"We can't do that in our school district." "I don't have time to add that to my curriculum." "We're fighting against impossible odds with these students." Sound familiar? School improvement can often feel like a losing battle, but it doesn't have to be. In this fully revised and updated second edition of The Learning Leader, Douglas B. Reeves helps leadership teams go beyond excuses to capitalize on their strengths, reduce their weaknesses, and reset their mindset and priorities to achieve unprecedented success. A critical key is recognizing student achievement as more than just a set of test scores. Reeves asserts that when leaders focus exclusively on results, they fail to measure and understand the importance of their own actions. He offers an alternative-the Leadership for Learning Framework, which helps leaders identify and distinguish among four different types of educators and provide more effective, tailored support to: "Lucky" educators, who achieve high results but don't understand how their actions influence achievement. "Losing" educators, who achieve low results yet keep doing the same thing, expecting different outcomes. "Learning" educators, who have not yet achieved the desired results but are working their way toward excellence. "Leading" educators, who achieve high results and understand how their actions influence their success. Reeves stresses that effective leadership is neither a unitary skill nor a solitary activity. The Learning Leader helps leaders reconceptualize their roles in the school improvement process and motivate themselves and their colleagues to keep working to better serve their students.

Turn ideas into goals-and goals into impact The road to school improvement and student achievement is paved with good intentions-so why does the destination seem so far away? If you're like most educators, the answer is a pothole known as the implementation gap. This book provides a road map to bypassing that gap in your school or district, offering a carefully researched, field-tested methodology that takes leadership teams, professional learning communities, and educators all the way from good ideas to systematic impact. Following the five Ds, you'll: Discover goals worth pursuing and problems worth addressing Design instruments and actions that generate deep impact Deliver interventions and collect data Double-back to monitor your progress and evaluate the impact Double-up to enhance, sustain, and scale your success You became an educator to make a difference in students' lives. With this playbook, you'll transform research and ideas into achievable actions-and make maximum impact.

This revised edition of the bestseller by Douglas B. Reeves contains the information and tools necessary to successfully evaluate all types of educational leaders and improve individual and organizational performance. Based on research, theory, and best practices of leadership, organizational effectiveness, and personnel evaluation, this book focuses on three critical concepts: Leadership has a dramatic impact on student achievement, equity, and staff morale Leadership effectiveness includes both personal predispositions and acquired knowledge skills Leadership evaluation is intended to improve personal and organizational performance, not merely to render an assessment.

In his new book, author and international keynoter Douglas Reeves addresses a major challenge faced by today's school leaders: an ever-growing load of programs and initiatives. Reeves contends that program overload not only taxes leadership resources, but actually hurts rather than improves student performance. Drawing on recent research findings, this book shows how leaders can pare down from a proliferation of initiatives to determine what is truly most important based on their local concerns, challenges, populations, and other school factors. Identifying a specific set of leadership practices that are more strongly associated with improvements in student achievement, Reeves provides explicit guidelines for how school leaders can improve their most critical leadership decisions by simultaneously engaging in three essential strategies: monitoring teaching and leadership practices, building high degrees of efficacy among staff members, and focusing on a smaller number of priorities. Finding Your Leadership Focus is essential reading for new and veteran principals, teacher leaders, and PLC book study groups. Book Features: Practical guidance to help school leaders at every level to focus on what is most important and to assess their progress. Analysis correlating three years of student achievement data and specific school leadership practices. Online video conference support by Douglas Reeves for book study groups and graduate classes who use this book. Online downloads.

