Research evidence on the effects of schooling continues to demonstrate that schools with effective leadership produce more learning than other schools do. Today's instructional leader must possess skills in the four areas of curriculum development, clinical supervision, staff development, and teacher evaluation. Recent research also reveals a list of teacher and classroom characteristics that most consistently appear to have a close relationship to effective teaching or high achieving schools. These include high teacher expectations of students, frequent monitoring of student progress, routinized classroom management tasks, adequate student time on task, opportunity for students to learn the material on which they are to be tested, appropriate level of difficulty of materials, strong instructional leadership, and favorable learning climate. The instructional leadership model presented here requires principals to focus their efforts on the four instructional leadership skills as they seek to help teachers to improve the eight teacher and classroom characteristics listed. (Author/JM)