The schools and districts I'm talking about think this way. The checks and balances that occur between the individual's degree of freedom and the interaction of the group are quite strong. They allow you to sort out what is effective.

At Park Manor, a high-technology pedagogy school, teachers are in fact doing their own thing, but they share when they discover something promising and begin to develop even better solutions together. They have many mechanisms to engage in collaborative professional learning. For example, they have each of the school's nine teachers demonstrate two things he or she is doing with technology that are highly effective. So each teacher has his or her own ideas and their colleagues can recognize what each of the nine teachers are doing that's working. This makes it likely that people will be drawn toward things that are working better. So the dynamic between individual initiative and group processing is quite strong.
You mention feedback as another guidepost for this constructive "freedom to." What kind of feedback leads to motivation to change?
Feedback is one of the hardest things for humans to get right. People will say, "I like feedback. I don't get enough of it. But I only want feedback that's positive." That's a natural human tendency. Even under the best of circumstances, we don't want feedback that feels, to us, judgmental. So in our work we try to help schools reduce inappropriate, negative, judgmental interventions, those that really decrease the possibility that feedback will be heard, and instead emphasize collaborative cultures. A collaborative culture has all kinds of feedback built into it. Teachers visiting one another's classroom, looking at what works with students together-if you're a teacher inside that, you're getting lots of feedback from colleagues. In this way, feedback is organically built into the day-to-day culture of the organization.

Ed Catmull, the CEO of Pixar, wrote a book a few years ago in which he explored how Pixar made 14 blockbusters in a row in a highly competitive industry. Pixar achieved that because they set up a culture that incorporated peers giving feedback to peers. Their two guidelines were-his words-candor and autonomy.

At the beginning of each project, the directors presented their early ideas to other directors and people in the company who formed what Catmull called the brain trust. They got lots of feedback. The ground rules were, don't hold back-give people strongly critical feedback if it's deserved-but with the understanding that people receiving the feedback don't have to take it. That's the autonomy. Most people who get that kind of feedback are more likely to take it.
Another key action for change you mention is educators spreading their positive actions or ideas. You say that diffusion works better than traditional "scaling up" for this. Can you explain?
My coauthors and I have actually been writing about diffusion-or what we're now calling intentional social movement -in our new book on the New Pedagogies for Deep Learning initiative, which is forthcoming from Corwin. We're trying to change the nature of teaching so there's more partnership among students, teachers, and families. We're relating deep learning to six global competencies-character, citizenship, collaboration, communication, creativity, and critical thinking. Scaling up school by school will never work; you have to mobilize large numbers of schools and districts learning from one another while discovering and retaining what works.

I'm always interested in changing the whole system. A district would be the minimum size, but the preferred size would be a state or a province. And when I looked at bringing any new practice to scale, there have been examples over the years where people have had success. For example, the Annenberg Foundation worked on really tough problems like concentrated intergenerational poverty and the underachievement of black and Latino youth, and found out what it would take to change that dynamic; they identified factors similar to those we've been talking about. But their successes were very much in the minority. They didn't spread.

The assumption behind going to scale is, if we get some good pilot examples, we'll know what works there, and we can transfer it to other places, expand it. Well, that doesn't work. Why not? Because the new places don't have the capacity. Or the replication is too slow: You get 20 pilots, then 30, but it never adds up to the whole system. People lose interest; they change priorities.

What's going to work is what I call diffusion or intentional social movement. Let me give an example. About eight years ago, we worked in Ontario, which has 900 high schools. Their graduation rate was stuck at 68 percent. So we created an innovation that enabled schools to develop programs involving applied work in various sectors, such as aviation, forestry, finance, or whatever fields were of interest to the community. But instead of doing this innovation in a few of the 900 schools and trying to scale it, we said any school can apply for it and we'll support that school. And as we support those schools, we'll quickly disseminate what's being learned laterally to other schools. Eventually almost all the high schools were doing one or another part of this innovation, and learning from one another. The high school graduation rate went up from 68 percent to its current 85.5 percent. Moreover, the number of students involved in the programs grew rapidly, from 600 students in the first year to 48,000 within a decade. That's convincing. Pilots don't go to scale, culture does.

In our deep learning work, instead of sequential thinking (doing a pilot and going to scale), we're trying to get to the idea of simultaneous learning-people learning from one another. It's a bit complicated because you're investing in a lot of initiatives, some of which don't work out. People should not be too constrained at the beginning, so that they can do different things. Then you need to sort out rapidly what's working and what's not working and do more of the things that are working. It requires good leadership. It also requires that ability to look outside yourself, to "go outside to get better inside." Whether you're an individual school or a school district, make sure you're connecting to what's happening beyond yourself, and contributing to that as well as learning from it.
So you need to do rapid measurement as you go along?
Yes. Rapid measurement and looking at things as they develop, always paying attention to any change's impact on student motivation, student learning, and student achievement. You don't have to prove it works within 12 months, but you have to show progress in measurable ways as you go from year one to year two. People latch on to what is working if they have early access to the ideas.
Is there anything you'd like to mention about your current work?
Here's one exciting thing. When you start to implement those global competencies, the six Cs, with the new pedagogy, students gravitate towards wanting to do something that's worthwhile. More students and teachers get turned on because they're doing something relevant-and they feel they need to help change things. It's obvious that the world is a lot more complex and anxiety-producing now; even little kids know something's up.

