Before Teaching and Learning

by Chad E. Gestson

The extreme pressure principals feel today to immediately improve student achievement is crippling. Often, this leads to stress, frustration, damaged relations, and poor employee retention. Even worse, this intense pressure regularly results in the creation of systems and structures that lead to short-term increases, yet long-term decreases, in achievement. On the contrary, principals who create the time and space necessary to address climate, culture, and other non-academic issues before beginning an intense focus on teaching and learning strategically lay the foundation for extraordinary, sustainable growth in student achievement. This book is a practical guide, or playbook, on where and how to start school turnaround, which is needed more than ever today. Following two principals on their real-life leadership journeys at three unique yet very challenging schools, this book provides its readers practical and powerful strategies for, and insights into, transforming outcomes for students, teachers, leaders, and the system as a whole.

262 pages, Paperback

Published May 2, 2019

Reviews

[Abigail Marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found some elements of this book particularly useful. The first 3 chapters provide key strategies that can help new principals be as effective as possible. However, Chapter 10 in particular was concerning to me. The author addresses the existence of the school-to-prison pipeline, then recounts two separate occasions at two separate buildings in which he removed problematic students from his building, making “alternative” arrangements for them. At the second building, a high school, this was 150 students. After this anecdote, it was difficult to see the rest of the book as anything but self-congratulatory and out of touch (which is odd, considering how recently it was published.) Again, some very useful strategies here, but it became difficult to engage with the last 1/4 of the book. This was an assigned textbook for my principalship program at a university in Arizona, where Dr. Gestson is a prominent leader.