The knowledge and/or performance of mediocre teachers is neither substantive and skilled enough to help most children learn nor poor enough to warrant a move toward dismissal. All children, however, deserve expert instruction from every teacher. The Skillful Leader: Confronting Mediocre Teaching presents a tool kit of field-tested strategies that supervisors and evaluators can use to identify and improve mediocre teaching. It includes a comprehensive series of framing questions to help the evaluator isolate performance strengths and weaknesses and examples of observation and summary evaluation reports. It also contains steps and strategies for designing improvement plans where the responsibility for change rests with the teacher. Using case studies, legal notes and a model contract, assessment tools, and personal accounts of leaders in action, the authors show how even the most seemingly entrenched teacher can be helped.

The Skillful Leader II: Confronting Conditions that Undermine Learning arms administrators and teacher leaders with step-by-step strategies to confront and raise the performance of teams and individuals who undermine student learning. The text includes methods of collecting data, strategies for intervention and tips for hiring and training. New individual and community profiles, together with legal notes, provide practical tools for busy leaders.

The first volume of The Skillful Leader taught us that big gains in instructional quality and learning can only be realized by focusing on mediocre instruction and the conditions that underlie it. Educators have learned to look in a tough-minded way at the problems of mediocrity and have pushed their practice beyond comfortable euphemism to concrete practices that address concrete practices that address fundamental issues of instructional quality.

Now The Skillful Leader II takes on the central issue of building strong communities of practice in schools that support and nurture high high-quality instructional practice. With the same flinty, skeptical eye toward the culture of mediocrity that characterized Skillful Leader I, with authors have taken on address the central issue of school culture in the United States. Under what conditions does cultural consensus in schools support, and under what conditions does it undermine, instructional improvement? When does collegiality work to change the conditions of success for students, and when does it reinforce the pathologies of mediocre instruction? This is a wise and much-needed, practical and supportive, guide for school leaders, aspiring and practicing, for on how to make schools places where adults and students learn at high levels.

— RICHARD ELMORE, Gregory R. Anrig Professor of Educational Leadership and Director, Consortium for Policy Research in Education, Harvard School of Education

Their suggestions for confronting mediocre teaching provide a useful starting point for administrators and supervisors as they consider how to deal effectively and forthrightly with this problem.

— EDWIN M. BRIDGES, Professor of Education, School of Education, Stanford University, Author of The Incompetent Teacher: Managerial Responses