The school year’s halfway done, but turning over a new leaf doesn’t need to wait until next New Year’s. Grab your wallet and prep your library card, because we’ve put together a list of some must-read books for your professional development resolutions for 2014.
Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World by Mark Williams and Danny Penman —Let’s face it, some invisible power working in your school has decided that you are the ultimate administrative catch-all, playing all-knowing adviser to students, media-relations expert with parents, and benevolent mentor for your teachers. Well researched and centered on mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), Mindfulness is an alternative approach to sorting the wheat from the chaff in your life—in a manner of speaking—and finding that elusive “peace of mind” that so many desperately search for but never attain.
Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work & in Life, One Conversation at a Time by Susan Scott —…And in the middle of that crazy everyday life that is yours as a Division Head, you’ll experience times when you have to sit another person down for an incredibly difficult conversation, be it a performance review with one of your staff or that awful moment when you have to respectfully ask a parent to back off a little bit. Fierce Conversations is that ace up your sleeve to help you not only achieve clarity and understanding, but also handle those strong emotions with more than a never-ending box of tissues.
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink —Sometimes it feels like pulling teeth to inspire your team to try out something new—or even keep up the old resolutions they set earlier this year. For a quick turbo-charge to your old “carrot and the stick” inspirational scheme, read Drive to learn how other organizations shake up the way they discover and reach for new goals.
Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath —The title is borderline cliché, but the premise is good—how do you help your people adopt new programs when they want to keep up old ones, or worse, they think that the old ones worked better? Switch uses real-life narratives to point out new ways to reverse old thinking by introducing small changes to achieve the large ones.
Additional ISM resources:
ISM Monthly Update for Division Heads Vol. 10 No. 7 Things to Remember as a Division Leader
ISM Monthly Update for Human Resources Vol. 11 No. 7 Preparing the Ground or Risking Failure
ISM Monthly Update for Human Resources Vol. 11 No. 2 Performance Reviews: Missing the Forest for the Trees
Additional ISM resources for Gold Consortium members:
I&P Vol. 38 No. 14 Faculty Ownership vs Buy-In
I&P Vol. 35 No. 8 The Headship: Are You Leading Yet?
