Leading for Results: Transforming Teaching, Learning, and Relationships in Schools / Edition 2

by Dennis Sparks

Overview

Featuring 18 new essays, this second edition shows how school leaders can promote extraordinary changes, be accountable, and achieve meaningful results for schools, districts, and their personal lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781412949705
Publisher:	SAGE Publications
Publication date:	11/17/2006
Edition description:	Second Edition
Pages:	248
Sales rank:	215,482
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Dennis Sparks has been executive director of the 10,000-member National Staff Development Council since 1984. He previously was an independent educational consultant and director of the Northwest Staff Development Center. Sparks has been a teacher, counselor, and co-director of an alternative high school. He completed his doctorate in counseling at the University of Michigan in 1976, and has taught at several universities. He speaks frequently throughout North America on topics such as powerful staff development and effective teaching.

Sparks has authored Designing Powerful Professional Development for Teachers and Principals (NSDC, 2002) and Conversations that Matter (NSDC, 2001), a collection of his JSD interviews since 1991. He is co-author with Stephanie Hirsh of Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn (NSDC, 2000) and A New Vision for Staff Development (ASCD/NSDC, 1997). He also co-authored, with Joan Richardson, What is Staff Development Anyway? (NSDC, 1998).

Sparks’ column appears each month NSDC's newsletter, Results. His interviews with leading educational thinkers also appear in NSDC'sJournal of Staff Development. In addition, his articles have appeared in a variety of publications, including Educational Leadership, Phi Delta Kappan, The American School Board Journal, The Principal, and The School Administrator. Sparks’ interviews and articles are accessible on the NSDC web site at www.nsdc.org/library/authors/sparks.cfm.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
About the Author
Introduction
How to Use This Book
Part I: Transformation Through Clarity and Creation
1. Use Fundamental Choices to Create Your Life
2. Clarify Your Intentions
3. Establish Stretch Goals
4. Identify Multiple Ways to Achieve Your Goals
5. Find the Trim Tab
6. The 80/20 Principle
7. Practice Satisficing
8. Determine Root Causes
9. Develop a Theory of Action and Use Storytelling to Communicate It
10. Gain Clarity Through Writing, Speaking, and Reflecting on Action
11. Leaders Provide Teachable Points of View
Part II: Transformation Through Interpersonal Influence
12. Tell Your Truth
13. Use Candor to Assess Current Reality
14. Use Genuine Dialogue
15. Engage in Dialogue-Like Conversations
16. Listen to Others in a Deep, Committed Way
17. Use Silence as a Learning Tool
18. Make Requests to Initiate Action and Create Results
19. Make and Keep Promises
20. Replace Questions With Declarative Statements
21. Minimize the Language of Obligation
22. Decrease the Use of Cause-Effect Language
23. Stand Up for Your Point of View
Part III: Transformation Through a Culture That Promotes Professional Learning, Teamwork, and Continuous Improvement
24. Shape School Culture to Improve Teaching and Sustain Competent Teaching
25. Create Successful Schools
26. Promote Breakthrough Thinking
27. Attend to Leaders' Inner Development
28. Recognize Our Best Selves
29. Increase the Use of Signature Strengths
30. Enhance Your Personal Energy
31. Build Relationships to Sustain Positive Energy
32. Address the Fundamental Barriers to Professional Learning and Teamwork in Schools
33. Spread Positive Emotions Throughout the Organization
34. Address Anxiety in the Schoolhouse
35. Appeal to the Heart as Well as the Head
Part IV: Transformation Through Professional Learning and Doing
36. Design Powerful Professional Learning for All Educators
37. Match Professional Development Goals and Methods With Student Outcomes
38. Bridge the Knowing-Doing Gap
39. Amplify Positive Deviance
40. Create Professional Learning That Alters Educators' Brains
41. Install Next Action Thinking
42. Change Habits
43. Sustain the Conversation
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Sparks has distilled his vision of leadership into this helpful guide. This is a personal look at leadership, not as much about what leaders should do (although a large number of how-to's are included), but more about how leaders should think and feel to actualize their potential and unleash individual and organizational energy. "

The School Administrator

"This is clearly one of the most engaging, useful, and deeply relevant books on leading schools in print. A must read for all thoughtful principals and educational leaders. "

Kent D. Peterson

Leading for Results consists of 26 gems of action oriented vignettes. Each is a treasure in its own right, and together they make up a consistent and powerful call to action. A powerful book of purposeful reform for those at all levels of the system committed to getting results.

Michael Fullan

"The author has done all of us who want to improve education a real favor by writing this book."

Phillip Schlechty

"Dennis Sparks provides a personal roadmap for transformational self-actualization. Simple, elegant, brilliant, and critically important. "

Ross Danis

"Leading for Results is brimming with useful insights and practices for teachers, principals, superintendents and all leaders who wish to transform educational organizations. Leaders wishing to transform educational institutions need look no further than this helpful book. "

Jane Dutton

"In Leading for Results, Dennis Sparks invites readers to take part in a journey of self-discovery and actualization. In this highly personalized description of his own transformation as an educational leader, Sparks carves a path through the dense jungle of organizational complexity, helping others to see their own paths to effective leadership in new and clearer ways. "

Thomas Guskey

“Leading for Results is one of those rare books that warrants diligence and attention. Sparks rejects simplistic solutions to school improvement, and honors the craft knowledge and expertise of educators.”

Richard Du Four

"In Leading For Results, Dennis Sparks has given us a practical, original, and tough-minded book abut what schools need now. An excellent book—but even more, a book to act on. "

Mike Schmoker

"In this inventive 'self-help' handbook for educators, Dennis Sparks, the voice of professional development in our field, offers a compelling message: the power to lead and to learn resides within each of us if we will only summon it forth and live by it. He challenges—and helps us—not to do something but to be something different. "

Roland S. Barth

“Leading for Results is one of those rare books that warrants diligence and attention. Sparks rejects simplistic solutions to school improvement, and honors the craft knowledge and expertise of educators.”

Richard DuFour