Whitaker talks about what to do in an ideal world. As someone who has been an instructional leadership coach in a high poverty school district for 21 years, I can tell you, you don’t always get an ideal world to work with. I did not find this book helpful because it gave advice like “find the best people and hire them.” That’s great if you have that power, but principals in our district have trouble attracting the most talented teachers and many teachers who are not good at their jobs cannot be fired because they have tenure. So I would have enjoyed hearing about what to do when you can’t do some of the things he recommends. How can you make the most of the staff you have, assuming that PD time is limited (24 hours per year) and the union has such a hold on everything that you have to be very cautious about any move to transform a school. At the district level, administrators are lackluster and don’t have a deep knowledge of either instruction or organizational change. DO leaders also tend to villfy and exclude the most talented and knowledgeable teachers, marking them as trouble makers because they challenge authority and name what’s wrong. How do you make the best out of that situation? If you work in an ideal world or in more affluent areas, this book might help you, but I found it too vague and full of platitudes to be useful. Elena Aguilar’s The Art of Coaching Teams is much more specific and can be enormously helpful in any context. (And I am NOT affiliated with her in any way nor am I benefitting from mentioning her book.)