Leading In Sync

Teacher leadership holds great promise for improving the quality of teaching and ensuring student success. But for co-performance of leadership among teacher leaders and principals to be effective, they must learn to lead in sync.

Leading In Sync: Teacher Leaders and Principals Working Together for Student Learning provides principals, assistant principals, coaches, department leaders, grade-level and content team leaders, mentors, professional development leaders, and in fact all teachers with the strategies and tools needed to

• Examine their own thinking about what constitutes high-quality teaching so they can work toward a shared vision.
• Identify teachers’ many strengths as potential assets for achieving the shared vision.
• Recognize ways in which most teachers are already leading.
• Support leadership collaboration through efficient, effective communication.
• Develop trust required to learn to lead together.

Jill Harrison Berg offers thought-provoking context and reflection questions that enable educators to examine their unique settings; real-world examples of teachers and principals co-performing leadership to improve student success; and dozens of strategies, tools, and templates to facilitate leading in sync.

This book includes a link to free downloadable tools.

Reviews

Teachers’ expertise has long been trapped inside the separate classrooms of the egg-crate school. Efforts to liberate what teachers know and can do have repeatedly fallen short for fear that as teachers gain influence, principals must lose it. But the potential for leadership in schools is not zero-sum and a miserly standoff between teachers and principals will only shortchange students. In her insightful, no-nonsense playbook for teachers and administrators, Jill Harrison Berg captures the promise of schoolwide leadership and deftly explains how educators can all lead, if only they’ll do it in sync.

— Susan Moore Johnson, Jerome T. Murphy Research Professor, Harvard Graduate School of Education

At last we have a book that has courageously reconfigured the very meaning of leadership in a school. Teaching us how to build trust, create, organize and support the influences for school improvement, we learn about the critical bonds needed between principals and teachers as leaders. We come to understand how to improve student learning, while building a collaborative culture in a school. This is a must read for all those who need an important partner in the process of building this culture. Jill Harrison Berg is it!

— Ann Lieberman, Emeritus Professor from Teachers College, Columbia University and Senior Scholar at Stanford University

Leading in Sync is a breakthrough masterpiece, helping all teacher leaders and their principals to find new ways of collaborating to solving the hitherto most “wicked problems” of educational challenge. Chock-full of concrete examples grounded in nitty-gritty, everyday realities, this is a book that will be treasured by educators at all levels and in all contexts. The writing is lively and the solutions are realistic and persuasive. This is a must-read for every serious change leader.

— Dennis Shirley, Professor, Lynch School of Education, Boston College, and Editor-in-Chief, The Journal of Educational Change

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