Leadership Capacity for Lasting School Improvement

ASCD recently published an outstanding new book by Linda Lambert titled Leadership Capacity for Lasting School Improvement . This ninety- five page book, published in 2003, is a timely and comprehensive addition to the literature on building and sustaining leadership capacity in our schools. It also compliments a number of DoDDS-Pacific/DDESS-Guam initiatives within our five- year professional development plan. For example, our initiatives aimed at building and sustaining mentoring relationships, developing leadership capacity in teachers as curriculum implementation facilitators, and strengthening school culture can all be strengthened by the outstanding material in this book. The book offers some practical and very achievable advice on how to sustain and nurture leadership teams and distribute leadership throughout the school.

The book contains numerous helpful tools and protocols that can be used to guide, clarify, and strengthen leadership development and capacity in your school. Please find the following examples:

•  Figure 3.5 School Assessment Questions can provide schools with a less formal and more flexible assessment process by presenting the key features of leadership capacity as open-ended questions.

•  Figure 4.1 Examples of Leadership Coaching matches a variety of coaching questions against a continuum of leadership activities.

•  Figure 5.2 Essential Principal Behaviors for building Leadership Capacity highlights key behaviors and defines those behaviors and their impact on building capacity.

•  Figure 5.1 Strategies to Help Principals Break Dependency Relationships is an excellent list of suggestions on how principals can help others take ownership in school activities and initiatives.

Leadership Team Guidelines (Figure 2.1)
Establishing Effective Leadership Teams
•	Create readiness for a leadership team among staff by talking with individuals and groups, sharing readings, and discussing roles and responsibilities
•	Clarify who will be accorded membership (e.g. classified staff? Parents? Students?)
•	Carefully select members based on faculty criteria
•	Convene and orient members to purposes, roles, and responsibilities; write and share clear by-laws, including a member rotation plan
•	Establish initial responsibilities and calendar and assess needs for essential skills
•	Organize responsibilities for facilitation and process observation
•	Create team norms - expectations for working together
•	Provide training in essential skills
•	Establish a study process so that each meeting includes some new learning about a new idea, reading or skill
•	Establish feedback loops so that school /community communication is comprehensive and multi-leveled (e.g., each member is responsible for personal communication with a small group of staff)
•	Create a team agenda process to address team roles
•	Continually assess where you are, where you are going, and what you need