Leading and Learning Together: Cultivating School Change From Within

2025 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

“This is not your typical book on education leadership. Rather than a list of what leaders should and shouldn't do, the authors set a different goal―to create schools where kids are prepared to foster and live in a socially just society. Written for educators who seek to make a positive difference, this book will inspire and provide guidance on how to do so.”
―Pedro A. Noguera, coauthor of A Search for Common Ground and City Schools and the American Dream 2

Leading and Learning Together offers a set of evidence-based principles, processes, and protocols that increase equitable access and support educators to breathe joy and justice into schools and communities.

Leadership, coupled with learning, is an ongoing process in which everyone has a participatory role in school or district change efforts. Providing a useful antidote to the plethora of packaged curriculum and external professional development providers, this book focuses on reclaiming agency, advocacy, and inquiry for leaders and teachers in the places they know best―their schools and districts. Doing so requires imagination, cooperation, and transparency. As such, the authors provide evidence from multiple school and district educators who are cultivating change from within by disrupting and dismantling systems and drawing on internal assets to address equity-driven challenges. As a result, educators can and should become researchers of their own practices.

Book Features:

• Educational change reimagined as reinvesting in the collective power of the people closest to the issues.
• Guidance based on evidence from multiple school and district change efforts documented and described by the authors.
• Use of evidence to organize more productive informal and formal professional learning driven by practitioner agency and inquiry.
• Text boxes called “Voices From the Field” provide stories of practices from practitioner-researchers.
• Access to equitable processes and protocols, including downloadable forms and tools for teacher professional learning.
• Evidence from school and district leaders underscores the complex work of leading and learning from within, and how to do it.

Lynda Tredway is a program coordinator at East Carolina University. Matthew Militello is the Wells Fargo Distinguished Professor of Educational Leadership at East Carolina University. Joseph Flessa is an associate dean and a professor in the Department of Leadership, Higher, and Adult Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.