Leaders of Learning

For many years, coauthors Rick DuFour and Bob Marzano have been co-travelers on the journey to help educators improve their schools. As Rick has focused on bringing the professional learning community process to life in schools, he has relied heavily on Bob's vast research on effective teaching and effective leadership. Bob has come to the conclusion that the best environment for great teaching and leading is a powerful PLC. In Leaders of Learning: How District, School, and Classroom Leaders Improve Student Achievement, the authors have combined their passions into one book to articulate how effective leaders foster continuous improvement at the district, school, and classroom levels. Rick and Bob argue that no single person has all the knowledge, skills, and talent to lead a district, improve a school, or meet all the needs of every child in his or her classroom. They assert that it will take a collaborative effort and widely dispersed leadership to meet the challenges confronting schools. Leaders of Learning focuses on district leadership, principal leadership, and team leadership, as well as addressing how individual teachers can be most effective in leading their students by learning with their colleagues how to implement the most promising pedagogy in their classrooms.

The first part of the book focuses on how district and school leaders create the conditions to support the collaborative culture of a professional learning community. In the second part, the authors turn their attention to the specific work that teachers undertake as members of PLCs. They discuss:

The district's role in supporting the PLC process and five characteristics of effective district leaders

The principal's role in leading a PLC, including fostering shared leadership, training team leaders, and building capacity

How to create collaborative culture and collective capacity, specifically by fostering reciprocol accountability through meaningful teaming, time for collaboration, supportive structures for teaming, clarifying work, monitoring and providing direction and support to teams, avoiding shortcuts, and celebrating success and confronting those who do not contribute

How leaders in a PLC develop a guaranteed and viable curriculum, from identifying objectives to designing proficiency scales, and then montitor student learning in an ongoing way with specific guidance for designing and scoring assessments and reporting grades

How teams of instructors design and deliver lessons that maximize the probability that all students will acquire the intended knowledge and skills

How leaders and the system respond when students do not learn