School Leadership Handbook For Excellence In Student Learning 4th Edition Stuart C. Smith, Philip K Piele - Solutions

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Do the interior and exterior of your school offer an attractive and inviting learning environment for students and staff? If yes, what makes it so? If not, what could be done to improve the physical environment of your school?
Who has input into the development of your school budget? Is it an inclusive process? If not, how could the development process be changed to make it more inclusive?
Describe your school district’s budget calendar and its relationship to your school’s budget process.
What type of budgeting does your school use? How does it link to the school and district educational plans?
What other means of developing human capital and social capital might your school or district want to consider? Discuss their cost and effectiveness and contrast them with current practices.
How do your school and district develop and enhance human and social capital to maximize student learning? Are these mechanisms effective? What do they cost?
Are all three references available for interpreting student performance: norm referenced for allocating resources, criterion referenced for making instructional decisions, and individually referenced for reflecting change over time within individuals?Are these references appropriately displayed
Are classroom-based measures available for administrators to use with teachers? Are these measures technically adequate? Is performance on them sensitive to all students, and are they universally designed? What are the target skills versus the access skills? How can adjustments be made to ensure
What infrastructure is in place for managing student performance information? Are data stored with directories, and are all the necessary variables present in the data file? Are the data complete(all variables have values), or are data missing? How accessible are these data (for transfer and
Do you believe it is the responsibility of a school leader to teach the public, not only students, the value and values of education?
What is your perception of the news media? Do you see the media as a watchdog? A community builder? A reliable source of information? A manipulator of public opinion and taste? An overly powerful estate? A business?
What is your opinion of collaboration? Do you prefer to make all the decisions and take on all the responsibilities yourself? Can you work with others, even if it means compromising and sacrificing some of your ideas and ambitions?
How would you rate the friendliness of the school or building you work in? Does it appear inviting to the public, or is it closed up like a prison? Are parking spaces designated for visitors?Reception areas? Are there signs that direct visitors?
How, in your view, can engaging the community advance the educational mission of the school, particularly by contributing to students’ academic achievement?
As a school leader, have you made involvement in your community a priority? Do you volunteer with youth sports activities or community fundraising events? Do you belong to the local chapter of organizations such as Rotary or Toastmasters?
Do you have any communication tics? For instance, do you always frown when hearing bad news? Do you interrupt people to get your point across? Do you pepper your speech repeatedly with words or phrases such as “do you know what I mean?” “you know,” “guess what?” or “like”? Ask
At the next staff meeting you attend, pay special attention to people’s body language. Watch for involuntary actions or reactions such as blushing, perspiring, or stammering. Notice if people’s actions agree with what they say. Do your actions agree with what you say?
How do you greet and treat visitors to your office? Do you stand up, smile, and come out from behind your desk when they enter?Or do you continue working or talking on the phone, making your visitors wait for you?
How accessible are you to colleagues or those who report to you?Is your office door always closed? Is the answering machine on your phone always engaged? Do you check your e-mail at least once a day?
How do you feel when someone else edits or proofreads your written communications? Are you grateful for the “extra pair of eyes”? Or do you resent someone else pointing out mistakes or improving your text?
How would you rate yourself as a communicator? Has anyone ever told you that you are a good listener or an excellent writer?Has anyone ever told you that you are difficult to talk to?
To what extent do teachers and students have the opportunity to be meaningfully involved in the decision-making and management structures of schooling? How might you take the lead to make way for such involvement?
How are teachers and students evaluated? Is the focus on quick completion and besting others or on meaningful engagement?
To what extent are the importance and value of assigned tasks made clear to teachers and students?
Do all teachers and students have access to opportunities to be meaningfully involved in learning and improvement?
How might you take the lead to ensure that classroom, school, and district goals reflect a learning focus?
Take some time to observe the messages sent to students and teachers. As you walk into the building, what messages are being communicated? Consider these elements:• How are hallways and classrooms decorated? What do those decorations communicate?• To what extent do the decorations reinforce a
How would you characterize the motivational experience of teachers and students within classrooms and the school overall?What types of motivational messages does the learning climate communicate to teachers and students?
How would you describe the learning climate in your classrooms, school, and district?
