Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way: How to Be a More Effective Leader in Today's Schools

Now you can do more than just deal with the "crisis-du-jour".

Leadership is learnable, and this comprehensive guide will show you how to be proactive, prevent crises, create dreams, push the envelope, and focus on the future instead of just reacting to crises, spending all your time putting out fires, or coping with the current system―whether it works or not. In this updated second edition, best-selling author Robert D. Ramsey gives you just what you need to avoid "simply managing" and to become a true leader instead!

Unlike other manuals that give you bits and pieces on how to develop a particular curriculum or handle specific day-to-day discipline problems, this unique handbook offers administrators practical, time-proven lessons on how to think, act, plan, set priorities, manage time, and make decisions―skills that will help you navigate through the unique challenges of leading in a school environment. Included are guidelines on:

• Getting the most out of people
• Bringing about change
• Handling politics
• Dealing with setbacks
• Thinking, looking, and acting like an effective school leader
• Communicating effectively
• Practicing ethical leadership

Being a school leader can actually be exciting, rewarding, and fun again, once you′re equipped to tackle today′s challenges!

Robert D. Ramsey is a lifelong educator who has served as a "leader of leaders" in three award-winning school districts in two different states. His frontline experience includes positions a teacher, counselor, assistant principal, curriculum director, assistant superintendent, acting superintendent, and adjunct professor. Most recently, he has served as associate superintendent in the St. Louis Park (MN) schools, where every school has been designated by the federal government as a National School of Excellence. Ramsey is now working full-time as a freelance writer in Minneapolis.