Leading With Inquiry and Action: How Principals Improve Teaching and Learning

This practical guide presents a collaborative, inquiry-based process for collecting information, making decisions, and taking action in order to improve instruction. Illustrating this cycle within a real-world context, the book helps school leaders identify areas for improvement, determine community-supported solutions, articulate an action plan, and evaluate program results.

Matthew Militello is the Wells Fargo Distinguished Professor in Educational Leadership at East Carolina University. He is currently the principal investigator for a million dollar National Science Foundation grant (NSF# 1738767) bringing computational thinking to music and art classes in rural NC middle schools. Militello is also currently implementing an innovative Ed.D. degree for ECU in Bangkok, Thailand. Militello received his teaching degree from the University of Michigan (B.Ed., 1992), his administrative certification (MSA, 1994) and doctoral degrees (Ph.D., 2004) from Michigan State University. He has held faculty positions at North Carolina State University (2008-2014) and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (2005-2008). Prior to his academic career, Militello was a middle and high public school teacher, assistant principal, and principal in Michigan (1992-2003). Militello has received funding to conduct research from the College Board, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Xian Normal University, as well as a multi-million dollar Race to the Top grant to train school leaders in Northeast North Carolina.

Sharon F. Rallis is Dwight W. Allen Distinguished Professor of Education Policy and Reform at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Previously, she was professor of education at the University of Connecticut; lecturer on education at Harvard; and associate professor of educational leadership at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University. Her doctorate is from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has coauthored numerous books, including several on leadership: Principals of Dynamic Schools: Taking Charge of Change (with Ellen Goldring); Dynamic Teachers: Leaders of Change (with Gretchen Rossman); Leading Dynamic Schools: How to Create and Implement Ethical Policies (with Gretchen Rossman and others); and Leading With Inquiry and Action: How Principals Improve Teaching and Learning (with Matthew Militello and Ellen Goldring). Her numerous articles, book chapters, edited volumes, and technical reports address issues of research and evaluation methodology, ethical practice in research and evaluation, education policy and leadership, and school reform.

A past-president of the American Evaluation Association (2005) and current editor of the American Journal of Evaluation, Professor Rallis has been involved with education and evaluation for more than three decades. She has been a teacher, counselor, principal, researcher, program evaluator, director of a major federal school reform initiative, and an elected school board member. Currently, her teaching includes courses on inquiry, program evaluation, qualitative methodology, and organizational theory. Her research has focused on the local implementation of programs driven by federal, state, or district policies. As external evaluator or principal investigator (PI), she has studied a variety of domestic and international policy and reform efforts, such as alternative professional development for leaders; collaborations between agencies responsible for educating incarcerated or institutionalized youth; initiatives supporting inclusive education for children and youth with disabilities; local school governance and leadership; labor-management relations in school districts; and leadership development. Her work with students on evaluation and qualitative methodology has taken her as far as Afghanistan, Turkey, and Palestine.

Ellen B. Goldring is professor of education policy and leadership at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University, where she won the Alexander Heard Distinguished Professor award. Her areas of expertise and research focus on improving schools, with particular attention to educational leadership and access and equity in schools of choice. She is the immediate past coeditor of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. She serves on numerous editorial boards, technical panels, and policy forums, and is the coauthor of three books, including Principals of Dynamic Schools (Corwin Press), as well as hundreds of book chapters and articles. Goldring is currently working on a project funded by the Wallace Foundation to develop and field-test an education leadership assessment system and establish its psychometric properties. She is also conducting experiments to study professional development and performance feedback for school leaders. She is an investigator at the National Center on School Choice and the Learning Sciences Institute at Vanderbilt. Goldring received her PhD from the University of Chicago.