The Will to Lead, the Skill to Teach: Transforming Schools at Every Level (Create a responsive learning environment) (Essentials for Principals)

School improvement begins with self-examination and honest dialogue about socialization, bias, discrimination, and cultural insensitivity. The authors acknowledge both the structural and sociological issues that contribute to low-performing schools and offer multiple tools and strategies to assess and improve classroom management, increase literacy, establish academic vocabulary, and contribute to a healthier school culture.

Benefits:

• Reflect on current practices, and identify areas for improvement.
• Spot the factors that can be harmful to school cultures.
• Identify your school as high will/low skill, high skill/low will, low will/low skill, or high will/high skill.
• Develop a blueprint for achieving skilled pedagogy and successful school improvement.
• Gain practical classroom management strategies and activities.

Contents:

Part I: Will and Skill
Chapter 1: The Two Parts of a Positive School Environment

Part II: The Will to Lead
Chapter 2: Conflicting Wills
Chapter 3: Frustration in a Toxic Culture
Chapter 4: The School Culture Framework: Creating a Culture of Collaboration
Chapter 5: Leadership at Every Level

Part III: The Skill to Teach
Chapter 6: Developing a Responsive Pedagogy
Chapter 7: The Steps to Responsive Pedagogy
Chapter 8: Responsive Classroom Management
Chapter 9: Responsive Academic Vocabulary
Chapter 10: Responsive Academic Literacy
Chapter 11: Responsive Learning Environment

Anthony Muhammad, PhD, is a much sought-after consultant. A practitioner for nearly 20 years, he has served as a middle school teacher, assistant principal, and principal, and as a high school principal. His Transforming School Culture approach explores the root causes of staff resistance to change.

Dr. Muhammad's tenure as a practitioner has earned him several awards as both a teacher and a principal. His most notable accomplishment came as principal of Levey Middle School in Southfield, Michigan, a National School of Excellence, where student proficiency on state assessments more than doubled in five years. Dr. Muhammad and the staff at Levey used the Professional Learning Communities at Work™ process for school improvement, and they have been recognized in several videos and articles as a model high-performing PLC.

As a researcher, Dr. Muhammad has published articles in several publications in both the United States and Canada.

Dr. Sharroky Hollie is a national educator who provides professional development to thousands of educators in the area of cultural responsiveness. Since 2000, Dr. Hollie has trained over 150,000 educators and worked in nearly 2,000 classrooms.

Going back 25 years, he has been a classroom teacher at the middle and high school levels, a central office professional development coordinator in Los Angeles Unified School District, a school founder and administrator, and university professor in teacher education at the Cal State University. Dr. Hollie has also been a visiting professor for Webster University in St. Louis and a guest lecturer at Stanford and UCLA.

In addition to his experience in education, he has authored several texts and journal articles. Most recently, he wrote Strategies for Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Teaching and Learning (2015) and contributed a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of African American Language (2015).

Dr. Hollie's first book, Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Teaching and Learning: Classroom Practices for Student Success was published in 2011, followed soon thereafter by The Will to Lead, The Skill to Teach, co-written with Dr. Anthony Muhammad. In 2003, he and two colleagues founded the Culture and Language Academy of Success, a laboratory school that demonstrated the principles of cultural responsiveness in an exemplary schoolwide model, which operated until 2013.