The Skillful Team Leader: A Resource for Overcoming Hurdles to Professional Learning for Student Achievement - Paperback

Elisa MacDonald′s expertise is in improving student achievement by leading educators in collaborative inquiry and reflective professional development and practice. As a consultant for Teachers²¹, she is currently working in twelve Massachusetts school districts as well as leading many of the organization′s training programs offered through MASCD and the Massachusetts Secondary School Administrators Association. Her presentations cover such topics as professional learning communities, teacher leadership, mentoring, behavior management, looking at student work, literacy across the content areas, flexible scheduling, MCAS writing, Reading Apprenticeship, and Reader′s and Writer′s Workshop. She is a skilled coach of teachers and administrators.

As former Assistant Headmaster for Instruction at Brighton High School, Elisa steered the teacher leadership program that powered the establishment of the school′s highly-regarded professional learning community that focused on analysis of student performance data and constantly improved the faculty′s delivery of instruction and assessment of student learning. Prior to this administrative post, Elisa was the school′s literacy coach for four years and introduced Reading Apprenticeship methods across the subject areas. She is the lead author of Back on Track: How an Urban High School Strategically Led At-Risk Students to Success (ASCD Express, October 14, 2010, 6 (1)) and is a contributing author to Beyond Mentoring (Teachers21, Third Edition, 2010). Her forthcoming book, The Skillful Team Leader: Facilitating Teams for Professional Learning (Teachers21, 2011), provides team leaders with research-based practical strategies to understand and shift school culture.

Elisa MacDonald is an adjunct faculty member and clinical mentor for the Lynch School of Education at Boston College and has been a lead mentor at the Center for Leadership Development for the Boston Public Schools. Her work on media literacy has been highlighted by the National Middle Schools Association and she was awarded the Calderwood Writing Fellowship for 2007-2008 by UMass Boston and the Boston Athenaeum. Elisa is a cum laude graduate of Brandeis University and a summa cum laude graduate of the Critical and Creative Thinking Graduate Program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.