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Ever since I was a child, I was always trying to imitate my heroes. As a boy who loved sports growing up in the Chicago area, that started with imitating Michael Jordan, Leon Durham and Ryne Sandberg. That desire carried over to my teaching career: I found myself during free periods sitting in the back of the classroom of the best teachers in the school. I don't know that I ever matched the talent of Roxana Aparicio (the best teacher I ever saw in my first years of teaching), but I got better. This same focus carried with me as I became a school leader, a principal manager, and beyond.
Fast forward 30 years, and I've had the opportunity to train or work with over 100,000 school leaders across the globe. As I've traveled the world, I particularly focused on observing exemplary schools, those that were the highest gaining or highest achieving schools in their districts, cities, states and countries. These were schools of all types: small and large, district and charter, startups and turnarounds. What made the difference?
What I discovered was that it didn't have anything to do with work ethic: nearly every school leader I met was working extremely hard. Yet most struggled to make an impact. Rather, the key difference was HOW a school leader used their time. The most successful schools focused on the core levers that matter, separating themselves from schools that didn't.
"Driven by Data" was my first book on this topic, zeroing in on one of the most important levers--data-driven instruction--that was the fruit of my initial work with thousands of school leaders nationwide. "Leverage Leadership 3.0" is one of the most recent, highlighting the seven levers that drive student achievement: from coaching teachers to internalize high-quality curriculum materials to observation & feedback and a well-managed leadership team. The rest of my books try to fill in the rest: from the core tenets of excellent coaching (“Get Better Faster”) to coaching principals ("A Principal Manager's Guide to Leverage Leadership") to content ("Make History, "Love & Literacy" and “Team up with the Text”) to the role of AI (“El Director Libre” alongside “Leverage Leadership 3.0.”)
In all of these books, my hope was to be able to share the best practices I observed with a larger audience (you!) and to give you the tools to replicate this success in your own school. To help make that possible, each book is loaded with real-life testimonials and success stories from around the world, and they also have an appendix with all the PD materials you would need to turnkey these trainings in your own school. And now you have all of that accessible to you in the Leverage Leadership App.
Being a school leader isn't easy--it never will be. But I hope you find these tools will help you to use your time more effectively than ever before, and in the process guide you to providing excellent education for all children. Our children certainly deserve it!
If you're interested in more, check out additional information at our Leverage Leadership Institute.
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