Getting Better

What makes people succeed? Why do some people succeed, while others struggle despite working hard? This book is based on the insight that success is not about how good you are but how powerful a model you have to improve how good you are. Chandramouli Venkatesan calls it the Get-Better Model, or GBM. Successful people are those who are able to build a powerful GBM to continuously improve themselves, and this book will show you how to do it. A GBM is made up of four key components and these must be practised deliberately for getting better-getting better by yourself; getting better by leveraging others; making others get better; and making and implementing a get-better plan. This powerful and life-changing book thus shows how you can constantly get better to unlock your potential at work and in life.

Effective and practical coaching strategies for new educators plus valuable online coaching tools Many teachers are only observed one or two times per year on average—and, even among those who are observed, scarcely any are given feedback as to how they could improve. The bottom line is clear: teachers do not need to be evaluated so much as they need to be developed and coached. In Get Better Faster: A 90-Day Plan for Coaching New Teachers, Paul Bambrick-Santoyo shares instructive tools of how school leaders can effectively guide new teachers to success. Over the course of the book, he breaks down the most critical actions leaders and teachers must take to achieve exemplary results. Designed for coaches as well as beginning teachers, Get Better Faster is an integral coaching tool for any school leader eager to help their teachers succeed. Get Better Faster focuses on what's practical and actionable which makes the book's approach to coaching so effective. By practicing the concrete actions and micro-skills listed in Get Better Faster, teachers will markedly improve their ability to lead a class, producing a steady chain reaction of future teaching success. Though focused heavily on the first 90 days of teacher development, it's possible to implement this work at any time. Junior and experienced teachers alike can benefit from the guidance of Get Better Faster while at the same time closing existing instructional gaps. Featuring valuable and practical online training tools available at http://www.wiley.com/go/getbetterfaster, Get Better Faster provides agendas, presentation slides, a coach's guide, handouts, planning templates, and 35 video clips of real teachers at work to help other educators apply the lessons learned in their own classrooms. Get Better Faster will teach you: The core principles of coaching: Go Granular; Plan, Practice, Follow Up, Repeat; Make Feedback More Frequent Top action steps to launch a teacher’s development in an easy-to-read scope and sequence guide It also walks you through the four phases of skill building: Phase 1 (Pre-Teaching): Dress Rehearsal Phase 2: Instant Immersion Phase 3: Getting into Gear Phase 4: The Power of Discourse Perfect for new educators and those who supervise them, Get Better Faster will also earn a place in the libraries of veteran teachers and school administrators seeking a one-stop coaching resource.

The chief people officer at FranklinCovey outlines anecdotal and practical recommendations for how organizations of any size or type can create a competitive advantage by building effective relationships.

A New York Times-bestselling author looks for the meaning of a good life by seeking advice from the very young and the very old. When his first book tour ended, Brad Montague missed hearing other people's stories so much that he launched what he dubbed a Listening Tour. First visiting elementary schools and later also nursing homes and retirement communities, he hoped to glean new wisdom as to how he might become a better grownup. Now, in this playful and buoyant book, he shares those insights with rest of us --timeless, often surprising lessons that bypass the head we're always stuck in, and go straight to the heart we sometimes forget. Each of the book's three sections begins with the illustrated story of "The Incredible Floating Girl." Brad weaves this story together with lessons of success, fear, regret, gratitude, love, happiness, and dreams to reveal the true reason we are here: to fly, and to help others fly. Beautifully designed and featuring Montague's own whimsical 4-color illustrations that appeal to the kid in all of us, Becoming Better Grownups shares the purpose and meaning we can all discover merely by listening, and reveals that--in a world that seems increasingly childish--the secret to joy is in fact to become more childlike.

Who drives transformation in society? How do they do it? In this compelling book, strategy guru Roger L. Martin and Skoll Foundation President and CEO Sally R. Osberg describe how social entrepreneurs target systems that exist in a stable but unjust equilibrium and transform them into entirely new, superior, and sustainable equilibria. All of these leaders--call them disrupters, visionaries, or changemakers--develop, build, and scale their solutions in ways that bring about the truly revolutionary change that makes the world a fairer and better place. The book begins with a probing and useful theory of social entrepreneurship, moving through history to illuminate what it is, how it works, and the nature of its role in modern society. The authors then set out a framework for understanding how successful social entrepreneuars actually go about producing transformative change. There are four key stages: understanding the world; envisioning a new future; building a model for change; and scaling the solution. With both depth and nuance, Martin and Osberg offer rich examples and personal stories and share lessons and tools invaluable to anyone who aspires to drive positive change, whatever the context. Getting Beyond Better sets forth a bold new framework, demonstrating how and why meaningful change actually happens in the world and providing concrete lessons and a practical model for businesses, policymakers, civil society organizations, and individuals who seek to transform our world for good.

On Getting Better is a thoughtful and compact book about self-improvement from Britain’s leading psychoanalyst, author of Missing Out and On Kindness. To talk about getting better—about wanting to change in ways that we might choose and prefer—is to talk about pursuing the life we want, in the full knowledge that our pictures of the life we want, of our version of a good life, come from what we have already experienced. (We write the sentences we write because of the sentences we have read.) How can we talk differently about how we might want to change, knowing that all change precipitates us into an uncertain future? In this companion book to On Wanting to Change, Adam Phillips explores how we might get better at talking about what it is to get better.