We have hundreds of examples being produced by schools we are working with in many countries. In Uruguay, for example, we have 10-year-olds saying, "I am supposed to be helping humanity, so I think I'll start in my neighborhood." They then address specific local problems. Birds were eating vegetables in local gardens, so the students built an electronic device that vibrated when birds came nearby, scaring them away.

The exciting part is, with these new pedagogies-which are more tied into real problems, more about humanity and citizenship-the students who are most alienated from regular schooling are the ones who move the furthest and fastest into this learning mode I just described. Our preliminary evidence-I call it the equity hypothesis-shows that by doing this new work, those students who are least connected are being drawn in in a way that changes their lives. We call it attacking inequity with excellence. The breakthrough is that all students end up learning and being more equipped to cope with and influence the world. Indeed, our newest motto is "engage the world, change the world."

Editor's Note: This interview has been edited for space and clarity.

Naomi Thiers is senior editor of Educational Leadership.

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Making Progress Possible: A Conversation with Michael Fullan

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Online June 2017 | Volume 74 Gearing Up for Change Pages 8-14 Naomi Thiers The accountability movement has tried to put maximum pressure on teachers to get results-and it doesn't work because teachers need to know how to do the right thing, not just that the right thing should be done.

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Thanks to its partnership with publisher Eye on Education, Education World is pleased to present this administrator tip from School Leader Internship (4th Edition): Developing, Monitoring, and Evaluating Your Leadership Experience, by Gary E. Martin, Arnold B. Danzig, William F. Wright, Richard A. Flanary, and Fred Brown. This article provides school leaders with five factors to consider when making quality decisions.

Decision making is sine qua non to education administration because a school, like all formal organizations, is basically a decision-making structure (Hoy and Miskel, 2001). Decision making is a process that guides actions. Decisions are based on the beliefs, values and previous experiences of individuals. Leaders must know themselves, know why they choose particular paths, know whom to involve, and know which particular decision-making model to use. Today, researchers and theorists know that those at the top cannot accurately gather or predict all alternatives. They know that followers deserve to be involved and that input and collaboration result in better decisions. The first decision is to decide what level of involvement is most effective.

Leaders have at least four options of involvement in decisions: deciding alone, seeking participation and input, seeking collaboration, and letting others decide. These approaches are termed autocratic, participative, collaborative, and laissez fair, respectively. A wise leader uses participative and collaborative strategies for all important decisions. However, such an approach is not always possible, nor is it preferable in all situations. The leader must assess 5 factors to decide on the level of involvement:

Time

Urgency may require the leader to make his or her own decision without consulting others. Participative decisions, especially collaborative decisions, require more time than a decision made alone. If important decisions are at stake, the leader must schedule more time for involvement.

Staff Interest in the Decision

Barnard (1938) found that individuals have a "zone of indifference" in which they simply accept the leader's decision and are apathetic toward the decision. In these cases, the leader would not benefit from trying to gain participation or collaboration. At higher levels of interest, however, more participation or collaboration is appropriate. Leaders who desire more collaboration must generate interest in the decision.

Staff Expertise

Followers who have very low levels of expertise accept the decisions of leaders. Staff members who have higher levels of expertise require either participation or collaboration to arrive at successful decisions. The leader who desires collaboration must raise levels of expertise to successfully involve subordinates.

Importance or Need For a High-Quality Decision

Some decisions are much more important and carry significant consequences. This is usually the case for instruction and learning, whether directly or indirectly. For important questions that demand high-quality decisions, collaboration is the best model. If the decision is relatively unimportant, then the leader should simply make the decision.

Degree of Need for Buy-In or Support for the Decision

Many decisions in schools need staff support for successful implementation and results. A collaborative model often increases buy-in and support.

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Decision-Making for School Leaders: Five Tips | Education World

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Thanks to its partnership with publisher Eye on Education, Education World is pleased to present this administrator tip from School Leader Internship (4th Edition): Developing, Monitoring, and Evaluating Your Leadership Experience, by Gary E. Martin , Arnold B. Danzig , William F. Wright , Richard A. Flanary, and Fred Brown .

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I love the article.  I wish this movement would really catch on with administrators.  I have been under the leadership of all types and it is always easier to follow those who care.
In your view I believe you have a settings button where you can turn on the buttons to allow comments.
Good luck!
Cami Lott