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Leading With Inquiry and Action
Foreword by Richard F. Elmore
Improve instruction in your school with this collaborative, inquiry-based process that helps identify areas for improvement, determine community-supported solutions, define an action plan, and evaluate program results.
- Grade Level: K-12
- ISBN: 9781412964142
- Published By: Corwin
- Year: 2009
- Page Count: 168
- Publication date: November 28, 2012
Price: $39.95
For Instructors
When you select 'request review copy', you will be redirected to Sage Publishing (our parent site) to process your request.
Description
"This essential guide for educational leaders skillfully blends scholarship with practice and integrates theory with real-world examples. Through case studies, the authors show the reader how to develop, support, and improve a collaborative, inquiry-action process for improving teaching and learning. If we are going to have schools that successfully educate all students to high standards, then we need principals who translate the lessons of this book into practice."
—Andrew Lachman, Executive Director
Connecticut Center for School Change
Enhance learning with a collaborative, inquiry-based system of leadership!
With sociopolitical forces prompting calls for school improvement, school leaders look for ways to expand their expertise in instructional leadership and strengthen their role in shaping classroom practice.
Leading With Inquiry and Action presents a systematic, ongoing process for collecting information, making decisions, and taking action to improve instruction and raise student achievement. The authors illustrate this collaborative inquiry-action cycle with a running vignette of an experienced principal and offer questions and exercises to guide individual reflection and group discussion. Thoroughly grounded in research, this book helps administrators:
- Identify areas for instructional improvement
- Determine community-supported solutions and build stakeholder commitment
- Articulate an action plan based on multiple data sources
- Take steps that support teacher development
- Systematically evaluate program results
Educational improvement requires informed leadership. This practical guide provides an efficient and functional framework for transforming current or aspiring principals into inquiry-minded, action-oriented instructional leaders.
Key features
Introduces and shows how to implement a collaborative inquiry-action cycle, an ongoing system of practice that emphasizes both thought and action in addressing the challenges of school improvement and that includes identifying the practice problem, determining outcomes, articulating the action plan, taking action, and evaluating
Illustrates the collaborative inquiry-action cycle in action through a running vignette of an experienced principal
The 3 chapters of Part 2 offer cases, with charts, inventories, rubrics, and illustrations that provide models of how the cycle can actually be used in schools
Good for book study groups: at the end of each chapter questions and exercises serve to guide both individual reflection and group discussion
Author(s)
![Matthew Militello photo](https://us.corwin.com/Content/Img/no-image-available.png)
Matthew Militello
Matthew Militello is the Wells Fargo Distinguished Professor in Educational Leadership at East Carolina University. He is currently the principal investigator for a million dollar National Science Foundation grant (NSF# 1738767) bringing computational thinking to music and art classes in rural NC middle schools. Militello is also currently implementing an innovative Ed.D. degree for ECU in Bangkok, Thailand. Militello received his teaching degree from the University of Michigan (B.Ed., 1992), his administrative certification (MSA, 1994) and doctoral degrees (Ph.D., 2004) from Michigan State University. He has held faculty positions at North Carolina State University (2008-2014) and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (2005-2008). Prior to his academic career, Militello was a middle and high public school teacher, assistant principal, and principal in Michigan (1992-2003). Militello has received funding to conduct research from the College Board, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Xian Normal University, as well as a multi-million dollar Race to the Top grant to train school leaders in Northeast North Carolina.
![Sharon F. Rallis photo](https://us.corwin.com/Content/Img/no-image-available.png)
Sharon F. Rallis
Sharon F. Rallis is Dwight W. Allen Distinguished Professor of Education Policy and Reform at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Previously, she was professor of education at the University of Connecticut; lecturer on education at Harvard; and associate professor of educational leadership at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University. Her doctorate is from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has coauthored numerous books, including several on leadership: Principals of Dynamic Schools: Taking Charge of Change (with Ellen Goldring); Dynamic Teachers: Leaders of Change (with Gretchen Rossman); Leading Dynamic Schools: How to Create and Implement Ethical Policies (with Gretchen Rossman and others); and Leading With Inquiry and Action: How Principals Improve Teaching and Learning (with Matthew Militello and Ellen Goldring). Her numerous articles, book chapters, edited volumes, and technical reports address issues of research and evaluation methodology, ethical practice in research and evaluation, education policy and leadership, and school reform.
