It’s all about the right support, at the right time, in the right amount

New teaching staff, whether novice or veteran, are a central part of a successful school year. So why is it that they are often greeted at the door of our school community with the autopilot vibe of a ticket taker at the movies? Onboarding Teachers changes the rules of engagement, offering activities and practical strategies that focus leaders and coaches on critical aspects of success for that make-or-break first year.

Built on high-impact instructional and coaching practices and ready for you to roll out in four eight-week cycles, everything you need is here:

• Timely content aligned to needs as they come up throughout the year including the physical environment, engagement, and classroom management
• Checklists and self assessments to gauge readiness
• Sample emails and communication tips for various audiences
• Coaching scenarios to apply and reflect on strategies
• Links to access additional resources on-line

Half of all new teachers leave the profession within five years. We can reduce that attrition by integrating new members in a way that deepens connection and practice. With Onboarding Teachers, the wish for new teachers to find their stride becomes a plan.

 50+ Instructional Strategies for Developing Independent Learners

Discover over 50 strategies to meet your students where they are and help them succeed.

Every teacher faces a recurring question in the classroom: What strategy will help this student learn right now? With hundreds of potential strategies available, the challenge lies in choosing the right approach at the right time. Instructional Strategies to Move Learning Forward does exactly that, equipping educators with thoughtfully curated instructional strategies designed to advance learning for all students. Grounded in the Gradual Release of Responsibility (GRR) framework, this book empowers you to select and implement purposeful strategies that address your students' specific needs at a specific moment in their learning while ensuring long-term success.

This content-rich guide provides practical tools and insights that emphasize why, when, and how instructional strategies can move learning forward, with:

• Research-informed rationale for why each strategy works and how each supports meaningful learning
• Detailed step-by-step guidance for implementation, ensuring every strategy can be immediately applied in your classroom
• Adaptability across contexts: Strategies designed for use across grades, content areas, and student needs—including multilingual learners and those requiring differentiated support
• Connections for each strategy to the GRR framework for cohesive lesson planning and consistent results

• Self-assessments so you know your baseline
• Pause and ponder questions to envision change
• REAL features to lead with alacrity
• Checklists to stay focused and strategic
• Relevant research to assimilate and share

Don’t sink your school’s creativity—encourage it to set sail!

Do today’s schools stifle creativity? Some think so. Whether or not that assessment is fair, educational leaders need to innovate, implement creative leadership and cultivate possibility thinking.

This book is the definitive resource for making creativity a schoolwide core value. Introducing the groundbreaking Small Steps Approach to Instructional Leadership (SAIL) framework, Ronald A. Beghetto shows how big wins come from small, completely doable steps, and all creativity needs is a little nudge from you, the instructional leader. Content includes:

• “Creative leader checklists” summarizing actionable points in each chapter.
• The keys to removing the most difficult creative barriers
• How to sit with uncertainty instead of letting it derail innovation efforts
• When to “flow like water”, and when to “stand like a mountain” as you re-focus your school towards creativity 

Implementing these principles will produce positive effects that resonate in every aspect of your school. 

Watch this video from Ron Beghetto on "Responding to Uncertainty."

Check out the PCR Interview for Big Wins, Small Steps.

"Ron Beghetto's engaging work on creativity has profound implications for schools, and for the staff and students within them." 
Larry Rosenstock, CEO
High Tech High

“Creativity has become the holy-grail in education. Beghetto presents an authoritative, accessible, and unpretentious pathway toward creative leadership. Insightful, practical, and based on solid research, not popular myth.”
Yong Zhao, Author of World Class Learners

"Creativity is needed to negotiate a complex world. Big Wins, Small Steps invites educators to teach creativity by first practicing deliberate creativity one small step at a time."
Beth Miller, Executive Director
Creative Education Foundation

Use media literacy to reach all students!

The Teacher's Guide to Media Literacy starts by asking, "What does it mean to be literate in today's world, and how can those literacy skills be developed?" The authors answer those questions by providing concrete, innovative ways to integrate media literacy across the curriculum and teach students to be independent, skilled, and reflective thinkers. Through dozens of suggested activities, teaching strategies, and lessons, this book's unique vision allows schools to

• Integrate media literacy into teaching at all grade levels and core content areas
• Address key education standards
• Teach 21st-century skills and higher-order critical thinking
• Engage students by bridging schoolwork with their lives outside the classroom

In addition to dozens of activity ideas, the text and companion website include self-reflection exercises, voices from the field, a glossary of terms, and seven annotated, original, classroom-tested lesson plans that illustrate different approaches to media literacy in the classroom. In a time of hectic schedules and ever increasing expectations, the authors help teachers reframe their instruction to focus on the skills students need to succeed in the digital age.

