Leading With Intention

With foreword by Douglas Reeves As a school leader, your influence and impact on students, staff, and families is beyond measure. Designed as a guide and reflective tool, Leading With Intention will help focus your invaluable everyday work. The authors provide in-depth advice and actionable steps for creating a highly effective school culture that supports collaborative leadership and teaching, evidence-based decision making, and the belief that students are the top priority. Effective school leadership practices for building leadership capacity and furthering your professional development: Explore eight interrelated areas of school leadership that will assist you in becoming a more synergistic leader. Explore four concepts essential to your work in leading schools: collaboration, a shared leadership model, evidence-based decision-making, and a focus on learning. Learn how to enhance student achievement in your school or district with the Professional Learning Communities at Work(TM) (PLC) process. Acquire 40+ specific instructional leadership actions you can put into practice immediately. Access educational leadership reflection questions and downloadable reproducibles designed to support your instructional leadership development. Contents: Introduction: Using Your Great Power as a Leader Chapter 1: Achieving Focus and Staying Intentional Chapter 2: Establishing and Maintaining Organization Chapter 3: Building Shared Leadership Chapter 4: Using Evidence for Decision Making and Action Chapter 5: Prioritizing the Student Chapter 6: Leading Instruction Chapter 7: Fostering Communication Chapter 8: Developing Community and Relationships Afterword: Creating the Future References and Resources

“I’m trying to meditate one day but urgent thoughts keep intruding. Don’t forget to take cupcakes to school! I have to prepare for my presentation for the wellness conference! Is that lunch with the other moms tomorrow or next week? My to-do list is stampeding through my mind, trampling any chance of tranquility. I feel overwhelmed, yes, but there’s more: I feel…guilty. Guilty that I’m taking on too much, guilty that I’m not doing anything well, guilty that I’m giving short shrift to my kids, my husband, my job. And what about you, Mallika? a quiet voice asks. How are you shortchanging yourself?” Living with Intent is a chronicle of Mallika Chopra’s search to find more meaning, joy, and balance in life. She hopes that by telling her story, she can inspire others with her own successes (and failures) as well as share some of the wisdom she has gathered from friends, experts, and family along the way—people like her dad, Deepak, as well as Eckhart Tolle, Marianne Williamson, Arianna Huffington, Andrew Weil, and Dan Siegel. She also provides a practical road map for how we can all move from thought to action to outcome. Each chapter is devoted to one step on her journey and another piece of her INTENT action plan: Incubate, Notice, Trust, Express, Nurture, and Take Action. Chopra’s insights and advice will help us all come closer to fully living the lives we truly intend.

Deepen your connections with students, staff, and your larger community. Behind every thriving school or district are deeply interconnected teams that consistently engage in a reciprocal transfer of learning. Leading With Intention aims to make this process visible by helping leaders and teachers understand how their thinking impacts their decision-making and the overall well-being of their learning communities. Through five highly practical chapters, authors DeWitt and Nelson explore self-awareness, nurturing human interconnectedness, collective inquiry, establishing a learning network, and crafting a personal learning environment. Filled with research, stories, and places to process information, this timely book is focused on how educators think, the choices they make, and how they develop deeper academic and social-emotional connections. Other features include: Success criteria to help readers identify personal goals Suggested activities to apply knowledge Reflection sheets with guiding questions In-depth examples to illustrate content School-leaders will come away with a deeper understanding of the importance of self-awareness in leadership and the pedagogical knowledge required to focus initiatives on student learning. Leading with Intention helps education leaders go from being merely ‘on task’ to deeply engaged and reconnected with why they entered the education profession in the first place.

This step-by-step how-to guide presents the six driving forces of instructional leadership within a multi-stage model for implementation, delivering lasting improvement through small, collaborative changes.

