Professional Growth In Staff Development

This training resource is a professional development career ladder for nursing professional development specialists and educators at any experience level. Whether you are new to the profession or a seasoned veteran, this book provides all the steps you need to progress professionally or chart the professional development of your staff.

This book makes the case that career development practice is a mental health intervention, and provides skills and strategies to support career development practitioners in their work. It explores how practitioners do more than help people navigate career paths, they change people's lives in ways that improve mental health and overall well-being.

This new edition offers unique, state-of-the-art perspectives on library staff development and training.

EDITORS This introduction to the International Handbook of Educational Lead ership and Administration describes some of the motivation for devel oping the book and several assumptions on which is based much of the work represented in its 31 chapters. A synopsis of the contents of those chapters is also provided. SOME KEY ASSUMPTIONS It is sometimes suggested that the search for an adequate understanding of leadership is doomed to fail. After all, there is little evidence of agreement about the concept in spite of prodigious efforts dating back hundreds if not thousands of years. Such a view is captured, for exam ple, in Bennis' observation that: Of all the hazy and confounding areas in social psychology, leadership theory undoubtedly contends for top nomination. Probably more has been written and less is known about lead ership than any other topic in the behavioural sciences. (1959, page 259) We do not find this state of affairs discouraging (nor entirely accurate) and, of course, it did not prevent Bennis from proceeding either. One reason for our desire to continue in the face of such discouraging words is that a great deal of leadership research aspires to develop a general theory, a theory which applies to all or most domains of organized human activity. This aspiration inevitably produces decontextualized and, therefore, abstract categories of practice. Howard Gardner's (1995) depiction of leadership as story telling is a case in point.

If you want to do more with mentoring, you’ve found the right book. The notion that only the most experienced members of an organization can guide a few promising go-getters no longer applies in today’s business world. In Modern Mentoring, Randy Emelo advocates for a vastly different mentoring practice. Drawing from a rich career, he explains why organizations should consider all employees potential mentors, making everyone both advisors and learners. Modern Mentoring offers a blueprint for success with a model that benefits more than the select few and steers clear of forcing connections between people. Emelo demonstrates that a culture in which people choose what they want to learn and whom they learn from, while increasing overall organizational intelligence, is completely within reach. In this book you will learn: what it takes to grow a modern mentoring culture which tools to use as you facilitate organization-wide mentoring how organizations like Monsanto and Humana benefit from modern mentoring.

The most effective leader behaves more like a coach Authors Bill Eckstrom and Sarah Wirth have spent a decade researching the activities, behaviors, and performance of leaders. After studying more than 100,000 coaching interactions in the workplace, primarily of sales teams, they have been able to determine how coaching affects team outcomes and growth. The authors share three critical performance drivers, along with the four high-growth activities that coaches must execute to build a team that is motivated to achieve at the highest levels. Through both hard data and rich stories, Eckstrom and Wirth demonstrate how leaders can measure and improve their coaching to lead their teams to better results. The Coaching Effect will help leaders at all levels understand the necessity of challenging people out of their comfort zone to create a high-growth organization. Leaders will learn how they can develop trust relationships, drive accountability and leverage growth experiences to propel their team members to the highest levels of success.

Children are already learning at birth, and they develop and learn at a rapid pace in their early years. This provides a critical foundation for lifelong progress, and the adults who provide for the care and the education of young children bear a great responsibility for their health, development, and learning. Despite the fact that they share the same objective - to nurture young children and secure their future success - the various practitioners who contribute to the care and the education of children from birth through age 8 are not acknowledged as a workforce unified by the common knowledge and competencies needed to do their jobs well. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 explores the science of child development, particularly looking at implications for the professionals who work with children. This report examines the current capacities and practices of the workforce, the settings in which they work, the policies and infrastructure that set qualifications and provide professional learning, and the government agencies and other funders who support and oversee these systems. This book then makes recommendations to improve the quality of professional practice and the practice environment for care and education professionals. These detailed recommendations create a blueprint for action that builds on a unifying foundation of child development and early learning, shared knowledge and competencies for care and education professionals, and principles for effective professional learning. Young children thrive and learn best when they have secure, positive relationships with adults who are knowledgeable about how to support their development and learning and are responsive to their individual progress. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 offers guidance on system changes to improve the quality of professional practice, specific actions to improve professional learning systems and workforce development, and research to continue to build the knowledge base in ways that will directly advance and inform future actions. The recommendations of this book provide an opportunity to improve the quality of the care and the education that children receive, and ultimately improve outcomes for children.