Kristine Servais - The Courage to Grow: Leading with Intentionality

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, we are grateful for the many lessons we have learned from our students. We are also thankful for the many people in our lives that contributed to The Courage to Grow: Leading with Intentionality . First, we thank our parents, our first teachers, who modeled courage and the desire for us to grow every day as we were growing up. We appreciate the professional relationships with leaders such as Douglas Reeves and Elle Allison, who took the time and interest to provide us with feedback on this book.

A special thanks to the following friends and colleagues who were willing to read, edit, read, and edit as many times as necessary to prepare this manuscript for publication: Mary Lynne Derrington, John Harper, Linell Monson-Laswell, Don McKinney, William Shields, and our gifted editor Donna Davis.

Finally, we are grateful to our life coaches, Carol and Jenni, for their endless patience and moxie during our constant leadership growth.

Introduction

Getting Ready for the Courage to Grow

People driven by intention are described as having a strong will that wont permit anything to interfere with achieving their inner desire.

Wayne Dyer, 2004, p. 3

The Courage to Grow: Leading with Intentionality will show educational leaders how to design and carry out a personal professional development/learning plan. It is a guide that allows leaders to construct their own learning to measure knowledge, assess growth, and improve performance. For our purposes, intentionality is defined as an intense energy or desire to grow exponentially from our current reality.

Intention is not groggy in the morning. The day is met with a particular enthusiasm. The possibilities of the day are partnersnot adversaries. Intentional living recognizes that, while accidents happen, life is not an accident. Days are built choice by choice. Intention savors moments of peaceful contemplation equally with productive initiative. Intention knows each moment of the day as a precious moment. (Radmacher, 2007, p. 21)

Why The Courage to Grow ? This training manual is for the teacher leader, beginning principal, practicing principal, assistant principal, department chair, district office administrator, aspiring leadership candidate, and college preparation program professor. Research is clear on the vital role of the principal for student achievement (Marzano, Waters, & McNulty, 2005). Even more compelling is the research on the importance of effective leadership in high-need schools (Lyman & Villani, 2004). However, state and national reports on progress being made in the preparation of successful school leaders continue to be bleak and alarming. Effective leadership does not happen randomly or by accident. It is conducted with a high level of intention that what is desired can be accomplished. The Courage to Grow: Leading with Intentionality is a guide for leaders at all levels to take action.

The Courage to Grow is a follow-up to The Courage to Lead: Choosing the Road Less Traveled , a workbook of ten essential skills and practical resources for collaborative leaders. Both of these resources are based on the premise that our greatest learning occurs through a commitment to action. Douglas Reeves (2004a) provides leaders with many motives to take informed and evaluative action, including research on the knowing-doing gap, which suggests that leaders frequently possess the knowledge to take action but fail to do so. Successful leaders take action that is congruent with knowledge in the best interest of students and the organization while continuously striving to self-assess, grow, and improve.

The Courage to Grow will allow leaders to complete a leadership fitness assessment in chapters 27. Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) performance standards (Council of Chief State School Officers, 2008) are used for the assessment as a practical tool for measuring present and future leadership skills. Each chapter provides ways to improve leadership skills and assess your own performance for the role you currently fulfill (district office, school administrator, leadership candidate/teacher leader, or educational leadership professor). The chapters are designed to address the comprehensive nature of the school leader. Thomas Sergiovanni (2009) compares the functions of a competent leader to the images of the head, heart, and hands. The multifaceted levels of the ISLLC 2008 performance standards are used within this text to illustrate the head as knowledge, heart as dispositions, and hands as performance. Chapters begin with a section called Learning with Intentionality, followed by a personal application of Caring with Intentionality. Chapters 27 will have a section titled Assessing with Intentionality and conclude with Growing with Intentionality, which requires the balanced application of leadership. Depending on your leadership role, you can select activities best suited to increase performance from present realities to ideal conditions for learning. Readers are encouraged to design personal action plans that take into account knowledge from each chapter, strategies for increasing their performance with intentionality, and self-assessment results. Finally, each chapter includes websites, resources, and activities to improve leadership.

Successful athletes and school leaders share many of the same characteristics. Athletes are acutely aware of their present level of fitness, goal setting, improvement of skills, and performance expectations. Similarly, leaders must be conscious of their own goals, improvement, and performance. However, in the field of education, understanding the need for leadership growth and improvement of performance is rare (Reeves, 2004a). Equally rare are tools or resources for leaders to assess their own growth and development, and well-defined performance expectations are ambiguous. Imagine that as an athlete you have prepared and trained for a golf tournament, and upon arrival to the event you find that the event is actually a marathon and you are expected to run 26.2 miles. The element of surprise and inadequate preparation is a common scenario for many school leaders. Leaders need to be aware of leadership expectations and the skills needed to be successful.