Leading In Sync

Teacher leadership holds great promise for improving the quality of teaching and ensuring student success. But for co-performance of leadership to be effective, teachers and principals need to lead in sync.Leadership coach Jill Harrison Berg guides educators through the process of creating a shared vision for student success and effective teaching, developing a mutual understanding of each person's role in achieving that vision, establishing a schoolwide culture of teacher leadership, and building the trust needed to bring it all together. Leading In Sync: Teacher Leaders and Principals Working Together for Student Learning provides principals, assistant principals, coaches, department leaders, grade-level and content team leaders, mentors, professional development leaders, and in fact all teachers with the strategies and tools needed to: * Examine their own thinking about what constitutes quality teaching. * Tap faculty members who are already leading. * Identify who has the knowledge, skills, and dispositions required for particular leadership roles. * Support leadership collaboration through efficient, effective communication. * Develop trust within the school community. Berg offers thought-provoking context and reflection questions so that educators can examine their own unique settings; real-world examples of teachers and principals co-performing leadership to improve student success; and dozens of strategies, tools, and templates to facilitate leading in sync.

Robert Wuthnow shows how music and art are revitalizing churches and religious life across the nation in this first-ever consideration of the relationship between religion and the arts. All in Sync draws on more than four hundred in-depth interviews with church members, clergy, and directors of leading arts organizations and a new national survey to document a strong positive relationship between participation in the arts and interest in spiritual growth. Wuthnow argues that contemporary spirituality is increasingly encouraged by the arts because of its emphasis on transcendent experience and personal reflection. This kind of spirituality, contrary to what many observers have imagined, is compatible with active involvement in churches and serious devotion to Christian practices. The absorbing narrative relates the story of a woman who overcame a severe personal crisis and went on to head a spiritual direction center where participants use the arts to gain clarity about their own spiritual journeys. Readers visit contemporary worship services in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston and listen to leaders and participants explain how music and art have contributed to the success of these services. All in Sync also illustrates how music and art are integral parts of some Episcopal, African American, and Orthodox worship services, and how people of faith are using their artistic talents to serve others. Besides examining the role of the arts in personal spirituality and in congregational life, Wuthnow discusses how clergy and lay leaders are rethinking the role of the imagination, especially in connection with traditional theological virtues. He also shows how churches and arts organizations sometimes find themselves at odds over controversial moral questions and competing claims about spirituality. Accessible, relevant, and innovative, this book is essential for anyone searching for a better understanding of the dynamic relationships among religion, spirituality, and American culture.

This book introduces the reader to the concept of functional synchronization and how it operates on very different levels in psychological and social systems – from the emergence of thought to the formation of social relations and the structure of societies. For years, psychologists have investigated phenomena such as self-concept, social judgment, social relations, group dynamics, and cooperation and conflict, but have discussed these phenomena seoarately.This book shows how synchronization provides a foundational approach to these otherwise distinct and diverse psychological processes.This work shows that there is a basic tendency with many processes to become coordinated and progressively integrated into increasingly larger units through well-defined processes. For these larger units, new and largely adaptive functions emerge. Although synchronization affords progressive integration of system elements to enable correspondingly higher-order functions, the trajectory of synchronization is often characterized by periods of assembly and disassembly of system elements. This occurs when a task is completed and synchronization is no longer essential so that the elements once again operate in an independent fashion. It is argued that the disassembly-resynchronization scenario occurs at all levels of psychological and social reality. The implications of this approach for important issues in interpersonal relations and societal processes are discussed.

Leadership is a set of abilities with which a lucky few are born. They're the natural relationship builders, master negotiators and persuaders, and agile and strategic thinkers. The good news for the rest of us is that those abilities can be developed. In The Leader's Brain, Wharton Neuroscience Initiative director Michael Platt explains how.

