Resources

Our use of frameworks with partners often generates tools that can support your learning and changes in your leadership practice. Below are some of the downloadable resources, including frameworks, webinars and books, that we have available.

Select a filter below to narrow your options.

Frameworks
Books
Case Studies
Reports
Tools
Webinars

4 Dimensions of School Leadership™

FRAMEWORK: The 4D™ framework describes key actions and dispositions for equity-driven school leaders. It illustrates what school leaders need to know and do to ensure that each student, particularly those furthest from justice, has a school experience that prepares them for a limitless future.

5 Dimensions of Teaching and Learning™

FRAMEWORK: The 5D™ framework is a comprehensive reflection of the core elements of effective teaching. It provides a shared language for instruction that grounds teaching and learning in classroom environment and culture, student engagement, curriculum and pedagogy, assessment for student learning and purpose.

Principal Support Framework

FRAMEWORK: The Principal Support Framework is a tool for central office leaders to eliminate inequitable student experiences and outcomes. Updated in 2022, this framework has four action areas that offer a student-centered vision for system leaders to partner with school leaders to grow equity leadership practices.

Teacher Learning Guiding Principles

FRAMEWORK: To create schools and classrooms where all students belong, take ownership of their ideas and have agency in their learning, educators must work and learn differently. This framework identifies what teachers and leaders should do to grow collective efficacy for more equitable experiences and outcomes.

Leading for Instructional Improvement

BOOK: Educational experts agree that quality teaching is the most important factor in improving outcomes for all students. This book shows how teacher, school and district leaders can cultivate the expertise of teachers to deliver high-quality instruction.

Leading for Professional Learning

BOOK: Leading for Professional Learning offers field-tested guidance to help school leaders more effectively support teachers’ professional development. With an illustrative case study, this book provides invaluable guidance and is packed with practical tools, processes and expert advice.

Making the Case: Transforming Teacher Professional Learning

CASE STUDY: Rethink your approach to teacher professional learning with this short document that offers a vision for transformative teacher learning and suggests recommendations for first steps you can take. You can use this with the Teacher Learning Guiding Principles as you work to increase collective efficacy on behalf of your students.

Teacher Professional Learning Case Study (Math That’s Open to Everyone)

CASE STUDY: This case study, reprinted with permission from the National Association of Elementary School Principals, illustrates what is possible when school leaders work on beliefs alongside practices, emphasize all students’ ability to engage in rigorous math and create opportunities for teachers to engage in intensive, collaborative practice.

When People are the Content: a Systems Approach to Supporting Principals as Instructional Leaders

CASE STUDY: Learn how system leaders created the conditions for principals to be what they most wanted them to be — instructional leaders — by taking their perspective. The report includes the tool kit that the system leaders used to facilitate this transformation.

White paper: From Procedures to Partnership

REPORT: Principal supervisors help improve schools when they emphasize principal growth and learning. But transforming the role of principal supervisors to help grow principals’ instructional leadership skills is challenging. Learn how a group of school systems used research to redesign principal supervisor positions and tackle early implementation challenges.

5D+™ Rubric for Instructional Growth and Teacher Evaluation

TOOL: Build understanding of what good teaching looks like with a growth-oriented tool for improving instruction based on the 5 Dimensions of Teaching and Learning™ instructional framework.

Characteristics of Instructional Leadership Team Members

TOOL: Explore seven characteristics to guide the growth and development of instructional leadership team members. Instructional leadership teams are a great opportunity to strengthen teacher leadership in support of a school’s vision and mission.

Creating a Theory of Action

TOOL: Develop a rationale behind your strategies and articulate your thinking by generating an evidence-based story that explains the specific changes you intend to make to improve teaching and learning.

Inquiry Cycle

TOOL: Engage in a four-phase process of continuous improvement for principal supervisors and school leaders to collaboratively improve and analyze instruction.

Student Experience Story Guide

TOOL: Strengthen how you actively listen to students with this guide that empowers students to tell their stories about their school experiences. Designed by students for students, this guide will be downloadable soon.

Types of Classroom Observation

TOOL: Advance your knowledge and understanding of classroom observation with practical, actionable guidance. This tool outlines the supporting theory, logistical considerations and possible leadership actions behind the three types of classroom observations, illuminating the purposes and techniques behind them.

Keeping the Student at the Center of Instructional Leadership

WEBINAR: Learn instructional-leadership strategies to help principals, coaches and central office leaders to keep students at the center of their work — and improve their ability to give feedback and plan professional development. This is a series of three webinars.

Grow Your Equity Stance as a Central Office Leader: Introducing the Revised Principal Support Framework

WEBINAR: In 2022, CEL revised the Principal Support Framework based on changes to the 4 Dimensions of School Leadership™, learning from our partnerships with districts across the country and knowledge from emerging literature on educational leadership.

Tried and Tested Strategies to Teach Central Office Leaders the Role of the Principal

WEBINAR: The expectations and goals for principals have changed, but not everybody in the central office knows what that means and how to deal with it. Hillsborough County Public Schools in Tampa, Fl., took this issue on and yielded impressive results.

Visioning Pyramid Explainer

TOOL: Are you interested in taking a more systemic approach and streamlining teaching and learning initiatives? The Visioning Pyramid Explainer helps leaders clarify their vision for student experience and learning, evaluate alignment between strategies and vision, and enhance impact.

Introducing the 5D+™ Rubric for Instructional Growth and Teacher Evaluation, Version 3

WEBINAR: Patty Maxfield, CEL’s former director of teacher evaluation, introduces version three of the 5D+ Rubric. She explains what educators using the tool in their practice need to keep in mind when switching to the updated rubric.

Central Office Leaders Centering Student Voice

WEBINAR: Central office leaders play an essential role in creating the conditions for student-centered school leaders to learn and grow. Hear from our central office leader partners from Springfield Public Schools in Oregon and Columbus City Schools in Ohio about how they’ve been shifting leadership practices across district teams by listening to and learning from students