Leadership and School Improvement

Leadership and School Improvement

1. Critical Leadership Characteristics

   • Leader promotes open communication and problem solving skills
   • Leaders consistently use data to make decisions and use data to identify school needs
   • Leaders use data to make decisions
   • Leaders monitor and assistant during the implementation of the improvement plan
   • Leaders develop a clear focus and vision for school improvment with open communciation between school building staff and faculty members
   • Use Teacher expertise for instructional and improvement plans
   • Leadership responsibilities are not based soley on one person but distributed throughout building leaders
   • Leaders develop a community that is based on open communication and the need to learn and improve
   • Leaders maintain a focus on student achievement

2. Organizational factors that impede leadership

   • Identifying a direction and plan
   • Lack of problem solving skills and communication
   • No trial and error- schools and leadership groups do not experiment or try various plans in the direction of student success and improvment
   • Lack of professional development for teachers
   • lack of research based instructional materials
   • Clear values and vision
   • Lack of communication, collaboration and encouragement
   • Time; time management strategies, time for change and implementation

3. Instructional Leadership

   • many factors contribute to instructional leadership and its effectiveness; instructional leadership differs at various school levels.
   • Clear understanding of instructional practices and instruction going on within the individual classrooms
   • Link between district initiatives and individual classroom practices
   • Actions of a leader with a direct link to instruction; moreover direct link to instruction with individual students