Stop apathy in its tracks with the 5 C's of engagement Disengagement, disenchantment, distress-the three "D's" of many post-pandemic schools. If we are to find our way back from this brink, every student, teacher, and leader must relearn how to lean in. It's time to focus, know one another, and stop chasing so many initiatives. It's time to shake things up so learners want to participate. From faculty meetings to student conferences, casual greetings to grading, you can learn to use practices that most powerfully reflect the Five C's of Engagement: Connections - feeling known, valued, and tethered to others Conditions - being able to learn in a stable environment in which expectations are high Challenge - engaging in an endeavor knowing your "high jumps" in terms of intellectual and creative risks will be supported Control - the privilege of learning with a balance between ownership and support Collaboration - deepening one's knowledge and identity as a learner by being skillful at relationship-building Our students are looking to us as the grownups in the room to model what it looks like to belong, believe, and balance high expectations with compassionate support. With Confronting the Crisis of Engagement in hand, you have the guide to make that happen.

Guiding schools through significant change is one of the toughest challenges educational leaders face, but learning from the examples of those who have succeeded can make it less daunting. In Leading Change in Your School, distinguished author and researcher Douglas B. Reeves offers lessons learned through his work with educators in thousands of schools around the world and presents real-life examples of leaders who have met the challenge of change head-on-with impressive results for their schools and districts. Readers will also find practical resources for engaging their colleagues in change initiatives. Expanding on a number of his columns in the journal Educational Leadership, Reeves offers insights ad recommendations in four areas: Creating conditions for change, including assessments to determine personal and organizational readiness for change. Planning change, including cautionary notes about strategic planning. Implementing change, including the importance of moving from rhetoric to day-to-day reality. Sustaining change, including the need to reorient priorities and values so that individual convenience gives way to a shared sense of the greater good. The change leaders-both teachers and administrators-whose stories Reeves tells come from varied districts, but they share a passion for creating schools that work for all students. They are, Reeves says, ""people like you, sharing similar challenges but perhaps with different results.

Accountability. The very mention of the word strikes fear in the hearts of many teachers and school leaders, leading to confusion and panic rather than improved student achievement. Author Douglas B. Reeves explains how to transform accountability from destructive and demoralizing accounting drills into a constructive decision-making process that improves teaching, learning, and leadership. Reeves encourages educators to become proactive in developing student-centered accountability systems. These systems capture the many aspects of teaching that test scores don't reveal-they tell the stories behind the numbers. Reeves shows how educators can create accountability systems that enhance teacher motivation and lead to significant improvements in student achievement and equity, even in traditionally low-performing schools. Accountability for Learning explains how to build a student-centered accountability system by examining key indicators in teaching, leadership, curriculum, and parent and community involvement. Focusing on the classroom, it outlines how teachers can become leaders in accountability by using a four-step process of observation, reflection, synthesis, and replication of effective teaching practices. Finally, the author discusses the role of local, state, and federal policymakers and corrects the myths associated with No Child Left Behind. ""As educators, we have two choices,"" Reeves says. ""We can rail against the system, hoping that standards and testing are a passing fad, or we can lead the way in a fundamental reformulation of educational accountability."" Accountability for Learning gives readers the helping hand they need to lead the way to fair and comprehensive accountability.

"In Holistic Accountability, Reeves succeeds in recasting the accountability dilemma into a win-win plan for school administrators who are weary of the test score sweepstakes and for policy makers who are demanding results. It is an excellent approach?one that is sound, reasonable, comprehensive, and relevant. The accompanying sample accountability reports are very useful."
?School Business Affairs, October 2002

Nationally recognized expert on assessment, Dr. Douglas B. Reeves, offers a comprehensive program of holistic accountability, a system that includes not only test scores but also the instructional and leadership practices at a school. Holistic accountability systems yield information about curriculum, assessment, and instruction that can lead directly and swiftly to better practices and better decision making for teachers, school leaders, and policymakers.

This revised edition of the bestseller by Douglas B. Reeves contains the information and tools necessary to successfully evaluate all types of educational leaders and improve individual and organizational performance. Based on research, theory, and best practices of leadership, organizational effectiveness, and personnel evaluation, this book focuses on three critical concepts: Leadership has a dramatic impact on student achievement, equity, and staff morale Leadership effectiveness includes both personal predispositions and acquired knowledge skills Leadership evaluation is intended to improve personal and organizational performance, not merely to render an assessment.