How might you continue to develop your own understanding of progress-monitoring techniques, tools, and considerations so as to better support the learning of all students? For instance, challenge yourself to critically reflect on the progress-monitoring techniques and tools used to generate
How is progress currently communicated to learners and related stakeholders? Is the information meaningful and actionable?What happens to the information? Is it used to make instructional decisions and help students take ownership of the learning process? How might students be more meaningfully
What type of information is being used in your building and district to render judgments about student learning? Is this information necessary and sufficient? What might be missing from this information (for example, impact of instructional techniques on student motivation)? And how might you
What strategies and systems does your school use to monitor student-learning goals? What learning goals (academic, behavioral, motivational) are in need of better monitoring? How might you take the lead to ensure the effective monitoring of students’ progress before, during, and after a learning
If you are a practitioner, what assessment methods does your school or district use to gather information about student learning? What additional assessment methods might help instructional decision making at the classroom, building, and district levels?
How might you continue to develop your understanding of the learning process? For example, challenge yourself to identify some aspect of the learning process you would like to know more about. Next, develop an action plan to increase and share your understanding. Finally, consider how you might
How might you take the lead in starting conversations with teachers and students about the learning process? And how might you work collaboratively with teachers and students in clarifying learning goals, determining where learners are in relation to those goals, developing strategies for attaining
How does your school currently select and use instructional strategies? How effective are these strategies for ensuring that all learners successfully attain learning goals? How might you take the lead in considering, selecting, and monitoring appropriate instructional strategies?
How might you take the lead in clarifying student learning goals for students and teachers? What learning goals seem the most ill defined in your building (motivational, academic, or behavioral)?How might you communicate to students, teachers, and parents the importance of clarifying and monitoring
What is your own view of how students learn? Does your view align with a particular formal learning theory or aspects of various learning theories? How does your view of the learning process influence your instructional and leadership decisions?
Are you comfortable with the exercise of political leadership, or would you prefer to restrict your attention to the nuts and bolts of the school’s instructional program? How might you advance students’ academic learning through political leadership?
In your current position, what sources of power do you have to influence school decisions? In what situations have you used that power? What was the outcome?
Choose a current or recent issue in your school and use the political mapping exercise described in this chapter to describe the key players, their interests, and their power. Given this mapping, what strategy would you advise the principal to use?
In your school, what decisions (such as curriculum, instruction, discipline, professional development) are considered to be in the principal’s sphere of interest? What decisions are in the teacher’s domain? What decisions are in a contested zone?
To what extent is your daily work affected or controlled by district policy? State rules? Federal regulations? What rule or policy would you most like to eliminate? Why? What district, state, or federal rules help you accomplish your work?
To what degree do you consider the leadership in your own school to be distributed? What steps could be taken to broaden the distribution? Would that make the school more effective?
In schools in which you’ve worked, what encouraged teachers to take a leadership role? What discouraged them?
To what extent do you agree with the statement “Everyone can be a leader”? Is this just feel-good rhetoric or a realistic principle?Does it apply to others in the school community besides teachers(for example, parents and students)?
Think back on the most successful and least successful committees and teams on which you have been a participant.What were the biggest barriers to success? What helped the others be successful? How much did the leader have to do with it?
Considering the range of decisions that principals frequently make (scheduling classes, choosing textbooks, arranging professional development for teachers, and so forth), which ones would you be willing to share with others? For which ones would you want to keep your decision-making authority? Why?
What personal and professional knowledge and skills do you think you should add to your own repertoire to better equip you to serve as an effective leader in an SBM environment?
What school-level noninstructional structures, policies, and practices might enhance student performance?
How would you deal with teachers and other school staff members who refuse to participate in SBM or any schoolimprovement program?
As a school principal, how willing would you be to trust and accept judgments on instructional issues from members of the community who are not educators?
What are the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of an SBM system?Are these weaknesses inherent? How would you try to overcome them?
Why or why not does shared decision making seem to you be an effective form of governance for a school district? For a school?
To what degree is the current state and federal accountability system consistent with the assumptions and philosophy behind the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium standards?
Based on your experience in schools, what leadership strategies are most successful in helping teachers accept and respond to unpopular mandates?
In your experience, what incentives are most likely to motivate teachers?
To what degree should teachers and administrators be held accountable for student performance on tests?
What positive and negative effects of accountability have you seen in your school or classroom?
In your current role, do you face demands for accountability that you consider to be unreasonable? Who is making these demands and why?
In your current role, to what individuals and groups do you consider yourself accountable? In each case, what are you accountable for? (What do they have a right to expect from you?)
How would you characterize your school’s student peer culture in regard to its influence on learning? Can you see evidence that students in your school may behave in the manner predicted by Bishop and colleagues’ cost-benefit model?
In what ways do you consistently model for others what you stand for?
