The Skillful Leader: Confronting Mediocre Teaching

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 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.

About The Authors:
Alexander D. Platt, Ed.D. is a founding and senior consultant with Boston-based consulting firm Research for Better Teaching (RBT). In 2000 he founded Ready About Consulting, dedicated to working with leaders of underperforming schools. He specializes in coaching urban principals on raising the quality of instruction through supervision and has presented at many national conferences and institutes including the Harvard Institute for School Leaders and the Association of California School Administrators (ACSA). He has taught long-term supervision and evaluation courses to over two thousand administrators in the United States, and to administrators in Europe and Japan. Dr. Platt has been an Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum in the Wayland (MA) Public Schools, a leadership consultant to NESDEC (New England School Development Council), and has served as President of the Massachusetts Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (MASCD). He is the lead author on the best-selling book, The Skillful Leader: Confronting Mediocre Teaching.

Caroline E. Tripp, Ed.D. is a consultant with Research for Better Teaching (RBT) and a member of the faculty of the Boston Principal Fellows program. She specializes in helping districts build effective administration teams, designing and implementing supervision and evaluation systems for teachers and administrators, and supporting the development of new administrators. For the past nine years, Dr. Tripp has been the director of curriculum and training for RBT’s joint project on workplace excellence with the Montgomery County (MD) Public Schools. Caroline is a former lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Assistant Superintendent of the Shrewsbury, MA, Public Schools. She has presented nationally on a wide range of topics related to teacher quality and leadership development and is a co-author of The Skillful Leader: Confronting Mediocre Teaching.

Wayne R. Ogden. is the Principal of Duxbury High School in Massachusetts. Before working in Duxbury he was Principal of Springfield High School in Vermont and a high school social studies teacher in Massachusetts. Wayne served for six years on the Commission on Public Secondary Schools of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges and was on the advisory Boards of the Principal Centers at Harvard University and in Vermont.

Robert Fraser, Ed.D., J.D. is an attorney and former Assistant Superintendent for Personnel with more than 32 years’ experience as a labor negotiator. His primary areas of expertise are personnel administration, labor law, negotiations, and education law, including special education. Dr. Fraser has been a member of the Massachusetts and American Associations for School Personnel Administrators. He is a partner at the Boston law firm of Stoneman, Chandler and Miller, and he has been an instructor at Boston University and Harvard School of Education.