Focused Leadership : Instruction, Learning, and School Improvement

Building-level and central office administrators must be both instructional and learning leaders. Instructional leadership means focusing on teacher behaviors that support student learning and helping teachers make good decisions about their own behaviors in the classroom. Learning leadership focuses on the learning itself—how students absorb, process, and retain information. This guide will assist administrators in their quest to be more effective at what they do; this is meant not as a prescriptive document, but rather a baseline from which to grow. This guide provides information about the intricacies of the teaching and learning process and how these elements are linked. Readers are encouraged to use the guide as a foundation, as a starting point to expand their own instructional and learning leadership. They should modify, add to, and personalize the guide as they challenge themselves to grow. The guide encompasses many components, all of which are important. It should help administrators to know what to look for during an observation, and, perhaps even more important, topics of conversations to have with teachers. Transformational leadership begins with understanding teaching and learning as well as having the ability to generate quality conversations.