As a field, education has largely failed to learn from experience. Time after time, promising education reforms fall short of their goals and are abandoned as other promising ideas take their place. In Learning to Improve, the authors argue for a new approach. Rather than “implementing fast and learning slow,” they believe educators should adopt a more rigorous approach to improvement that allows the field to “learn fast to implement well.” Using ideas borrowed from improvement science, the authors show how a process of disciplined inquiry can be combined with the use of networks to identify, adapt, and successfully scale up promising interventions in education. Organized around six core principles, the book shows how “networked improvement communities” can bring together researchers and practitioners to accelerate learning in key areas of education. Examples include efforts to address the high rates of failure among students in community college remedial math courses and strategies for improving feedback to novice teachers. Learning to Improve offers a new paradigm for research and development in education that promises to be a powerful driver of improvement for the nation’s schools and colleges.

Rules for developing talent with disciplined, deliberate, intelligent practice We live in a competition loving culture. We love the performance, the big win, the ticking seconds of the clock as the game comes down to the wire. We watch games and cheer, sometimes to the point of obsession, but if we really wanted to see greatness—wanted to cheer for it, see it happen, understand what made it happen—we'd spend our time watching, obsessing on, and maybe even cheering the practices instead. This book puts practice on the front burner of all who seek to instill talent and achievement in others as well as in themselves. This is a journey to understand that practice, not games, makes champions. In this book, the authors engage the dream of better, both in fields and endeavors where participants know they should practice and also in those where many do not yet recognize the transformative power of practice. And it’s not just whether you practice. How you practice may be a true competitive advantage. Deliberately engineered and designed practice can revolutionize our most important endeavors. The clear set of rules presented in Practice Perfect will make us better in virtually every performance of life. The “how-to” rules of practice cover such topics as rethinking practice, modeling excellent practice, using feedback, creating a culture of practice, making new skills stick, and hiring for practice. Discover new ways to think about practice. Learn how to design successful practice. Apply practice across a wide range of realms, both personal and professional The authors include specific activities to jump-start practice Doug Lemov is the best-selling author of Teach Like a Champion A hands-on resource to practice, the rules within will help to create positive outliers and world-changing reservoirs of talent.

The acclaimed author of What's Worth Knowing reveals the truth about aging: Old age often offers a richer, better, and more self-assured life than youth. From our earliest lives, we are told that our youth will be the best time of our lives-that the energy and vitality of youth are the most important qualities a person can possess, and that everything that comes after will be a sad decline. But in reality, says Wendy Lustbader, youth is not the golden era it is often made out to be. For many, it is a time riddled with anxiety, angst, confusion, and the torture of uncertainty. Conversely, the media often feeds us a vision of growing older as a journey of defeat and diminishment. They are dead wrong. As Lustbader counters, "Life gets better as we get older, on all levels except the physical." Life Gets Better is not a precious or whimsical tome on the quirky wisdom of the elderly. Lustbader-who has worked for several decades as a social worker specializing in aging issues-conducted firsthand research with aging and elderly people in all walks of life, and she found that they overwhelmingly spoke of the mental and emotional richness they have drawn from aging. Lustbader discovered that rather than experiencing a decline from youth, aging people were happier, more courageous, and more interested in being true to their inner selves than were young people. Life Gets Better examines through first-person stories, as well as Lustbader's own observations, how a lifetime of lessons learned can yield one of the most personally and emotionally fruitful periods of anyone's life. As an eighty-six-year-old who contributed her story to the book noted, "For me, being old is the reward for outlasting all the big and little problems that happen to all of us along life's pathway." The collected stories in Life Gets Better provide a hopeful corrective to the fear of aging aggressively instilled in us by the media. Don't dread the future: The best years of our lives just may be ahead.

The founder of Better Life Bags, Rebecca Smith, teaches us how to take little steps, say yes when God calls, and follow the passion He has given us. Let love stretch you. As the founder of one of the most popular custom handbag companies in the country, Rebecca Smith knows a thing or two about business. A highly successful entrepreneur in a world where the focus is on scalability, brand strategy, and global marketing, Rebecca Smith also knows the truth: that every success she's experienced at Better Life Bags has been the result of very small, very ordinary, very obedient steps of faith. Moving from Savannah, Georgia, to Hamtramck, Michigan, was culture shock enough for Rebecca. But trying to feel at home in a city where twenty-six different languages were spoken and most of the inhabitants were immigrants seemed downright impossible. It was only when Rebecca recognized that God had called her to this specific neighborhood at this particular moment in time that his plans began to unfold for her. Stepping forward into the place God had called her - a place that seemed messy and uncomfortable and unfamiliar - Rebecca discovered the true secret to success: when we slow down, pay attention, and trust that still, small voice of God to guide us, we just might change the world. Though Rebecca never set out to build a brand or create an empire, God saw Rebecca's heart for others, and began to multiply her efforts in ways she could have never imagined, creating a company where women from different cultures, faiths, and backgrounds work together for the good of others - for a better life. As you read this inspiring story, you will discover how to hear and follow God's voice for yourself as you slow down, take one small step at a time, and make a difference in the world right where you are.