Skill
Using Tactful Confrontation
Scenario One: Addressing a Negative Team Attitude
Scenario Two: Confronting a Veteran Educator
Scenario Three: Responding to Lack of Compliance
Using Professional Monitoring
Scenario One: Addressing Refusal to Use Best Practice
Scenario Two: Checking Progress on Agreed-On Processes
Scenario Three: Dealing With a Lack of Investment
Conclusion
Understand the Essence of Leadership
Follow Support With Accountability
The Why Skill Sets: Data and Persuasion
The Who Skill Sets: Empathy and Credibility
The How Skill Sets: Collective Problem Solving and Social Context for Learning
The Do Skill Sets: Tactful Confrontation and Professional Monitoring
Conclusion
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
