Finding Your Leadership Focus

In his new book, author and international keynoter Douglas Reeves addresses a major challenge faced by today’s school leaders: an ever-growing load of programs and initiatives. Reeves contends that program overload not only taxes leadership resources, but actually hurts rather than improves student performance. Drawing on recent research findings, this book shows how leaders can pare down from a proliferation of initiatives to determine what is truly most important based on their local concerns, challenges, populations, and other school factors.

Identifying a specific set of leadership practices that are more strongly associated with improvements in student achievement, Reeves provides explicit guidelines for how school leaders can improve their most critical leadership decisions by simultaneously engaging in three essential strategies: monitoring teaching and leadership practices, building high degrees of efficacy among staff members, and focusing on a smaller number of priorities. Finding Your Leadership Focus is essential reading for new and veteran principals, teacher leaders, and PLC book study groups.

Book Features:

• Practical guidance to help school leaders at every level to focus on what is most important and to assess their progress.
• Analysis correlating three years of student achievement data and specific school leadership practices.
• Online video conference support by Douglas Reeves for book study groups and graduate classes who use this book.
• Online downloads.

Douglas B. Reeves is the founder of The Leadership and Learning Center, Englewood, Colorado (www.LeadandLearn.com). He was named the Brock International Laureate for his contributions to education and received the Distinguished Service Award from the National Association of Secondary School Principals.

"Finding Your Leadership Focus could not have arrived at a more timely moment in the history of reform.... Doug Reeves’s conclusions and agenda for action are exactly what is needed."
—From the Foreword by Michael Fullan, University of Toronto

“This book is a masterful combination of research and practice, and Doug Reeves is one of the few people in the country who could have written it. He has added much-needed clarity to the process of leading in a way that directly results in enhanced student achievement.”
—Robert J. Marzano, CEO, Marzano Research Laboratory

“If schools and districts model their improvement efforts on Doug Reeves’ sage advice, voluminous strategic plans will be scrapped, trees will be saved, educators will avoid the Law of Initiative Fatigue, and most importantly, students will learn at higher levels.”
—Richard DuFour, educational author and consultant

Exercises and Assessments