Jess Levy - School Improvement Mind Map

Jess Levy - School Improvement Mind Map

1. Instructional leadership and Distributed Leadership

   • DLS - Distributed Leadership Series - developing a new framework for examining school leadership and management
     • In this framework, leadership practice is constructed through the interactions of leaders, followers, and contexts.
     • Cognition and Sociocultural activity theory
       • Focuses on two things; principal plus and practice
         • Principal plus: multiple individuals are involved in leading and managing schools
         • Practice: prioritizes the practice of leading and managing schools and frames this practice as emerging from interactions among school leaders and followers
         • Practice is most important! It focuses on where the "rubber" of school leadership and management meets the "road" of instructional improvement
   • Easier to be shared among many people: In one study, principals reported that "other school staff" shared responsibility for 31% of their daily activities
   • Who leaders are depends upon the school, subject, and activity
     • Important to make sure responsibilities are divided as evenly as possible

2. Leadership Characteristics of Effective Leaders

   • Self-confidence
   • Ambitious
   • Good communicator
   • Optomistic but realistic
   • Good listener
   • Determination and motivated by failure
   • Creative and eager to develop new ideas
   • Good at collaborating with others and sharing responsibility
   • 1. Leader's recognition and use of internal intellecutal and experiential resources 2. Differentiated top-down and lateral decision making process 3. Cultural bulding through dialogue and collaborative inquiry
   • Seek, recognize, and use teacher's expertise

3. Organizational factors that influence school improvement

   • Hurtful to School Improvement:
     • We are many times too fixated on leadership that we don't pay enough attention to the importance of management
       • Adminstrators do not support teaching staff when issues arise
         • Lack of resources, funding, and supports
           • Having one singular figure at the top of a hierarchy overseeing the allocation of resources, building and implementing a vision and making decisions for staff has proven unsustainable
   • Helpful to School Improvement:
     • Good resources, staff, and supports
       • Teachers and Administrators are on the same page
         • Staff is kept in the loop with changes in school day/school policies and school improvement efforts
           • PLC's within the school collaborate with each other and successfully facilitate productive discussion
             • Inquiry cycle for designing and implementing different instructional approaches and studying their impact
               • Leadership is more effective when it's stretched over knowledgeable individuals of a school