Noted leadership coach Jill Harrison Berg offers a comprehensive guide to help school and teacher leaders amplify the power of collaborative inquiry as a means for identifying, interrogating, and addressing instructional inequity. At the center of the book is Berg's i3PD Planning Map, an invaluable tool for enhancing inquiry-based professional development experiences so that they become engines for schoolwide transformation. The map guides teachers to recognize and reform ways their instructional practice may be contributing to inequity, bolsters facilitators' abilities to help their colleagues become more effective agents of their own learning, and cultivates a culture of organizational learning in schools. Berg lays out the process in four parts: 1. Establishing a solid foundation for your improvement cycle with a deep understanding of the three components of your instructional core: content, participants, and facilitators. 2. Attending to the three Rs—relevance, rigor, and relationships—representing the connections among the core components. 3. Designing your improvement cycle and planning it out as a series of session agendas. 4. Planning for impact by thinking through what you will accept as evidence of success and how you will use that information to take your school to the next level. If you're ready to see your school start to work smarter toward instructional equity, and if you're eager to be a part of that change, Uprooting Instructional Inequity provides the design principles and sample tools you need to get the transformation started.

rofessional success comes through team effort.Finding success in organizations and life is not a solo effort. It's created through working together, working in sync with colleagues, clients, and valued friends or family members. Through this reciprocity, small ideas grow into big plans, local efforts have a global impact, and productive managers become great leaders. When you have the tools to generate the combined effort of your team in a unified direction, you develop the power of leading without a title and getting greater results through coordinated efforts.Working in Sync tells the stories of eleven highly successful professionals who learned the principles of connection and teamwork on the Dartmouth class of '86 crew under coach Whit Mitchell. After a twenty-five year team reunion, Whit wanted to find out the secret to their professional success. He conducted months of one-on-one interviews, uncovering outstanding insights on excellence in life and business.These interview produced staggering results. Whit discovered that each of his former rowers had found professional success at a high level. They had each taken very different routes along the way, but they had all been able the reach the height of professional excellence in their various fields. Each rower also credited his success to the basic skills and principles gleaned from his time on Whit's crew. Whit immediately saw the connection to be made with his own executive coaching clients to find their own measure of professional success.Now, using the same lessons that propelled these rowers, Whit created Working in Sync to share them with you.

A bestseller--more than 300,000 copies sold, translated into seventeen languages, and featured in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Miami Herald, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Fortune; Shows how discoveries in quantum physics, biology, and chaos theory enable us to deal successfully with change and uncertainty in our organizations and our lives; Includes a new chapter on how the new sciences can help us understand and cope with some of the major social challenges of our timesWe live in a time of chaos, rich in potential for new possibilities. A new world is being born. We need new ideas, new ways of seeing, and new relationships to help us now. New science--the new discoveries in biology, chaos theory, and quantum physics that are changing our understanding of how the world works--offers this guidance. It describes a world where chaos is natural, where order exists ''for free.'' It displays the intricate webs of cooperation that connect us. It assures us that life seeks order, but uses messes to get there.Leadership and the New Science is the bestselling, most acclaimed, and most influential guide to applying the new science to organizations and management. In it, Wheatley describes how the new science radically alters our understanding of the world, and how it can teach us to live and work well together in these chaotic times. It will teach you how to move with greater certainty and easier grace into the new forms of organizations and communities that are taking shape.

Ancient Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu is often credited with the phrase, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” Unfortunately, he had nothing to say about which step was the right one. Your journey to be the leader you want to be begins here. Lead 4 Success sets your development as a leader on the right track, focusing on the four fundamental skills that fuel the thoughts and drive the actions of leaders who make a difference: SELF-AWARENESS, LEARNING AGILITY, COMMUNICATION and INFLUENCE. Each of those essential skills is comprised of other skills. You will learn about all of them in Lead 4 Success. To ensure the success of your leadership journey, use this book as a guide. Its tools and ideas will help you develop and put into practice the skills that you need to demonstrate true leadership.

"The workplace is stressful these days. Sync or Swim is a refreshing story of a sheepdog and a puffin that helps us to solve a frustrating mystery: Why do morale-building programs often hurt morale . . . and why does communicating appreciation too often result in cynical reactions? In Sync or Swim, you'll follow an organizational manager and the challenges he has to overcome: - A threating storm rapidly approaching the island - The expectation to do more with less - Complaining, negative team members - Morale of loyal employees who feel undervalued - Long history of mismanagement It's a small tale with great wisdom, a classic insight into the ways expressing authentic appreciation can change everything-and help us survive the storms that threaten us in work and life"--

This book is for leaders and managers looking to develop themselves and others. It is for training & development professionals, inside or working as independent consultants, who can use the book as a coaching tool, a blueprint for leader development plans, and in other ways .For leaders concerned with their development, dedicated to developing their people for more responsibilities, and committed to organizational sustainability, this book will help in those efforts.