A past-president of the American Evaluation Association (2005) and current editor of the American Journal of Evaluation, Professor Rallis has been involved with education and evaluation for more than three decades. She has been a teacher, counselor, principal, researcher, program evaluator, director of a major federal school reform initiative, and an elected school board member. Currently, her teaching includes courses on inquiry, program evaluation, qualitative methodology, and organizational theory. Her research has focused on the local implementation of programs driven by federal, state, or district policies. As external evaluator or principal investigator (PI), she has studied a variety of domestic and international policy and reform efforts, such as alternative professional development for leaders; collaborations between agencies responsible for educating incarcerated or institutionalized youth; initiatives supporting inclusive education for children and youth with disabilities; local school governance and leadership; labor-management relations in school districts; and leadership development. Her work with students on evaluation and qualitative methodology has taken her as far as Afghanistan, Turkey, and Palestine.
![Ellen B. Goldring photo](https://corwinpress.azureedge.net/sp-corwinpress-prod/images/default-source/authors/contributor-529518-v529518-529518-u6384286800.jpg?sfvrsn=3c6b2b7c_0)
Ellen B. Goldring
Table of Contents
Foreword by Richard F. Elmore
Preface
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Part I. From Challenges to Possibilities
1. The Myth of the Great Principal
2. The Collaborative Inquiry-Action Cycle
Part II. The Collaborative Inquiry-Action Cycle in Action
3. What Are We Teaching? A Case of Curricular Alignment
4. What Do We Know? A Case of Data Informing Practice
5. What Do We Do in the Classroom? A Case of Changing Instructional Practice
Part III. Making It Happen
6. Roles the Inquiry-Minded, Action-Oriented Principal Plays
7. You Can Do It! Putting the Collaborative Inquiry-Action Cycle Into Practice
References
Index
Reviews
“Creating the conditions for the continuous improvement of teaching and learning is the holy grail for school and district leaders. In my 15 years as a superintendent, I actively and continuously searched for and worked hard to nurture and support 'inquiry-minded, action-oriented' school leaders. These authors have it spot on. This book provides a leadership learning pathway for both emerging school leaders and for experienced school leaders looking for affirmation and explication for their most successful leadership practices. I recommend this book with enthusiasm.”Robert M. Villanova, Director, Executive Leadership Program
Neag School of Education, University of Connecticut
“This book is an essential guide for educational leaders in schools, district offices, and higher education. It skillfully blends scholarship with practice, and theory with real world examples. Through case studies, the authors show the reader how to develop, support, and improve a collaborative, inquiry-action process for improving teaching and learning. If we are going to have schools that successfully educate all students to high standards, then we need principals who translate the lessons of this book into practice.”Andrew Lachman, Executive Director
Connecticut Center for School Change
"This book presents an excellent school improvement model that empowers teachers to take control of the teaching and learning process as active participants in innovative professional communities. The multifaceted role of the principal as buffer and bridger, as facilitator and focuser, illustrates the versatility and skill needed by today’s great leaders!"Patricia M. Richardson, Professor of Practice-Educational Leadership
University of Maryland
"A highly readable and easy-to-use book for principals to guide their schools through the cycles of inquiry and action in addressing pressing problems. I highly recommend the book as a companion to a research course or a leadership course in school leadership preparation, and for districts to use as a form of professional development for principals and their leadership teams."Margaret Terry Orr, Faculty
Bank Street College
"An awesome action blueprint for building true school improvement. The authors masterfully outline the current forces, pressures, and factors that challenge instructional change. At the same time, essential keys are provided to assist school leaders in informing, balancing and inspiring instructional change within school walls. As a current principal, I find myself in the pages experiencing much of the same journey."Edye Morris-Bryant, Principal
Centennial Campus Magnet Middle School, Raleigh, NC
For Instructors
When you select 'request review copy', you will be redirected to Sage Publishing (our parent site) to process your request.