Literacy Leadership

1. Literacy Leadership Susan Lenski sjlenski@pdx.edu

2. Leadership is to this decade what standards were to the 1990s. • Fullan, M. (2003). The moral imperative of school leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

3. What is Leadership? • To lead people, walk beside them… • When the best leader’s work is done, the people say, “We did it ourselves?” • Lao-Tsu

5. People Tree • Place yourself on the People Tree as you think about yourself as a leader. • Which one are you? • Why?

6. Good Leaders = Knowledge • Knowledge of people • Knowledge of reading • Knowledge of national, state, and local trends

7. If you had a question about literacy or assessment, who would you ask?

8. Gallup found that the majority of employees take their cues from a trusted colleague rather than from the boss, the employee manual, or a silver-tongued trainer (Rath & Clifton, 2004).

9. Hubs!!!! • The network framework suggests that change spreads throughout the system on a distinctly nonlinear communication path of nodes, hubs, and superhubs.

10. Toxic Hubs

12. Knowledge about reading • History of reading • Reading “vocabulary” • What’s Hot?

13. National Trends

14. Question the Status Quo • Status quo, you know, that is Latin for “the mess we’re in.” • Ronald Reagan

15. It’s not working….. • Judging by the increasing dropout rates and widespread lack of student engagement in learning, it seems that too many young people are turned off by the punitive methods being used to make them better students. • Anne Lewis, national education policy writer, Kappan

16. Few of us went into education out of a burning desire to raise students’ test scores. We went into it out of a deep sense of what’s good for kids and society… • David Ferrero

17. State Initiatives

18. Pick battle big enough to matter, small enough to win. • Jonathon Kozol

19. Local Trends

20. Word to the Wise Leader • If you don’t decide what’s important, others will do it for you.