About the Authors
Anthony Muhammad, PhD, is a much sought-after educational consultant. A practitioner for nearly twenty years, he has served as a middle school teacher, assistant principal, and principal and as a high school principal. His Transforming School Culture framework explores the root causes of staff resistance to change.
Anthony’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. Anthony and the staff at Levey used the Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) at Work® process for school improvement, and the school has been recognized in several videos and articles as a model high-performing PLC.
As a researcher, Anthony has published articles in several publications in both the United States and Canada. He is author of Transforming School Culture: How to Overcome Staff Division; The Will to Lead, the Skill to Teach: Transforming Schools at Every Level; and Overcoming the Achievement Gap Trap: Liberating Mindsets to Effect Change and a contributor to The Collaborative Administrator.
To learn more about Anthony’s work, visit New Frontier 21 (www.newfrontier21.com), or follow @newfrontier21 on Twitter.
Luis F. Cruz, PhD, is former principal of Baldwin Park High School and Holland Middle School, located east of Los Angeles, California. He has been a teacher at the elementary level and administrator at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. Luis is an educational consultant who presents throughout the United States on PLCs, school culture, the role of school leadership teams, RTI, and the conditions needed for students and parents learning English as a second language to be academically successful.
In 2007, Luis led a collective effort to secure a $250,000 grant for Baldwin Park from the California Academic Partnership Program for the purpose of effectively utilizing courageous leadership to promote a more equitable and effective organization.
Since becoming a public school educator, Luis has won the New Teacher of the Year, Teacher of the Year, and Administrator of the Year awards and other community leadership awards. He and a committee of teacher leaders at Baldwin Park High School received the California School Boards Association’s prestigious Golden Bell Award for significantly closing the achievement gap between the general student population and students learning English as a second language.
As a recipient of the Hispanic Border Leadership Institute’s fellowship for doctoral studies, a fellowship focused on increasing the number of Latino leaders with doctorates, he earned a doctorate in institutional leadership and policy studies from the University of California, Riverside. He earned an associate’s degree from Mt. San Antonio Community College, a bachelor’s degree from California State University, Fullerton, and a master’s degree from Claremont Graduate University.
To learn more about Luis’s work, follow @lcruzconsulting on Twitter.
To book Anthony Muhammad or Luis F. Cruz for professional development, contact [email protected].
Introduction
The most vital assets in any organization are the human resources, and the leader is responsible for managing these resources. The task of cultivating, organizing, and motivating people to improve an organization’s productivity holds much importance, especially for school leaders, who seek improvement to ensure that students grow, develop, and reach their maximum potential, the key to a community’s prosperity. Leading school improvement is serious business, indeed!
Research shows a general consensus that schools can improve, but how to improve schools remains a topic of much research and heated debate both politically and intellectually. On one hand, many argue that school systems should take a corporate approach; they should use data to monitor performance, rewarding the productive educators and removing the ineffective ones. The other school of thought suggests that leaders should provide educators with a supportive and nurturing environment, trust them with a high degree of professional autonomy, and assume that they will make good, professional decisions. In this book, we argue that school leadership has much more complexity than either of these two approaches; leaders must do more than simply order change or nurture a warm organizational climate and hope that people will change. Effective school leaders must develop specific skills—a balance of both having assertiveness and encouraging autonomy—to engage those they lead in the change process.
Richard DuFour and Michael Fullan (2013) perfectly sum up our argument in the following passage from their book Cultures Built to Last: Systemic PLCs at Work®:
How should leaders engage people in the complex process of cultural change? Should they be tight—assertive, issuing top-down directives that mandate change? Or should they be loose—merely encouraging people to engage in the change process, but leaving participation optional? The challenge at all levels of the system is to navigate this apparent dichotomy and find the appropriate balance between tight and loose, between assertiveness and autonomy. If we know anything about change, it is that ordering people to change doesn’t work, nor does leaving them alone. (p. 33)
The delicate balance between loose and tight, as DuFour and Fullan (2013) describe it, requires that a leader have a comprehensive set of leadership skills. Without these skills, trying to differentiate between the right time to nurture and the right time to demand performance can lead current and aspiring school leaders down a slippery slope. People cannot logically expect that this collection of delicate skills would come naturally to everyone seeking to lead schools. In fact, we contend that people rarely have the instincts necessary to naturally strike this balance, and without proper guidance, every school would need a superhero to create the conditions for improvement. Fullan (2003) acknowledges that the goal should be to make leadership “more exciting and doable. It cannot require superwomen and supermen or moral martyrs because, if it does, we will never get the numbers necessary to make a system difference” (p. xv).
Our goal with this book is to provide leaders with a logical and duplicable process so that anyone who wants to become an effective school leader has a road map for success. We begin by exploring what we know about good leadership.
Leadership as a Skill
Leadership represents the ability to use influence to improve organizational productivity. Leadership is not a position; it is a set of actions that positively shape the climate and culture of the working environment. In essence, leadership is a verb, not a noun. We know a good leader is present when those whom he or she influences have become more effective and productive at their given task because of the impact of the leader. Consider this: most would agree that a reading teacher lacks effectiveness if his or her students don’t improve their reading skills after being exposed to the practices and influence of a reading teacher. Wouldn’t the same standard apply to a school or district leader? He or she is not a successful leader if those he or she leads do not succeed. For this reason, isolating and evaluating individual teachers as the sole indicator for school progress, using their students’ test scores to determine success or failure, is doomed to fail as a public policy and school-improvement method. The teacher does not work on an island; the teacher is a product of his or her leaders, just as the teacher influences a student. In fact, no one truly works in isolation. Educators are a part of an intricate web, each contributing to the success or failure of their system. All educators are leaders, yet they all need leadership. The question each educator should ask becomes, “What responsibility do I have for influencing and improving those I have to guide?”
In a school, productivity is measured in terms of this influence and improvement in both student learning and