Leading for Powerful Learning: A Guide for Instructional Leaders

Supporting teacher learning is a complicated and challenging task. This much-awaited book offers a practical, research-based framework for thinking about instructional leadership, along with the necessary resources and tools for improving practice. The authors identify specific structures, formats, and strategies that an instructional leader can use to support new and veteran principals and teacher leaders. They then discuss ways to think about which structures are most appropriate for particular settings, offering suggestions on the most effective way to work with these structures. This unique book combines theory with best practices to create a vision of how 21st-century instructional leaders can improve education for all students.

This practical book:

• Describes a unique, adult learning framework.
• Includes a variety of tools and protocols that leaders can use to support teacher learning in schools, districts, departments, and teams.
• Offers instructional leaders both theory and practice-the what to do and also the why and how.
• Addresses a broad spectrum of instructional leaders at the district, school, and university level.

“Students everywhere deserve teachers and administrators who have read this book, and who enact the ideas in it. It is a must read for principals, district level administrators, teacher leaders, instructional coaches and mentors - anyone charged with leading the learning of adults in their schools.”
—Gene Thompson-Grove, Educational Consultant and Board Member, SchoolReform Initiative

“Leading for Powerful Learning is the book every school leader needs. It provides the essential tools for carrying out what is arguably the school leader's most difficult task: supporting the learning of the teachers with whom they work. The authors’ insights and practical wisdom, drawn from their decades of experience in schools, will be useful not only to formal school leaders but to those serving as leaders in more informal ways.”
—Tina Blythe, Harvard Graduate School of Education