A Leader’s Guide to Excellence in Every Classroom

“In his book, A Leader’s Guide to Excellence in Every Classroom: Creating Support Systems for Teacher Success, John Wink provides a comprehensive guide to school excellence. Wink pairs best practices in education with visuals and tools to support planning and implementation, presenting a schoolwide support system in an understandable and thoughtful way. Student academic growth and learning are clearly at the heart of this well-articulated process, and the importance of continually developing the talents of all teachers adds an uplifting and ‘can do’ feeling to the systematic approach that is outlined. It is clear that within this system, every teacher counts and can continually grow toward excellence.”

“Wink has it right. While teachers must engage students, schools must engage teachers. Professional development starts day one and is the responsibility of everyone in the school. His book is a blueprint for developing every teacher into a leader and entrepreneur. When we do that, Wink says we will have a self-sustaining ‘hierarchy for instructional excellence.’ Great read—a good blend of the practical and theoretical.”

“As an unabashed advocate for teacher leadership and technology-rich schooling, I am happy to see that John Wink has taken a systems-thinking approach in A Leader’s Guide to Excellence in Every Classroom to tackle the collective issue of how to make our schools and teachers the best they can be so that all students will achieve high levels of success. By creating clever analogs to well-known models such as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the three-tiered system we associate with RTI, Wink offers research-based strategies that can be used to scaffold the growth and development of teachers so they are eventually able to become teacher leaders. These scaffolds include schoolwide supports, teacher team supports, and individual supports, which Wink calls an Excellent Support System, that can be used to guide and support teachers as they master each stage of what he terms a Hierarchy of Instructional Excellence. Furthermore, Wink models these ideas by providing numerous scaffolds in the form of research-based recommendations, guiding questions, and both planning and reflection tools that school leaders can use to leverage their human and capital resources. The wisdom collected in this book is worth the time for school and teacher leaders to read and follow to achieve their goal of excellence for all.”