Leading Well with Lucy Calkins

This week on the Heinemann podcast, a conversation with author Lucy Calkins on leadership. In Leading Well: Building Schoolwide Excellence in Reading and Writing, Lucy Calkins draws on the transformative work that she and her colleagues at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project have done in partnership with school leaders over the last thirty years.

While a school leader should be inspirational, Lucy says leaders need to be much more than that. Lucy says, making monumental change in literacy education is no small thing and the most powerful leaders lead through influence—not compliance—rallying people to believe in the cause. She also tells us that a good leader reminds us there is dignity in learning and that leaders need to make themselves vulnerable as public learners to foster the kind of environment that will help their teams try new things and continually outgrow themselves.

Our conversation started out by asking Lucy what led her to writing a leadership book...