Alan C. Jones – författare

Bridge the gap between managing well and leading for impact.

In this must-read guide for education leaders, Alan C. Jones expertly distinguishes between Administrators Good at their Jobs (AGJs) and Standout School Leaders (SSLs) by exploring the qualities that make select leaders truly exceptional. While AGJs focus on maintaining effective school operations, SSLs address the gaps within institutional systems to create environments that foster genuine learning and growth, balance institutional demands with innovative educational approaches, and align day-to-day operations with the deeper mission of schooling.

You’ll find chapter openers that contrast how SSLs and AGJs approach fundamental administrative functions and closing questions to support personal reflection and application of the concept at your school site. Additional features include:

Vignettes that illustrate daily challenges faced by administrators and contrasting leadership responsesSSL Tips to offer insights into how SSLs think differently about schooling goalsEnd-of-Chapter Resources to deepen understanding of key concepts

Jones empowers education leaders with the knowledge and tools to integrate innovative practices into their roles. Whether you're a principal, department head, or district leader, this book provides the guidance needed to transition from managing to leading by fostering environments where both educators and students can thrive.

A laser-beam focus on improving instruction to improve learningSaying "teaching matters most" is easy, and seems obvious. Making it the top priority for school leaders and staff is not so easy—in fact, it′s messy. If we want to change how students write, compute, and think, then teachers must change how they teach. They must transform the old "assign-and-assess" model into engaging, compassionate, coherent, and rigorous instruction. The authors show school leaders how to make this happen amidst myriad distractions, initiatives, and interruptions. Unlike other books that stop at evaluating teachers and instruction, this work demonstrates how to grow schools′ instructional capacities with a three-step process that involves: Envisioning what good teaching looks like Measuring the quality of current instruction against this standardWorking relentlessly to move the quality of instruction closer and closer to the idealThe authors provide helpful guidance on issues such as hiring, induction, professional development, mentoring, and teacher evaluation. Each chapter offers specific action steps toward building the blueprint for improvement. Also included are frameworks for completing instructional audits in schools, and probes, instruments, and protocols for measuring and tracking the quality of instruction. Leaders will find excellent guidance for spearheading and sustaining a focused and aligned effort to improve the quality of teaching to impact all learners.

All school districts have written statements of the educational values and goals that members of the school community believe are important and worth pursuing. They display these on the front page of all school district public relations packets and on the walls of school and district offices. While all segments of the school community enthusiastically embrace the values and goals stated in the documents, rarely, if ever, do they practice these goals and values in classrooms or administrative offices.The gap between the educational ideals spoken from auditorium stages and the instructional regimes students experience in classrooms is the result of schools designed to achieve institutional goals—accountability, standardization, and efficiency—rather than educational goals—thoughtfulness, deep knowledge, and critically-informed citizens. This book is aimed at school administrators whose goal is restoring the why of schooling to the organizational structures and instructional routines that currently govern public schooling in this nation.

All school districts have written statements of the educational values and goals that members of the school community believe are important and worth pursuing. They display these on the front page of all school district public relations packets and on the walls of school and district offices. While all segments of the school community enthusiastically embrace the values and goals stated in the documents, rarely, if ever, do they practice these goals and values in classrooms or administrative offices.The gap between the educational ideals spoken from auditorium stages and the instructional regimes students experience in classrooms is the result of schools designed to achieve institutional goals—accountability, standardization, and efficiency—rather than educational goals—thoughtfulness, deep knowledge, and critically-informed citizens. This book is aimed at school administrators whose goal is restoring the why of schooling to the organizational structures and instructional routines that currently govern public schooling in this nation.

This book presents a series of cultural situations that could occur within the first one-hundred days of a school year: responding to entrenched vocabularies and behaviors, addressing professional and instructional bad habits, enacting alternative teaching scripts, leveraging a policy blindside, redefining the goals and practices of teams, and implementing outside-the-box programs. Each cultural situation offers a new school leader the opportunity to redefine the goals, values, and practices of an entrenched school culture—the Central High way. Administrators reading the title of this book may view one hundred days as an arbitrary number picked out of administrative thin air. I argue that disrupting and replacing organizational and instructional routines is a race against time. Every school day that goes by without some sign of creative destruction is one more day that comfortable organizational and instructional routines live on in main offices and classrooms.The idea for this book originated from a question I asked a former student of mine who had just signed a contract to become the principal of a high school. We were discussing the complexities of changing a school culture when I asked the following question: “What would you do on the first day in your new office to change your school’s culture?” The response to that question described a series managerial routines that all new administrators have learned to perform as they move from the classroom to the main office: organize the office, meet staff, tour the building, write a newsletter, examine data, and visit community venues. Nothing in this conversation described strategies for redefining the beliefs and values of an entrenched school culture.With this conversation in mind, I made it a point in my formal and informal contacts with school administrators to always ask the question: “What would you do in the first day in your new office to change your school’s culture?” The most common responses involved reviewing district documents, touring facilities, meeting staff, listening to stakeholders and managing systems. In each conversation, school leaders populated their responses with the current jargon of school reform: learning communities, data mining, standards-based curriculum, differentiated learning, common core standards, formative assessment, race to the top, continuous improvement, etc. While these responses encompass reasonable behaviors on the first day in the main office, not one of these actions possesses the capacity to connect educational values expressed in school mission statements—why are we here—to daily organizational and instructional routines. Each activity gives the appearance of leading, but produces no connections between beliefs, values, and practices. Although none of these responses would make or break a school culture, they do represent a pattern of thinking and behaving that holds out little possibility of fundamentally changing a school’s culture.