From the Creators of the CALL Leadership Assessment

About the Book

In 2009, University of Wisconsin Professors Richard Halverson and Carolyn Kelley set out to develop a school leadership assessment tool with a unique approach to inquiry and survey design. The result, the Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning (CALL), is now being used across the country, and around the world, not only to assess school-wide leadership but to provide meaningful and timely feedback to school and district leaders. CALL’s distributive leadership framework, task-based approach to inquiry, and interactive formative feedback system show that “assessment” can be a meaningful experience for all involved.

Mapping Leadership lays out the foundation of CALL: it’s research roots, it’s theory of action, and the way education leaders use CALL to map their success for their schools.

"The depth and utility of this book are incredible. The CALL surveys exemplify a range of possible practices. This book is a gift to the field of educational leadership. I can't recommend it highly enough."
DR. SCOTT McCLEOD
Associate Professor, University of Colorado Denver, and Founding Director, CASTLE
"Mapping Leadership is a thoroughly readable, practical guide that makes sense of a large body of research on school leadership. It moves attention away from the leader as an individual to the developer of systems of collaboration. Using tangible examples, the book vividly demonstrates the process of school improvement."
ELAINE ALLENSWORTH
Lewis-Sebring Director, University of Chicago Consortium on School Research

Drawing on twenty years of research in school effectiveness, Mapping Leadership presents a distributed model of task-based school leadership that leads to continuous school improvement. The book outlines the tasks school leadership teams must focus on to improve teaching and learning.

Recognizing that the principal is a single actor in a complex web of activity influencing student learning, the focus is not only on the principal’s role but on a range of leadership and instructional practices to be shared across the leadership team.

In addition to examining the multiple facets of school leadership, Mapping Leadership provides guidance for using the Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning (CALL) system. CALL participants can refer to this book to learn how school leaders can use CALL data and feedback to strengthen their practice. When signing up to use CALL, CALL participants can acquire copies of the book for leaders in their school in order to gain a deeper understanding of the practices being measured, how they are being measured, and how to use the data resulting from these measured practices.

Excerpt

"With a data system that seemed to focus on the outcomes of the work, [the principal] found herself at a loss to think through how she and her team could access the information they needed to understand how their initiatives shaped day-to-day practices and influenced the academic, social and future lives of [the school’s] students. And if she was struggling with making sense of how practices and results fit together in her school, imagine how leaders new to the field felt, or leaders in schools that were failing or beset with resource problems.

What she and her colleagues needed, she thought, was a map. A map that could tell educators where they were on the path to improvement, and point them in the directions they needed to go. A map of leadership practice."

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About the Authors

Richard Halverson is a Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education. Rich co-directs the Wisconsin Collaborative Education Research Network and the Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning project, and was a co-founder and co-director of the Games + Learning + Society Research Center. He is a former high school teacher and administrator. He is co-author (with Allan Collins) of Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology.

Carolyn Kelley is Senior Associate Dean for Academic Programs in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Jim and Georgia Thompson Distinguished Professor of Education in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis. She co-directs the Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning project, and is co-author (with Jim Shaw) of Learning First!.