Dream Team: A Practical Playbook to Help Innovative Educators Change Schools

The world needs great individual educational changemakers capable of identifying problems and creating bold, scalable solutions. But the world also needs Dream Teams —groups of talented administrators, teachers, staff, students, and community members who are passionate about making things better for kids, believe that school-based change is the means to this end, and are willing to roll up their sleeves and work together to achieve it.

This book is for Dream Teams in the making. In it, rising global education leaders Aaron Tait and Dave Faulkner share the models and methods of 10 brilliant leadership teams at urban, suburban, and rural schools in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Informed by these successes, the authors provide specific, sometimes audacious advice for navigating what they call the Change Leader Journey: how to move from Dream Team assembly and problem analysis all the way through to solution generation, piloting, promotion, and evaluation.

Innovative educators come in all forms, and they require lots of options. Here, you'll find a collection of practical ideas and tools designed to fuel transformational leadership without sacrificing instructional excellence or anyone's sanity. Whether your team is a group of fearless rebels, more cautious types, or somewhere in between, Tait and Faulkner's flexible approach can help you figure out where you want your school to go, build a more collaborative and creative culture, and generate the solutions that best serve your students.

Aaron Tait is a cofounder of Education Changemakers and its director of innovation. A global leader in innovation for impact, he is at the forefront of a movement of "entrepreneurs changing lives." He has built his outside-the-box thinking over a diverse career that has seen him complete seven years of active service as a decorated military officer, lead a secondary school for street children in Tanzania and an orphanage in Kenya, complete three master's degrees, and graduate from Cambridge University. He advises companies and governments across the globe on impact entrepreneurship, is a Village Capital Fellow, and was named by the Foundation for Young Australians as the Australian social entrepreneur of the year (2015).

Dave Faulkner is a cofounder of Education Changemakers and its CEO. Faulkner has emerged as a global leader in education innovation. His education leadership journey began as a principal of an Australian school, where his work earned him recognition as Young Australian of the Year (Western Australia) and Young Leader of the Year (Western Australia). Dave is a leader in education startup acceleration, works with thousands of educators each year, and advises senior government, education leaders, company executives, and leading philanthropists throughout the world.