SPECIAL INTRODUCTORY PRICING: Enjoy first-week pricing of $18.95 on paperback books! Regular retail pricing of $23.95 becomes effective on July 22nd. It all began with the initial chance meeting of this book's author, Katie Anderson, and the book's subject, Isao Yoshino. She was an American leadership coach and consultant in her mid-career, with a newfound love of Japanese culture. He was an accomplished Japanese people-centered leader at the end of his corporate career, with a lifelong love for American culture and 40 years of inside experience with the Toyota Way. During the next five years, Anderson and Yoshino spent countless hours learning from each other, reflecting on the past, and envisioning the future. The resulting book - written by Anderson and focused on the profound lessons offered by her mentor Yoshino -- is a beautiful, one-of-a-kind tapestry. Much like the weaving of fabric -- where the beginning work is but a glimpse of the final pattern -- this book was created from many layers of intertwined conversations and reflections. If you've ever been mentored -- in business or in life -- by someone whose words, experiences, and perspectives changed you for the better, you know that an entire book of such selfless generosity and deep wisdom could change the world. For today's business professionals -- dedicated to continuous learning and people-centered leadership -- this is that book. Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn is a leadership book that defies generational or cultural divides, offering a refreshing, proven perspective for all those who dare to lead. The Best Leaders Never Lose the Humility for Learning Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn is much more than a collection of Isao Yoshino's personal stories and insights. It's a memorable, entertaining, and poignant way to highlight important leadership lessons, to record pivotal moments in Toyota's history, and to create something to help veteran and aspiring leaders reflect and learn about themselves. Yoshino's experiences help us understand how Toyota intentionally developed the culture of excellence for which it is renowned today, and how one person "learned to lead" so that he could lead with an intention to learn ... every day and in every way. "The only secret to Toyota is its attitude toward learning." -- Isao Yoshino Let the Past Inform the Future: The Role of Reflection in Leadership By looking back at the past, we can learn and therefore shape our future. Through each story in this unique and inspiring book, Anderson shares Yoshino's experiences with leadership and learning, and his efforts at self-improvement while empowering others. Through those stories, you'll hear his reflections on what he learned then ... and what he is re-learning now with a different perspective as he looks back at the totality of his career. A must-read for those who: -- Want to become more people-centered leaders -- Currently practice lean or continuous improvement methods -- Serve in leadership, coaching, or operational management roles -- Want to learn more about Toyota's history and culture -- Are inspired by heartwarming stories of personal discovery and leadership With a foreword by John Shook, Chairman of the Lean Global Network.

In business today, there is no offline and there is no downtime. Professionals are both exhausted and depleted. Being constantly tethered to our work through technology makes us overwhelmed and shortsighted, and deprives us of time for meaningful reflection or thoughtful connection to our professional communities, and often even to our own families. For us to thrive-not simply survive-in this accelerating economy, we need to adopt small, intentional behaviors and practice them each day. From simply taking care of our rest and exercise to building our self-confidence and embracing challenges, author Shawn Hunter's latest book Small Acts of Leadership will guide you through a series of incremental steps you can take to build a stronger version of yourself and make a broader impact in the world. Weaving in personal life stories and meaningful interviews with business leaders around the world, Hunter presents the reader with twelve critical competencies that are consistently present in the daily behaviors of today's most successful leaders.

How do you build the career and life you want--especially with chaos swirling around you, throwing out roadblocks at every turn. Only when you understand that the world isn't set up to optimize, can you begin the journey to uncover your best and lead your life with intention. Bottom line: life is the ultimate experience model. You don't come with an operating manual that tells you how to be your best. You just have to figure it out to find the things that work. And the discovery is never done. You have to stay engaged, curious and willing to admit you don't know everything, so you can learn more to be your best. Dedicating yourself to the lifelong discipline of practice outlined in GROUNDED allows you to see what works and most importantly stay in tune with what grounds you at every turn of your journey. The questions change as people move through their lives. In their twenties, people wonder where to begin. In their thirties, people wonder if they are headed in the right direction. In their forties, they may begin to wonder if this is all there is. And in their fifties and beyond, they wonder what should happen next chapter. This notion of being grounded isn't about age, it's about attitude. Your life will have impact. Choices will be made. GROUNDED is dedicated to building the skill so you decide, not someone else. Your life is simply too important to leave it to chance. And if you choose to lead others, GROUNDED is dedicated to inspiring others to be their best because you have done the work to understand how to lead first yourself and now others.