Leading Your Team to Excellence

"This book is particularly well-organized. It will be an invaluable resource for educators who are interested in leading their teams to excellence."

Ren T. Snyder, Associate Principal
Flowing Wells High School, Tucson, Arizona

This book provides the tools and decision-making skills to help propel your school to excellence. McEwan shows you, step-by-step, how to create and sustain an effective, dynamic, site-based decision-making team at your school. Share the responsibility for leadership and improve the quality of every decision your group makes.

You′ll learn how to:   

• Introduce and nourish the "teaming" concept
• Create a flexible team structure
• Master the necessary skills for successful decision making
• Choose the right group process for each problem-solving situation
• Unleash the power and productivity in your staff (and yourself)

Begin by building shared values, mutual trust, and teamwork abilities to make working together more productive. Lead your group in developing creative new ideas for solving old problems. Share critical information among group members. Your team will learn to improve and streamline its decision-making process and develop better strategies for dealing with conflict. Your newly empowered site-based management group will share commitment, success, and the realization of a job well done--together. Your quality decision making team can share the benefits with everyone at your school and create your school′s future as a real teaching and learning community.

Elaine K. McEwan is an educational consultant with The McEwan-Adkins Group, offering professional development for educators to assist them in meeting the challenges of literacy learning in Grades Pre K-6. A former teacher, librarian, principal, and assistant superintendent for instruction in several suburban Chicago school districts, Elaine is the award-winning and best-selling author of more than three dozen books for educators. Her Corwin Press titles include Raising Reading Achievement in Middle and High Schools: Five Simple-to-Follow Strategies for Principals, Second Edition (2006), Seven Strategies of Highly Effective Readers: Using Cognitive Research to Boost K-8 Achievement (2004), Ten Traits of Highly Effective Principals: From Good to Great Performance (2003), Making Sense of Research: What’s Good, What’s Not, and How to Tell the Difference (2003), Seven Steps to Effective Instructional Leadership, Second Edition (2003), Teach Them ALL to Read: Catching the Kids Who Fall through the Cracks (2002), and Ten Traits of Highly Effective Teachers: How to Hire, Mentor, and Coach Successful Teachers (2001). McEwan was honored by the Illinois Principals Association as an outstanding instructional leader, by the Illinois State Board of Education with an Award of Excellence in the Those Who Excel Program, and by the National Association of Elementary School Principals as the National Distinguished Principal from Illinois for 1991. She received her undergraduate degree in education from Wheaton College and advanced degrees in library science (MA) and educational administration (EdD) from Northern Illinois University.