Book excerpt: Let’s make the "next normal" a "better normal" If there ever was a time for our heroic school leadership to persevere, it’s now. Because now, well over one year since the pandemic stretched the resilience and reserves of our school systems, it’s time to "rebound." It’s time to leverage this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reboot teaching and learning as we know it so that we magnify the effective practices from the past while leveraging the so many recent lessons learned. This is where Doug Fisher, Nancy Frey, Dominique Smith, and John Hattie, coauthors of The Distance Learning Playbook series, are ideally equipped to serve as your collaborators. Inside Leading the Rebound: 20+ Must-Dos to Restart Teaching and Learning you’ll find immediate actions, mindsets, and approaches to take if we’re to reimagine and improve our schools and school systems. Step by step, you’ll discover explicit guidance on how to: 1. Take care of yourself 2. Take stock and find the path 3. Rebuild teacher agency 4. Rebuild collective teacher efficacy 5. Foreground social and emotional learning 6. Change the learning loss narrative 7. Guide teacher clarity 8. Ensure instructional excellence 9. Use assessments for a range of purposes 10. Design and implement interventions 11. Win back parent-teacher relationships 12. Establish restorative practices 13. Avoid stealing the conflict 14. Enhance teacher-student and student-student interactions 15. Develop early warning systems for attendance, behavior, and course completion 16. Confront cognitive challenges to learning 17. Ensure equitable and restorative grading 18. Enhance PLCs 19. Provide empathetic feedback 20. Host honest performance conversations 21. Maintain your social presence 22. Future-proof teachers and students What’s more Leading the Rebound is backed up with all kinds of resources--including VISIBLE LEARNING® research, sample planning tools, and other essential tips and strategies--to provide you with a start-to-finish roadmap for navigating this absolutely critical next leg in our journey toward a "better normal."