Aiming High: Leadership Actions to Increase Learning Gains

Aim high to improve leading, teaching, and learning

Skillful leadership is critical as schools return to a new normalcy. Improving students’ learning and addressing the challenges many learners experienced due to recent learning interruptions are top priorities for all school leaders.

Aiming High offers leaders a framework for creating an environment where both effective instruction and a focus on social and emotional needs benefits all students and teachers. Evan Robb maps a route to building a positive, trusting culture of collaboration, creativity, and empowerment. Features include:

• An outline of the leadership elements required to build a learner-focused culture
• Tools for fostering productive collaboration, creating shared teacher leadership, and building trusting relationships
• Insightful tips for addressing complexities that come with new learning formats
• Provocative questions that guide readers toward redefining instructional leadership

Your mission as leader is clear: aim high, work intentionally and collaboratively with teachers, and create a refreshed school culture centered on learning and growth for all.

Evan Robb is presently principal of Johnson-Williams Middle School in Berryville, Virginia. He has served for more than twenty years as a building-level principal. Prior to being a school principal, he was an English teacher, department chair, and assistant principal. Evan is a recipient of the Horace Mann Educator of the Year Award. In addition, the NCTE Commission on Reading selected him to serve on its national board.

A TEDx speaker, Evan presents inspirational keynotes, workshops, and webinars on leadership, mindset, culture, impactful change, and how to improve literacy in schools. Evan has shared his ideas with thousands of educators at workshops across the United States and in other countries.

His first book, The Principal’s Leadership Sourcebook: Practices, Tools, and Strategies for Building a Thriving School Community, was published by Scholastic in the fall of 2007. His next book, The Ten-Minute Principal, was published by Corwin in May 2019. Evan Robb and Laura Robb collaborated with Dave Burgess Publishing to write TeamMakers, published in August 2019. In addition, Evan partnered with Laura Robb to write A School Full of Readers, with Benchmark Education, published in January 2020.

Evan has been named one of the top twenty-five educational leaders to follow on Twitter. Scholastic EDU also named Evan one of the ten educators to follow on Twitter. Evan was recently named one of the ten most inspiring global thought leaders for 2020.