Category Archives: Book Reviews

Book Review: Leading with Focus

For the past five years in my career in education, I have promoted this concept of “do less better” in the face of multiple so-called requirements and initiatives that tend to distract us from doing any of them well.  Some … Continue reading

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Book Review: On Your Mark

The district I serve in moved to “standards-based report cards” a few years before I arrived in 2007 and I can honestly say they have created heartburn and lively debate three times each year.  These have been revised and re-aligned … Continue reading

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Book Review: The Instructional Leader and the Brain

I’ve been poking in and out of this book for a few months now, interrupted by other reading.  The growing fields of cognitive and neuroscience have fascinated me, but the intersection of this research with practical application has been scattered … Continue reading

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Book Review: Dispositions

Art Costa is one of the originators of the Cognitive Coaching practices that I’ve trained in for helping people move their thinking, so it was clear that when he put out a book all about Dispositions, I was dying to … Continue reading

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Book Review: The Power of Positive Deviance

Here’s another book that I read, two pages at a time for more than a year.  I found it while researching for my own work on collaborative professional learning.  Positive Deviance is the concept of coaching a community (social or … Continue reading

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Book Review: Man’s Search for Meaning

I came across this book in a pile of freebies in a staff room last December, fifty-five years after Viktor Frankl first published it!  I’d heard the title for sure along the way, but the small print of “A new … Continue reading

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Book Review: All The Roads

I don’t read nearly enough fiction, so when a colleague and close friend, Jessica Cotter, recently self-published her first book, I devoured it…uncomfortably because of our friendship.  At times it felt like I was walking around in parts of her … Continue reading

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Book Review – Professional Capital

Few books make me salivate to read them, prior to publication. I’m usually the latecomer to some chart-topper that has already moved the world’s thinking, but the pre-publication campaign for Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan’s Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in … Continue reading

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Book Review – Your Life in Rhythm

For the past two years, I have kept Bruce Miller’s book, Your Life in Rhythm, as my “second”. I tend to keep a transitional book that I read between or along with others to avoid fatigue of one subject. This … Continue reading

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Book Review – Outliers

I first heard about Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers from the parent of a former student, and friend. The way she described it was, “It’s about how really successful people aren’t just lucky, they practice a lot.” Nearly two years later, … Continue reading

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