Julie Rae Smith

Julie R. Smith is an educator, consultant, and author with more than three decades of experience in K–12 education and leadership development. Over her career she has served as a teacher, principal, and executive director of elementary schools and has also taught in university principal preparation programs in Colorado and Florida. Her work centers on building leadership capacity in people and systems, including school improvement planning and the design of teacher, principal, and district evaluation models, with a particular focus on implementing system-wide change grounded in John Hattie’s Visible Learning research.

Smith is the coauthor of several books on educational leadership, including Impact Coaching: Scaling Instructional Leadership (Corwin, 2018), written with Raymond L. Smith, and Evaluating Instructional Leadership: Recognized Practices for Success (Corwin, 2015). She has also coauthored earlier work on principal evaluation, including a book titled The Reflective Leader: Implementing a Multidimensional Leadership Performance Assessment (2012), and continues to provide professional development and workshops across North America related to Visible Learning and instructional leadership.