Professional Learning
for School Leaders
We get it. As a new or established leader, the challenges you face can feel insurmountable and endless: from low morale to conflicting state and city mandates; from the ever-evolving knowledge of what good instruction looks like to lack of manpower. How do you keep it all afloat while ensuring the instructional practice is in place to help students thrive academically? The demands are vast and the role itself can be isolating. We know. We’ve been there, too.
Effective school leaders – much like orchestra conductors when they produce a coherent sound – are adept at organizing groups to produce team results while encouraging individuals to shine. It’s often an objective mentor or partner behind the scenes that provides the tools, resources and know-how to be an effective leader. That’s how Generation Ready can help.
Dr. Richard Elmore, Professor Emeritus, Harvard University School of Education and Chair of Generation Ready’s Advisory Board, has developed with his team the Internal Coherence Framework and Developmental Rubric that undergirds Generation Ready’s leadership practice. This work represents an ‘efficacy based’ theory of improvement. Collective efficacy beliefs are defined as the individual team member’s belief that the team’s actions can make a difference to the outcome. The research is powerful in the context of high poverty schools because the coefficient for impact on student achievement for collective efficacy is equal to that of student socioeconomic status (Goddard, 2001) (Goddard & Woolfolk, 2000). Teachers and teams in persistently low performing systems typically score low on collective efficacy (Goddard, Goddard, & Tschannen-Moran, 2007). Our leadership work tackles this problem head on by ensuring the development of strong instructional leadership that aligns with effective principal leadership practices and team processes.