Identify one or two dysfunctional assumptions held by personnel in your school. Recalling that cultural elements persist because they succeed in meeting people’s needs at some level, can you analyze how those dysfunctional assumptions continue to derive their power?
Which of these assumptions facilitate accomplishment of your school’s mission? Which ones don’t?
Thinking about the school (or other organization) in which you now work, can you identify some of its espoused values? Shared, taken-for-granted assumptions?
How might humility, which characterizes the outstanding (Level 5) leaders Jim Collins observed in his book Good to Great, influence how the leader might try to assess and transform a school’s culture?
Have other leaders you know exemplified the prosocial motive described at the beginning of this chapter, and to what extent has your desire to serve as a school leader been inspired by their example?
How closely does your personal vision match the school vision?
To what degree is your school’s vision a result of leadership?How influential has the principal been in creating or sustaining the vision? What leadership behaviors have had an impact on vision?
Does shared vision play an important role in the life of your school? Is it frequently discussed or used as a standard in making decisions?
To what degree does your school have a shared vision? Briefly describe it. What outward indicators of this vision would a visitor to your school see?
In a few sentences, describe your personal educational vision. If someone were to observe you over a period of a week, what outward indicators of your vision would they see?
Considering the needs of your students, identify one change in policy, practice, or environment that would have a significant, positive impact. As principal, what steps could you take to advocate this change? What barriers would you face?
What examples of advocacy by teachers or administrators have you seen in your school? What visible effects have their efforts had?
Can you recall a time when your responsibility to the district conflicted with your responsibility to students? How was the conflict resolved? If you had to do it again, would you respond the same way?
Using an ethical dilemma you have faced in the past year, identify the elements that made it difficult to resolve.
Can you identify an administrator in your experience who exemplified ethical leadership? What virtues did he or she demonstrate? Conversely, can you identify an administrator who did not show ethical leadership? What virtues was he or she lacking?
Thomas Sergiovanni (1992) advocates “leading by outrage.”What are the issues in your school that trigger your sense of outrage?
If you are an experienced principal, what was the most difficult challenge during your first year? Based on that experience, how would you design a mentoring program for first-year principals?
What role has mentoring played in your career? Was it a beneficial experience? Would you support a proposal to make mentoring available for all new principals?
How would you describe your career goals in terms of the future positions you will seek? In terms of the things you hope to accomplish before you’re done?
Levine claims that administrator preparation programs range in quality from “inadequate to appalling.” Does that statement seem supportable? Does it match your experience in a preparation program? Based on your experience, what are the most important changes that should be made in programs for
What has been the biggest mental adjustment you’ve had to make in becoming a principal? In what way do principals see the world differently than teachers?
Identify a major issue in your school. What leadership strategy(or combination of strategies) would be most appropriate to resolve the issue?
Again drawing on your experience in schools, does transformational leadership seem to be as rare as some researchers suggest? If so, why? What are the barriers to becoming a transformational leader?
Looking back on your experience in schools, can you recall cases in which leaders failed because they adopted the wrong strategy?Why did their strategy prove ineffective?
Do you agree with Edwin Locke that there are certain decisions that can never be effectively shared or delegated? If so, what kinds of decisions are in that category?
Think of an especially effective educational leader you have known. How would you describe his or her leadership style? To what degree did this leader’s style account for his or her effectiveness?
How would you describe your leadership style? In what ways is this style an advantage? What disadvantages does it have?
Take any leader on the national stage during the past several decades, and imagine him or her in the role of school principal.How would the leadership qualities of George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, or Martin Luther King Jr. (for example) be helpful or harmful in the principalship?
In an earlier, perhaps more innocent age, people spoke unhesitatingly about the heroes who had inspired them. Is it still meaningful to talk about personal heroes? If so, what heroes have inspired you, and what leadership qualities did they possess?
Some leaders are admired as effective; others are remembered as great. What’s the difference?
What light does your own career shed on the development of leadership? Has leadership been a persistent theme throughout your life, or is it a more recent development? What brought you to where you are now?
When you compare your self-portrait with the portrait drawn in this chapter, what implications do you see for your professional development as a leader?
What does your self-portrait as a leader look like? What leadership strengths do you see in yourself? What areas do you worry about?
From what you know of school leadership, what are the essential traits or behaviors of effective principals? How does your answer compare with that of your peers? Is there a reasonable consensus?
What implications does this research hold for you personally?Does anything need to be added to your professional development agenda?
Is this kind of research really necessary, or are people capable of recognizing good leadership when they see it?

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