Minding the Future: Revitalizing Learning Cultures Through Teacher Leadership

The true leaders in education are the ones who have the most direct contact with learners – our teachers. They represent the most significant influencer of student outcomes, which is supported by a vast amount of research. Angie Anderson, Susan Borg, and Stephanie Edgar not only highlight this fact but present strategy after strategy on how to cultivate teacher leadership and leverage its impact to improve learning for all students.

Minding the Future outlines a very clear framework for how a school might reimagine professional learning in support of results for students. The authors do an excellent job of providing a specific set of strategies to help educators innovate responsibly and transform their teaching. What’s especially helpful are the tools and resources that will help educators through every step of the process. Thank you for bringing this great resource to the field!  

If you’ve been searching for proven strategies on creating a vision, planning, and establishing a learning culture ready for transformation, this is it. Real ideas from actual practitioners! Written with knowledge only gained from experience, Minding the Future presents readers with clear plans to lead their own professional learning transformations. The anecdotes and stories happily bring these plans to life. This book is for educators wishing to embrace the future head-on and hand in hand!

There is no handbook to transforming school culture. Leaders will need to know their culture and drive meaningful change from the point of their learners. That being said, in Minding the Future, the authors start some very compelling conversations and give practical ways you can initiate, maintain, and adapt the transformation process, leading to amazing learning opportunities for all stakeholders in your organization.

Minding the Future encourages communication, collaboration, and problem-solving through the engagement of teachers in professional learning academies that will inspire creativity, risk-taking, and transformation of the learning environment. It is a practical guide to changing the culture of learning in American schools to ensure that all students are future-ready. 

If you have been inspired to ask if there is a better way to approach improvement in our schools and put the focus on learning, this is the book for you. Anderson, Borg, and Edgar provide readers with a plethora of authentic examples that empowers all stakeholders to take action.

Minding the Future is a clearly and passionately rendered story of one district’s endeavor to engage teacher leaders in imagining and co-creating learning to ready today’s students for living, learning, and flourishing in constantly changing tomorrows. Both a road map outlining strategically designed professional learning experiences and a travel log taking readers inside the sojourners’ transformed classrooms and schools, this book is an invaluable guidebook for educational leaders seeking to design and lead a similar expedition.    

Written by designers and facilitators of professional learning, these three authors share their thinking behind the Transform Academy—as well as agendas, facilitator notes, and resulting participant actions and reactions. The authors’ enthusiasm and successful design of this year-long academy is conveyed energetically, creating a desire to give their design a try. Knowing that deep and lasting change doesn’t just happen through mandates, these leaders recruited teams (principal and teacher-leaders) from interested schools to establish their vision of a future-ready school. Honing skills of collaboration among adults and students, bringing in teacher and student voice to engage learners, celebrating successes, and planning for sustaining mindsets that change is the only constant in an improving school.   

This book provides practical ways to utilize the presented concepts in an effective and personalized professional development program. It could serve as a model for a strong professional development program that incorporates much collaboration, especially at the local level.

The authors present a systematic approach to change, as well as the necessary tools, to allow educators to apply this process to their own districts. The stories, examples, and visuals make the work relevant and practical.