Women leaders explore personal and professional growth through reflection and story

Leading While Female means working with female and male colleagues who are grounded in values for equity to confront and close the gender equity gap. This guided reflection is both a stand-alone book and a companion to the bestselling Leading While Female: A Culturally Proficient Response to Gender Equity.

Combining the first-hand experiences of female leaders with research on feminism, intersectionality, and leadership, Arriaga, Stanley, and Lindsey support readers to explore their personal and professional cultural proficiencies. Readers will find:

• support to identify barriers and formulate methods to overcome them,
• opportunities to record their experiences following a narrative protocol for their Stormy First Draft (SFD), a writing experience derived from nine chapters of guided reflective journal entries,
• leadership stories and figures to provide guidance and illustrate the need for gender equity, and
• opportunities for males who are mentors and allies to dismantle gender bias.

Data show women are doing the work of classroom teaching while disproportionately, men are making leadership decisions. This interactive resource supports women leaders to interrupt current dominant narratives with their own stories of challenges and success.

Translate the science of learning into strategies for maximum learning impact in your classroom.

The content, skills, and understandings students need to learn today are as diverse, complex, and multidimensional as the students in our classrooms. How can educators best create the learning experiences students need to truly learn?

How Learning Works: A Playbook unpacks the science of how students learn and translates that knowledge into promising principles or practices that can be implemented in the classroom or utilized by students on their own learning journey. Designed to help educators create learning experiences that better align with how learning works, each module in this playbook is grounded in research and features prompts, tools, practice exercises, and discussion strategies that help teachers to

• Describe what is meant by learning in the local context of your classroom, including identifying any barriers to learning.
• Adapt promising principles and practices to meet the specific needs of your students—particularly regarding motivation, attention, encoding, retrieval and practice, cognitive load and memory, productive struggle, and feedback.
• Translate research on learning into learning strategies that accelerate learning and build students’ capacity to take ownership of their own learning—such as summarizing, spaced practice, interleaved practice, elaborate interrogation, and transfer strategies.
• Generate and gather evidence of impact by engaging students in reciprocal teaching and effective feedback on learning.

Navigate barriers and take actional steps toward equity

The principles of Cultural Proficiency have guided our drive toward equitable schools for decades. Leaders who apply this framework to scrutinize the beliefs and practices that have caused disproportionate harm to children of color and other marginalized students are frequently left with the question: “Now What?”

Using their unique insights and life experiences as Latina superintendents, the authors of Now What? Confronting Uncomfortable Truths About Inequity in Schools present a guide to navigating barriers, managing differences, and creating an actionable equity plan. Readers will find:

• a "What Next" guide for leaders at all levels to leverage Cultural Proficiency
• a Culturally Proficient Leadership Rubric for promoting growth
• an 8-Step Process to help educators gauge status and progress of their equity plan
• a discussion of the impact of COVID-19 on educational transformation, as well as heightened awareness of injustice, including the Black Lives Matter movement and mistreatment of immigrant children and families

Cultural Proficiency begins with us. By focusing on our beliefs and biases, and taking actionable steps, we can become more proficient at eliminating barriers.

Rebuilding your day--How ten minutes can make the difference between ordinary and fantastic leadership

A principal’s enthusiastic vision is often thwarted by daily demands. There never seems time for carefully laid plans. But what if you made the most of ten-minute blocks scattered through your day? Could you make progress? 

This book says Yes! and will help you improve, but not overwhelm yourself or staff. It will show you how to intentionally use ten-minute opportunities to consider, kickstart, and execute your vision. Based on six pillars of school leadership, vision, relationships, trust, efficacy, student-centeredness, and instructional knowledge each chapter will:

• Introduce a leadership topic
• Offer a ten minute opportunity to consider where you are and what you might change
• Give a ten minute tip on how to get started, as well as overcome challenges
• Provide ten minute collaborative opportunities to gain buy-in and participation

Discover how to build the foundations of effective leadership and be a school [helping teachers and students grow and improve] despite daily demands. Make the most of chunks of time to refine your craft and become a reflective and intentional leader.

Promote the skills and experiences that equip students to thrive in the future!

Future Focused Leaders concentrates on three areas, Relate, Innovate, and Invigorate, that will engage and empower school leaders to effectively prepare students and educators for the future. This book provides best practices, practical tools, and research-based strategies that educators can immediately apply for sustainable innovation in their leadership. With maintaining positive change in mind, this book also offers:

• Examples, vignettes, and activities for reflection and action
• A self-evaluation rubric to check your ability to relate, innovate, and invigorate
• Visit Chase Learning for video and audio resources, as well as a leadership simulation for team practice

Read chapter 4