Leadership Curriculum Training Module Summaries

To view or download a two- or three-page summary of a Leadership Curriculum Module, click on its link below.

Improving the School as a System

Module Summary: *Using Data to Focus Improvement
Schools that successfully improve student achievement regularly use data to guide decisions about instruction, student support and professional development. Easy-to-use processes are taught, and participants learn how data are a vital part of the school improvement process.

Module Summary: *Creating a High-performance Learning Culture
Schools cannot improve when the culture does not support school improvement. Often in the push to improve quickly, the school’s culture is forgotten. Participants learn what culture is and why it must be cultivated; what roles leaders play in growing the culture; and what tools and strategies are available to help leaders foster a culture that supports improvement, high expectations and the well-being of students.

Module Summary: *Using Root Cause Analysis to Reduce Student Failure
Improving student learning by changing classroom and school practices both requires and results in changes to a school’s culture. Culture also impacts how and what improvements are made to benefit student learning, and data can be a powerful lever to explore inequities, expose systemic biases, and change beliefs and practices needed to improve the achievement of disenfranchised students. Participants gain analytical tools to uncover the real problems that school leaders need to address to close success gaps in schools.

Module Summary: Providing Focused and Sustained Professional Development
Professional development is a powerful tool for changing schools, yet professional development is frequently done poorly and results in little or no positive change. Participants examine the characteristics of professional development in high and low-performing schools; learn how to structure successful learning for the staff; and learn how schools can create a professional learning community.

Module Summary: Organizing Resources for a Learning-Centered School
How can schools more effectively use time and resources for teaching, planning and professional learning? This module adds lots of practical tools and processes to the leadership toolbox on how the school staff can work together to improve learning and achievement and how to use technology effectively.

Module Summary: Building and Leading Effective School Improvement Teams
The heart of leadership is the willingness to assume responsibility. Schools that improve and sustain improvement use teams to lead school reform. A crying need exists for teachers to lead by taking a more formal and explicit role in the supervision and improvement of instruction. Participants learn leadership skills and collaboration, the parameters of teamwork, how to design and organize teams, and how to provide the training they will need to be effective.

Module Summary: Communicating to Engage Stakeholders in School Improvement
Effective communication is the key to an improving school community. Often the best intentions are sidetracked by poor communication. Participants learn how to communicate effectively, decide who needs to know and why, how to involve people at the right times, and the impact that communication has on schools and quality instruction.

Module Summary: Leading School Change to Improve Student Achievement
School leaders have gotten used to the idea that "the only constant is change." Productive school leaders understand the forces that influence the change process and can direct these forces for continuous school improvement. Learn how to lead change rather than react to it.

Module Summary: Coaching for School Improvement
Schools undergoing transformational school improvement processes often need external coaches to help them through the process. Participants learn how to add value to various school improvement situations using a variety of strategies and techniques.

Improving Curriculum and Instruction

Module Summary: Prioritizing, Mapping, and Monitoring the Curriculum
In a world of high-stakes-testing, this module helps schools keep their curriculum on target. Participants learn the benefits of prioritizing, mapping and monitoring the curriculum and more deeply understand what they want students to learn, which learning is most important and how to know if the curriculum is being taught.

Module Summary: Designing Assessment to Inform Instruction
Participants learn to link curriculum, assessment and instruction; to effectively use assessment for learning strategies to improve learning; to recognize good instruction; and to use effective, research-based instructional strategies, tools and processes to observe/study assessment and instruction.

Module Summary: Aligning Teacher Assignments and Student Work to Rigorous Standards
Schools may adopt standards that ask students to learn at high levels, but classroom assignments often do not match the standards. Participants learn a process that schools can use to analyze teacher assignments and student work to determine if assignments really require students to do high-quality work that helps them meet the standards.

Module Summary: Personalizing School to Engage Students in Learning
When standards are raised, "safety nets" are necessary for students to achieve at higher levels. The components of effective extra-help programs, how we help students successfully make transitions from one level of school to the next, and meaningful advisement that includes parents all contribute to a personal learning environment. Participants learn how to make schools learner-friendly.

Module Summary: Leading Schoolwide Literacy Initiatives
Achieving literacy for all citizens is a national problem that has become a top education priority for the federal government and for educators across the nation. School leaders must be able to recognize effective literacy instruction and observe and conference with teachers about good literacy practices. These include a complete set of complex reading, writing and language skills to help students handle a variety of texts as they go through school and beyond. This module is designed to close the gap in what leaders know about literacy and what they must know to provide literacy leadership in schools.

Module Summary: Leading Schoolwide Numeracy Initiatives
Obtaining and succeeding in the jobs of today’s economy require an ever-increasing breadth and depth of mathematical skills and concepts. School leaders must know how to recognize effective instruction in numeracy and encourage numeracy instruction across the curriculum. This module will help leaders close the gap in what they know and what they must know to provide numeracy leadership.

Module Summary: Assessing Academic Rigor to Ensure Grade-level Proficiency and College Readiness
Although school leaders generally recognize the importance of rigor, many are not thoroughly and accurately measuring, monitoring and encouraging it. Too often, rigor is a vague concept that means instruction is hard, tough and sometimes boring. In this module, school leaders learn how to use tools and strategies to determine whether rigor exists in the school.

Improving Leadership Preparation

Module Summary: Developing Internship Programs to Prepare Learning-centered Principals
Internship programs that provide opportunities for aspiring principals to practice the leadership behaviors that are linked to increasing student achievement are an essential element of a quality principal preparation program. Participants work in university-district partnership teams to create partnership agreements. They are guided through their work by being asked to make a series of decisions. Throughout the module, participants are encouraged to develop high-quality internship programs, based on a review of the literature.

Module Summary: Mentoring School Leaders in Competency-Based Internships
Mentors are guides on an intern’s journey, and the most effective mentors are those who engage in a process of discovery with their protégés. This program builds skills in administrators who are serving as mentors to aspiring principals. Participants learn the roles, skills, processes and tools that effective mentors use to help develop school leaders who make a difference in student achievement.

Module Summary: Developing Collaborative University-District Partnerships to Prepare Learning-Centered Principals
University-district partnerships have the potential to leverage the collective capacity of both organizations if both are willing and able to work together to develop and maintain — within a formal structure — a shared vision, a shared sense of urgency, mutual accountability and shared inquiry. This training guides partnerships and accelerates their progress as they develop enabling conditions to design and implement a new paradigm of school leadership.

*Using Data to Lead Change and Creating a High-performance Learning Culture are recommended prerequisites for Fostering a Culture of High Performance: Changing Practice by Using Data.

For more information, e-mail Kathy O'Neill at kathy.oneill@sreb.org.