What is a professional learning community? What are the key challenges facing these communities and how might they be resolved? Is it time to extend our thinking about professional learning communities? There is great interest internationally in the potential of professional learning communities for enhancing educational reform efforts and sustaining improvement. This international collection expands perceptions and understanding of professional learning communities, as well as highlighting frequently neglected complexities and challenges. Drawing on research, each chapter offers a deeper understanding of topics such as distributed leadership, dialogue, organisational memory, trust, self-assessment and inquiry, and purpose linked to learning. The last section of the book focuses upon three of the most challenging dilemmas that face developing professional learning communities - developing professional learning communities in secondary school, building social capital, and sustaining professional learning communities. The authors provide pointers on why these challenges exist, offering rays of hope for ways forward.Professional Learning Communities is key international reading for education professionals, school practitioners, policymakers, academics and research students. It is a must-read for anyone interested in building capacity for sustainable learning and the ability to harness your community as a resource for change.

Professional Learning Communities

Education & Teaching

Seashore-Louis, Karen

Stoll, Louise

Schools & Teaching

Open University Press

Organizing for School Change (Contexts of Learning)

Improving education is a key priority for governments around the world. While many suggestions on how best to achieve this are currently under debate, years of academic research have already revealed more about how to encourage change than is sometimes assumed. This volume brings together for the first time some of the most significant work of Karen Seashore Louis, one of the foremost thinkers and researchers in the field. Organizing for School Change presents a unique variety of research-based results from studies conducted over the past twenty-five years. What emerges is not an idealistic plan, but a realistic picture of what needs to be done if schools are to be made better. Drawing on a wide and comprehensive list of sources, the ideas brought together in this collection will prove invaluable and insightful reading, stimulating both newcomers and veterans of the field to consider educational research in new ways.

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Routledge

Linking Leadership to Student Learning 
Linking Leadership to Student Learning clearly shows how school leadership improves student achievement. The book is based on an ambitious five-year study on educational leadership that was sponsored by The Wallace Foundation. The authors studied 43 districts, across 9 states and 180 elementary, middle, and secondary schools. In this book, Kenneth Leithwood, Karen Seashore Louis, and their colleagues report on what they found. They examined leadership at each organizational level in the school system―classroom, school, district, community, and state. Their comprehensive approach to investigating school leadership offers a balanced understanding of how the structures within which leaders operate shape what they do. The results within will have significant implications for future policy and practice. 
Praise for Linking Leadership to Student Learning 
"Kenneth Leithwood and Karen Seashore Louis offer a seminal new contribution to the leadership field. They provide a rich and authoritative evidence base that demonstrates clearly just why school leadership is so important and how it promotes successful student learning." ―PAMELA SAMMONS, Ph.D., Professor of Education, Department of Education, University of Oxford, Oxford 
"This ambitious, groundbreaking, and thought provoking treatment of the link between school leadership and student learning is a testament to the outstanding work of these exemplary scholars. This is a 'must read' for academics and practitioners alike." ―MARTHA McCARTHY, President's Professor, Loyola Marymount University, and Chancellor's Professor Emeritus, Indiana University 
"The question is no longer whether school and district leader's impact student learning, but rather how they do it. The authors provide a convincing answer, one that recognizes the crucial interaction between leader and locality." ―DANIEL L. DUKE, Professor of Educational Leadership, University of Virginia

Linking Leadership to Student Learning

Leithwood, Kenneth

Jossey-Bass

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Books by Seashore-Louis, Karen