Lead from the Start: How to Succeed as the New Principal of your School
by Tommy Reddicks and Tina Merriweather Seymour, Solution Tree Press, Bloomington, Ind., 2020, 187 pp with index, $36.95 softcover
In their book
Lead from the Start: How to Succeed as the New Principal of your School, authors Tommy Reddicks and Tina Merriweather Seymour offer a focused strategic plan for new principals, whether in a traditional public school, charter school or private schools, to follow to achieve success as a leader.
The authors, experienced school leaders and mentors, discuss ways for new principals to develop tools to build on best practices, manage and delegate tasks, utilize data-driven proactive systems and build a strong supportive school community.
The book leads a new principal from planning for the new school year all the way through his/her first year to concluding the year with faculty evaluations and planning for year two. Topics include: Understanding the setting of the school, focus on mission and vision, building strong relationships, managing school operations and finances, creating strong behavior management systems, implementing and evaluating curriculum, instruction, and assessment models, and hiring, managing and evaluating staff.
The authors provide the reader with personal accounts and firsthand lessons they have learned from their own career experiences. Each chapter concludes with reflection questions. The appendix provides checklists, budgeting templates and other resources a new principal can use during his/her first year as he/she has to manage the many tasks of school leadership.
This book could be useful in college leadership preparation programs, as a first-year principal, or as a book study for leadership teams. This book can help beginning school leaders to avoid some of the more common mishaps that can happen due to inexperience. It gives first year principals the tools necessary to grow and lead a school organization in today’s world.
Reviewed by Diane E. Reed, associate professor and chair, St. John Fisher College, Graduate Educational Leadership Program, Rochester, N.Y.
Teachers and Their Unions – Labor Relations in Uncertain Times
by Todd A. Mitchell, Rowan & Littlefield, Lanham, Md., 2020, 202 pp. with index, $29 softcover
Todd Mitchell, a professor of education at the University of New Hampshire, demonstrates his expertise in school law with a comprehensive exploration of the teacher union labor movement from its beginnings to current times. It is both a history of union progress and a look at the complicated issues the movement has raised for politics, government, school administration and for the teachers themselves.
Key to the complexity is the knowledge of applying an industrial union model to teachers who view themselves as professionals, not simply a labor force. While contracts can easily spell out terms such as wages and benefits, defining working conditions that lead to effective student learning is not such an easy task. Tying teacher evaluation to student performance, then tying issues of tenure to student proficiency has led to negotiations and contract language that have raised the possibility of conflict unimagined by teachers when they started asking communities for wages and benefits that recognized their value to the community.
While not a how-to manual for administrators involved in teacher contract negotiations, this text will provide a foundation for understanding why negotiations are becoming more and more difficult as an inappropriate contract model tries to address issues that cannot be reduced to several sheets of paper, then applied to countless non-alike classrooms and students of every sort.
The text closes with ideas for proceeding in uncertain times .
Reviewed by John C. Fagan, retired superintendent, Oak Park, Ill.
Common-Sense Evidence: The Education Leader's Guide to Using Data and Research
by Nora Gordon and Carrie L. Conaway, Harvard Education Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2020, 240 pp., $33 softcover
Those preparing to become superintendents typically take an education statistics course and find that the content has little application for improving actual administrative practice. To address this problem, Georgetown University associate professor Nora Gordon and Harvard University senior lecturer Carrie Conaway have written
Common-Sense Evidence: The Education Leader's Guide to Using Data and Research. They use a broadened understanding of "evidence" and suggest "common sense" ways of utilizing evidence to improve practice.
By itself,
Common-Sense Evidence might be useful for an elementary or secondary teacher endeavoring to improve instruction. But without use of education statistics (such as correlation, analysis of variance, chi square tests, etc.), the teacher will not accomplish much. For that reason, I suggest that this book be utilized in conjunction with a standard education statistics textbook. The Gordon and Conaway book would stimulate interest, and the education statistics textbook would provide the necessary analytic tools.
To study school start time, for example, it is usually not practical to randomly assign students from a local population to two student groups starting school at two different times. On the other hand, some "evidence" might be gathered by comparing similar groups that started at two different times. While the latter study would not meet experimental standards, Gordon and Conaway suggest that while a non-randomized selection of participants would raise questions about the generalizability of the results, it would also be more practical.
Given the need to interest more administrators in research to improve curriculum and instruction, I recommend Gordon and Conaway's
Guide to Using Data and Research as a companion to a traditional education statistics text. Their book teaches useful methods for securing data for suggestive consideration, but it does not teach education statistics.
Reviewed by Louis Wildman, professor emeritus, California State University-Bakersfield, Bakersfield, Calif.
