BEFORE Teaching and Learning: A Principal's Playbook for Year One and Beyond

The extreme pressure principals feel today to immediately improve student achievement is crippling. Often, this leads to stress, frustration, damaged relations, and poor employee retention. Even worse, this intense pressure regularly results in the creation of systems and structures that lead to short-term increases, yet long-term decreases, in achievement. On the contrary, principals who create the time and space necessary to address climate, culture, and other non-academic issues before beginning an intense focus on teaching and learning strategically lay the foundation for extraordinary, sustainable growth in student achievement. This book is a practical guide, or playbook, on where and how to start school turnaround, which is needed more than ever today. Following two principals on their real-life leadership journeys at three unique yet very challenging schools, this book provides its readers practical and powerful strategies for, and insights into, transforming outcomes for students, teachers, leaders, and the system as a whole.