The Building Leadership Team (BLT) Project is grounded in the fundamental belief that

In order to close the achievement gap, all students deserve the best efforts of our skills and knowledge about learning in order to achieve academic growth in our schools

Collegial collaboration is key to our professional growth and sharing our professional knowledge about student achievement

Collaborative site-based decision-making structures are key to operating in a way that will accelerate student academic achievement

This toolkit has been compiled to inform the BLT work at each school, around these beliefs.

The knowledge about BLT work has evolved over the years we have been working with this project in our school district. School coaches, administrators and operating BLT teams have expressed a need to have the best of the work documented and shared for the benefit of all our schools. This is our attempt to capture good work that has taken place and the best of the resources available at this time.

Each section of this manual is designed around an important question regarding BLT work. This includes content that each Building Leadership Team should have and be using.

Each section includes tools to help you process the information. These processing resources are designed to be used with your BLT, however, many of them are appropriate tools to use with your whole staff, or committee work.

Use this toolkit as a resource for your work in many ways. See Quick Find on the following page for a more comprehensive list.

Additionally there is a resource section where you can find the processing tools, protocols and articles that will be helpful in your work.

Processing tools are designated with this icon so that you can easily find them.

These resources have been used by permission of the authors and adapted from the following works:

• Seattle Education Association documents from 2002-2004 bargaining agreement
• Seattle Public Schools Building Leadership Team Training 2002-2004
• Adaptive Schools: Robert Garmston and Bruce Wellman www.adaptiveschools.com
• Focus on Results: Huntington Beach, CA
• Critical Friends Group: coaching materials
• Atlas Schools: group protocols

Robert Garmston - 916-933-2727

Strategic framework for transformation - seven areas
Three goals for BLT.
Resources for our work.
Professional Development Standards
Governance Structures
Time resources