10 Perspectives on Innovation in Education
edited by Jimmy Casas, Todd Whitaker, and Jeffrey Zoul, Routledge, N.Y., 2019, 184 pp., $29.95 softcover, $99.95 hardcover
Setting up our education system to optimize learning is dependent on breaking away from the status quo. This is the first volume in a planned series of Great Educators books by Routledge, a publishing company that has helped sponsor What Great Educators Do Differently (WGEDD) conferences. These conferences stem from the work of
ConnectEDD, an organization founded in 2015 that provides resources to teachers and administrators to support the transformation of education.
10 Perspectives on Innovation in Education, edited by three visionaries in education innovation, Jeff Zoul, Jimmy Cases and Todd Whitaker, provides essays from 10 esteemed educators who have presented at a What Great Educators Do Differently event.
As a veteran educator and education administrator, I continue to expand my viewpoints and hone my skills by keeping up with other educators who inspire and invigorate me. Jimmy Casas is an educator, author, and speaker with over two decades of school leadership experience. Todd Whitaker is a professor of educational leadership at the University of Missouri, international presenter and bestselling author of
What Great Teachers Do Differently and
Your First Year: How to Survive and Thrive as a New Teacher (co-written with Madeline Whitaker Good and Katherine Whitaker). Jeffrey Zoul is an education leader and president of ConnectEDD.
The book is set up in chapters, each written by one of 10 contributors. Zoul, Whitaker and Casas have written the first three chapters and cover leading edge professional learning practices, innovating school culture and improving hiring practices to recruit and hire the best educators for our school communities, respectively.
Other chapters include championing the role of the school library and librarians as innovators, changing how students learn in a math classroom and increasing personal skill development for teachers. Each chapter provides a bit of background, some thoughts on transformation, and a few practical tips. Each contributor has a twitter handle so that readers can continue to connect with these thought and practice leaders to invest in their own professional learning.
The book is geared for educators at all levels. Inspirational, aspirational and practical are apt descriptors of the thoughts shared by the education innovators in this first volume.
Reviewed by Marilyn King, deputy superintendent instruction, Bozeman, Mont.
The Leader’s Greatest Return: Attracting, Developing, and Multiplying Leaders
by John C. Maxwell, Harper Collins Leadership, 2020, New York, N.Y., 207 pp., $27.99 hardcover
If you are looking to add value and boost the culture in your school district then I would recommend reading
The Leader’s Greatest Return: Attracting, Developing, and Multiplying Leaders, by John C. Maxwell, author of over 70 books on leadership. In his book, Maxwell argues that while organizations pour their time, effort and money into restructuring and reinvention, the real way to organizational success is by growing your leaders.
Maxwell neatly lays out how current leaders of organizations can begin generating leadership from all levels of their organization. The steps within the chapters draw on numerous examples from organizations and Maxwell adds his own personal stories of cultivating leaders. While reading this book, it was quite simple to draw parallels from the examples that were highlighted in the chapters to how these steps might be applied in a school district.
This is one of those books educational leaders will come back to and learn something new each time. It is a must-read from leaders who are mentoring other leaders and for leaders who want to bring their district to the next level. There are also some bonus features of this book that can be located on Maxwell’s website, podcast, and blog, not to mention his “Minute with Maxwell” videos that can arrive in your inbox each day to continue building you leadership and the leadership in your district.
Reviewed by Christopher Brewer, assistant superintendent for educational programs, Rome, N.Y.
Building Your Building
by Jasmine K. Kullar and Scott A. Cunningham, Solution Tree Press, Bloomington, Ind., 2020, 192 pp., $36.95 softcover
Building Your Building by Jasmine K. Kullar, Ed.D. and Scott A. Cunningham exemplifies the practical application of reading, learning, and reflection. The book is engaging and straightforward, with practical utilization of reflection questions at the end of all chapters. Nestled in each chapter are reproducible templates to help codify the learning in the chapter.
The authors do an excellent job of reminding one of the reasons for leading teachers and leading others. The Sample Faculty Manual Table of Contents was the most significant takeaway the author provided. Chapter 3 could be a book of its own offering guidance to budding principals, school leaders, and district leaders.
The authors have crafted a winner in this book. A leader entering their first role can organize their entire year by implementing the tools provided. The book presents lots of useful tools, providing evidence behind each instrument. This book may have been intended for leaders with less than three years of experience, but its contents can be applied to all leaders — a reminder and reaffirmation of the reasons we lead in such a critical industry.
Reviewed by Sean Wilson, CEO, International High School of New Orleans, New Orleans, La.