Taming the Turbulence in Educational Leadership

Learner-centered leadership grounded in courage, integrity, and love for every child

The pressures of today’s political and cultural climate have created unprecedented roadblocks for school leaders striving to ensure success for all students. With mounting challenges from communities, conservative legislation, and misconceptions about student-centered instruction and inclusion efforts, leaders often feel isolated and threatened in their efforts to prioritize what learners need most.

Drawing on interviews with 67 education leaders around the world, Taming the Turbulence in Educational Leadership is a practical handbook, offering strategies to drive equity-focused and student-centered transformation, even in the face of opposition. Additional features include

• Approaches to foster trust and build relationships across the campus and community to overcome resistance
• Strategies to leverage data; include learner, teacher, and parent voices; and use intentional communication for effective decision-making
• Tools for preparing teachers, adapting systems, and protecting staff as they implement equity-centered initiatives
• Protocols, reflective questions, and worksheets to help schools determine readiness and create actionable plans

Rooted in real-world stories, this book offers solidarity and actionable strategies to education leaders committed to centering the needs of all learners in increasingly polarized societies.

Jennifer D. Klein is a product of experiential project-based education herself, and she lives and breathes the student-centered pedagogies used to educate her. She became a teacher during graduate school in 1990, quickly finding the intersection between her love of writing and her fascination with educational transformation and its potential impact on social change. She spent nineteen years in the classroom, including several years in Costa Rica and eleven in all-girls education, before leaving the classroom to support educators’ professional learning in public, private, and international schools. Motivated by her belief that all children deserve a meaningful, relevant education like the one she experienced herself, and that giving them such an education will catalyze positive change in their communities and beyond, Jennifer strives to inspire educators to shift their practices in schools worldwide. Jennifer is committed to intersecting globally-connected student-centered learning with identity-responsive and anti-racist teaching practices, and her experience includes deep work with schools seeking to address equity, take on brave conversations, build healthier communities, and improve identity politics on campus. She has a broad background in global education and global partnership development, student-centered curricular strategies, diversity and inclusivity work, student-led evaluation, outdoor education, and experiential, inquiry-driven learning. She has facilitated workshops in English and Spanish on four continents, providing the strategies for high-quality, globally connected project-based learning in all cultural and socioeconomic contexts, with an emphasis on amplifying student voice and shifting school culture to support such practices. Jennifer has worked with organizations such as the Buck Institute for Education, the Center for Global Education at the Asia Society, The Institute for International Education, Fulbright Japan, What School Could Be, the Centre for Global Education, TakingITGlobal, and the World Leadership School, to name a few. Most recently, she served as Head of School at Gimnasio Los Caobos (Bogotá, Colombia) for three years, where she was able to put her educational thinking into practice with profound impact on the quality of student learning and their growth as agents of change.   Jennifer’s first book, The Global Education Guidebook: Humanizing K–12 Classrooms Worldwide Through Equitable Partnerships, was published in 2017, and her second book, The Landscape Model of Learning: Designing Student-Centered Experiences for Cognitive and Cultural Inclusion, coauthored with Kapono Ciotti, was published in 2022. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and a Master of Arts from the University of Colorado at Boulder, both in literature and creative writing. Additionally, Jennifer completed her principal licensing studies at the University of Denver. She currently lives in Denver, Colorado. Learn more about bringing Jennifer to your school or conference at www.principledlearning.org.