Learning First A School Leader's Guide to Closing Achievement Gaps [Paperback]

Combine this research-based, collaborative framework with four critical dimensions of leadership to advance equity and excellence in student learning and close student achievement gaps in your school.Combine this research-based, collaborative framework with four critical dimensions of leadership to advance equity and excellence in student learning and close student achievement gaps in your school.This text is the product of considerable research and disciplined reflection on closing the student achievement gap in schools, unquestionably the most important challenge facing schools at this time. It offers a wealth of well-illustrated advice, especially to those in school and district leadership roles, about how to go about addressing this challenge in their organizations. It should be required reading for every principal and superintendent.

Our schools national testing results need to improve, and as the principal I have been generating strategies, with my staff, to turn those results around. We have developed lots of good, solid strategies, but the bit that was missing is how we hold this new plan together. Then I found Kelley and Shaws Learning First, and it pushed me back into the big picture stuff, where I should have been all this time.

The book is based on contemporary leadership research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The opening sentence struck an immediate chord: Diversity is the greatest strength of public schools, and their greatest challenge. (p. xi) Thats where we are at. Other points of engagement were: the moral imperative for Learning First, addressing the achievement gaps, and the resource gaps, which are often overlooked.

The conceptual framework of Learning First in visual form looks like many other concentric-circle models. The elements are what makes it different: socio-cognitive leadership, the dimensions of leadership for learning, and leversl³ª