Leader 2 Leader

Sandy Austin, Center for Educational Leadership It’s a new year and you have made a resolution to  create plans and work with teachers to improve teaching and learning. That excitement quickly turns to focused determination as you remember all of your other responsibilities as a school principal. You ask yourself, “How can I get into classrooms more and plan supports for teachers?”    One idea you have is to form an instructional leadership team (ILT) of teacher leaders to identify teaching and learning challenges in your building and support teachers to solve these challenges. You imagine that leading a team in this sort of work will build their instructional leadership skills and expand your capacity to provide the kind of support that your teachers and students need and deserve. Based on the research and experiences from the field, it is evident that without effective leaders who are able to focus on instruction and instructional leadership, meeting the ...

Where can you find the best teachers? By Jayne Ellspermann The best teachers are right in front of us! Several years ago, the school where I was principal was struggling to find teachers, especially in hard to fill positions like math, science, and special education.  We had a building full of bright students who we were doing a great job preparing for countless professions. Teaching was not one of them. Teachers are often the first profession students encounter and see in action.  When you ask students in elementary school what they want to be when they grow up many of them will tell you they want to be a teacher.  Years go by and those same students move on to different careers, often because we do such a great job in our schools of promoting other careers. Every day I saw potential teachers in our classrooms, and knew with a few changes we could create an outstanding teaching force with the students in our school.  There were things we nee...

Joseph B. Harrell Northwest Region Director, Florida Support Administrators Association (FSAA) Assistant Superintendent for Administrative Services, Santa Rosa School District Santa Rosa School District provides students with a high-quality education and our students consistently lead the State of Florida in academic achievement. Indeed, the mission of our school district, Educate students for success by providing a superior, relevant education, drives our daily instruction in the classroom as we strive to prepare our students for a bright and prosperous future. With this mission in mind, Santa Rosa School District is currently in Year 1 of our Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics STEAM Innovate Program, a 5 year transformation and partnership with Discovery Education, a division of the globally recognized Discovery Communications. Research consistently demonstrates that STEAM education dramatically increases student achievement, literally eliminating achi...

Kirstie Gabaldon President-elect, Florida Association of School Administrators Assistant Principal, Creekside High School, St. Johns County  “Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into Benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation.” ~ John F. Kennedy  “I teach. What’s your superpower?” Anon. Visitors arriving at Creekside High School comment that the school feels like a college campus, or how happy everyone looks, or that the school feels like a positive place. What generates this atmosphere is not a well-placed palm tree or bench (although we have those), nor is it the tall rotunda, or shiny red paint. I would argue that what generates this atmosphere is confidence. At Creekside we have focused on developing opportunities for our 2,000 students to explore and discover what they are interested in, and where their talents may...

Mark E Shanoff, Ed. D President, Florida Association of School Administrators Principal, Ocoee Middle School  Currently, the students, teachers and school leaders in Florida are leading their schools without the standardized assessment data we have become accustomed to in years past. What’s worse is when the data is eventually released, the validity of the data has been called into question by practitioners and leaders from across the State. And, once the data is released in January, more instructional time will have passed since the students took the exam than instructional time exists before the next round of FSA testing. It used to be that the politics surrounding student assessment, albeit distracting, didn’t impact the planning and delivery of an instructional program based on the previous year’s data. In fact, school leaders relied on that data, to make placement decisions and lineup changes. But today, the politics of student assessment and the absence of any actio...