This text integrates the core instructional leadership tasks of all principals: supervision, evaluation, and professional development. It is a practical, hands-on approach based on sound theory and research. The text provides both a conceptual frame and practical exercises that contemporary principals can use in their supervision, evaluation, and professional development activities. The models for these tasks are research-based and reflect the current realities that confront principals and others committed to improving instruction.

In this second edition of Improving Instruction Through Supervision, Evaluation, and Professional Development we’ve maintained the conceptual framework while updating sections to provide the most recent research on instructional strategies that have the most promise of helping all students learn. Modifications of the law resulting from the reauthorization of the 50-year-old Elementary and Secondary Education Act—Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) (2015)—and their implication for practice are embedded throughout this new edition. Updated data collection tools for classroom observations are also provided. We included a link to a website that contains all the observation tools in electronic format so that observers can have the opportunity to collect data on a tablet or laptop, save the observation data as a PDF file and e-mail those data to the teacher observed. This new edition recognizes the reality that all principals are responsible for supervision, evaluation, and professional development of their teachers—tasks that are neither simple nor without conflict. The primary audience of this text is aspiring and practicing principals. We hope to help them understand both the theory and practice of supervision, evaluation, and professional development. However, observing instruction, collecting data for reflection, and having conversations about teaching, are not the sole provinces of principals. Master teachers, teacher leaders, and teacher colleagues can also benefit from the supervisory sections of the book, especially the chapters on high-quality instruction, improving instruction, and the classroom data collecting tools. The book provides numerous tools specifically designed to collect a variety of data in classrooms to improve instruction. Embedded in each chapter are exercises to apply Theory into Practice by responding to a set of questions posed by the key issues of the chapter. After the explication and illustration of the key concepts and principles of the chapter, actual Instructional Leadership Challenges as described by a successful practicing principal for reflection and analysis.

This book takes a new approach to teacher evaluation by building on and encouraging new best practices in education - constructivist teaching, emotional intelligence and brain research, improved professional development practices, reflective practice, collaborative teacher-administrator relationships. It develops a new evaluation model established by the author - the Growth-Focused Evaluation system - and provides the requisite forms and reproducibles necessary to adopt or adapt the system. Chapters one through six examine the nature of evaluation as a vehicle not only to provide accountability but also to improve success of schools and students; they examine the complexity of the teacher's job and the role of the principal as motivator and leader; and they look at the many factors that contribute to the need for alternative evaluations, and examine various approaches such as reflective practice, self-assessment, portfolios, peer coaching and evaluation. The book then moves into the Growth-Focused Evaluation system, which promotes teacher reflection and examination of practice. Included are processes for working with experienced, beginning, transferring, and marginal teachers.Samples of how to report teacher growth and evaluation are included, as well as ways for teachers to record their own professional growth and activity.An appendix of forms at the end of the book provides masters that can be reproduced as principals develop their own plan, or implement the plan described.

A volume in Research and Theory in Educational Administration Series Editors: Wayne K. Hoy, The Ohio State University and Michael DiPaola, The College of William and Mary Improving Schools: Studies in Leadership and Culture is the seventh in a series on research and theory dedicated to advancing our understanding of schools through empirical study and theoretical analysis. This book is organized around two broad concepts-leadership and culture, which have important implications for improving schools. The book begins with an analysis of the saliency of trust in the culture of schools. In the first chapter, Patrick Forsyth's review of the consequences of school trust sets the tone for seeking and developing school cultures that enhance high academic performance of students. The investigation of school trust is traced over several decades at four research universities as scholars at each institution conceptualized, refined, and examined the consequences of school trust. It seems fair to conclude that a school culture that is anchored in values and norms of faculty trusting students and parents facilitates high academic achievement and positive outcomes.