Chapter 1: A Guide to the Resource Book

Purpose of the resource book   

The TAMAM Resource Book presents the TAMAM Capacity Building Program and makes it available as a resource for coaches who support schools that aim at building their leadership capacity for sustainable school-based improvement. It can also serve as a resource for practitioners, researchers and policy makers who want to be introduced to the TAMAM model. The TAMAM Capacity Building Model aims at building leadership capacity for sustainable school-based improvement at all levels of the educational system. Its capacity building program comprises of a job-embedded learning experience through which a team of practitioners acquire a set of leadership competencies to lead school-based improvement.

This Resource Book is not intended as a prescriptive training manual. Instead, it aims at providing coaches with the theoretical foundations of the program, the rationale for its targeted outcomes and a framework of the job-embedded learning experiences. The Resource Book also provides practical guidelines for potential coaches on how to engage school improvement teams in the TAMAM Capacity Building Program to build leadership capacity both at the individual and school levels. These guidelines reflect the lessons learned since the launching of the TAMAM project in 2007, and include guidelines and templates that have been developed through experimentation and an iterative process of continuous refinement based on experimental implementation in a number of schools in the Arab region. The provided content of the Resource Book allows coaches, themselves action researchers, to develop their coaching plan while adapting its job-embedded learning experiences to the level of readiness of the participating teams as well as to their unique organizational and sociocultural conditions and cultural context.