The Skillful Team Leader: A Resource for Overcoming Hurdles to Professional Learning for Student Achievement

Get the most out of your PLCs and teacher teams!

All teams face hurdles. What distinguishes the skillful team leader from a less effective one is his or her approach in overcoming them. Whether you are a team leader or a trainer of team leaders, this book is an essential resource for you.

Elisa MacDonald offers a skillful approach to team leadership rooted in values, mindset, intelligence, and skill. Readers will learn from reality-based examples illustrating common team hurdles in collaboration, shared leadership, goal setting and attainment, rigorous discourse, and continuous improvement. This practical guide features:

• Research-based and field-tested solutions for preventing and overcoming hurdles
• Brief follow-up sections with tips for sustaining positive change
• Ways to work beyond the team to shape and influence school culture
• Prompts to apply learning to your own leadership hurdles
• A common chapter format for easy reference and flexible use

"Teacher teams have become a common fixture of North American schools. However, not all teams make the best use of their meeting time by engaging in sustained, professional learning. Written in a clear, practitioner-friendly style, this book provides team leaders with an array of useful strategies to address common team hurdles and realize the promise of powerful, collaborative learning."
--Jim Knight, Author of Instructional Coaching

"This book is a fantastic resource for someone who leads teams every day. The vignettes echo the very real challenges that I continually see in team meetings. The book is organized so that I can easily find practical strategies to apply right away when I am facing major challenges in my daily work."
-- Karen Coyle Aylward, Literacy Coach and Team Leader
Boston, MA

Author: Elisa B. MacDonald
Publisher: Corwin Publishers
Published: 03/13/2013
Pages: 208
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 10.90h x 8.40w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9781452218830

About the Author

Elisa MacDonald′s expertise is in improving student achievement by leading educators in collaborative inquiry and reflective professional development and practice. As a consultant for Teachers²¹, she is currently working in twelve Massachusetts school districts as well as leading many of the organization′s training programs offered through MASCD and the Massachusetts Secondary School Administrators Association. Her presentations cover such topics as professional learning communities, teacher leadership, mentoring, behavior management, looking at student work, literacy across the content areas, flexible scheduling, MCAS writing, Reading Apprenticeship, and Reader′s and Writer′s Workshop. She is a skilled coach of teachers and administrators.

As former Assistant Headmaster for Instruction at Brighton High School, Elisa steered the teacher leadership program that powered the establishment of the school′s highly-regarded professional learning community that focused on analysis of student performance data and constantly improved the faculty′s delivery of instruction and assessment of student learning. Prior to this administrative post, Elisa was the school′s literacy coach for four years and introduced Reading Apprenticeship methods across the subject areas. She is the lead author of Back on Track: How an Urban High School Strategically Led At-Risk Students to Success (ASCD Express, October 14, 2010, 6 (1)) and is a contributing author to Beyond Mentoring (Teachers21, Third Edition, 2010). Her forthcoming book, The Skillful Team Leader: Facilitating Teams for Professional Learning (Teachers21, 2011), provides team leaders with research-based practical strategies to understand and shift school culture.

Elisa MacDonald is an adjunct faculty member and clinical mentor for the Lynch School of Education at Boston College and has been a lead mentor at the Center for Leadership Development for the Boston Public Schools. Her work on media literacy has been highlighted by the National Middle Schools Association and she was awarded the Calderwood Writing Fellowship for 2007-2008 by UMass Boston and the Boston Athenaeum. Elisa is a cum laude graduate of Brandeis University and a summa cum laude graduate of the Critical and Creative Thinking Graduate Program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.