Healthy Schools

Creating conditions for better teaching and learning to occur has become an important responsibility for today’s school leaders. Principals must attend to building and sustaining healthy school cultures.The authors take the reader on a journey through several different situations that occur at the elementary, middle and high school levels and focus on a different and challenging aspect of educational leadership every time. The reader can read and analyze different scenarios and decide whether or not the outcome was the best for all stakeholders involved. Not only do all of the vignettes offer beneficial advice to educational leaders of all levels and experience, but they also provide research that demonstrates how and why each educational leader does what he or she does in each situation and how those choices affect everyone involved.We believe that these vignettes support the most important quality of school leadership: “Promoting the success of every student by advocating, nurturing, and sustaining a school culture and instructional program conducive to student learning and staff professional growth” (ISLLC Standard 2.0, 2008).

I have been interested lately in the imperatives of pro-social acculturation by schools and was, thus, delighted to receive the pre-publication draft of Healthy Schools: The Hidden Component of Teaching and Learning. How wonderful to find such a timely piece filled with case studies and anecdotes that will resonate with school leaders and teachers in the public, private, and independent school worlds as they search for the blocks to build that school culture that is the foundation for any learning that occurs.  , Great principals are like magnets - they attract and keep great teachers. Phyllis Gimbel and Lenesa Leana applied years of real-world school experience in writing this highly readable book describing what it takes for school principals to establish and lead a healthy school, and become an even more powerful magnet., Healthy Schools: The Hidden Component of Teaching and Learning is a reader friendly resource for educators at every level of the education continuum. The content is driven by experience and practice rather than theory. The topical arrangement of the book leads readers through consideration of critical elements in understanding and improving school culture.

Dr. Phyllis Gimbel has enjoyed a lengthy career in education, serving as middle school principal, foreign language department chair and French and Spanish teacher. Currently, she is Associate Professor of Educational Leadership in the Department of Secondary Education and Professional Programs at Bridgewater State University, where she served as Assistant Coordinator of Writing Across the Curriculum and Faculty Fellow in the Office of Teaching and Learning.Lenesa Leana has been a teacher, counselor, administrator, principal, head of school, and trustee. She has studied the multiple factors that contribute to the growth of healthy school cultures.  Her background in developmental psychology provides an important perspective on her observations of school communities, always with an eye toward what is good for the students.