July 2018 Bookshelf
Books 12 July 2018
The Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life
Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan
Nearly 75% of “change initiatives” at large companies and organizations fail. That means months of brainstorming, manpower, and energy go completely wasted, while the same problems remain more present than ever. Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan, along with their colleagues, believe they have a solution. Rather than looking to “change” performance, transform it. In their book, The Three Laws of Performance, the authors, based on decades of remarkable transformative work, propose three laws everyone should follow when seeking a bold future for their companies and organizations. The three laws are three short sentences: “How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them. How a situation occurs arises in language. Future-based language transforms how situations occur to people.” Seeing these laws applied in the most dire of organizational turmoil might be just the story you’ve been looking for to create sustainable transformation in your learning community.
Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling
John Taylor Gatto
We all need a book every now and again that affirms our vision for the future and adds fuel to our internal fire to continue pushing forward with our transformational work. Weapons of Mass Instruction is one of those books. Author, John Taylor Gatto tells stories from his three decades as a public school educator and the lessons he’s learned from the traditional reform conversation. Gatto has a knack for creating the perfect Hollywood moment in his writing and in his actual life—he resigned from his days as a classroom educator through an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal immediately after he received “Teacher of the Year” honors. Gatto’s flare for the dramatic will show up in his writing. You’ll discover opinions you vehemently disagree with. Then, there will be ideas and perspectives you want the entire world to hear. Either way, Gatto boldly invites educators, and anyone else for that matter, to push their thinking to unexpected and exciting places—opening up a world of possibility waiting to be explored.
The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
David Abram
Context is decisive. At Education Reimagined, this simple three-word sentence is at the foundation of everything we do. We, as people, have the unique ability to mold the same set of facts and circumstances into an infinite number of stories. It’s a series of choices we make every day. However, it takes an intentional mind to recognize the stories we’re writing. David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous, agrees. In his celebrated work, he takes readers on a journey of perception and language. He explores how and why our sensuous experiences determine far more about how we interpret the world around us compared to the objective reality that exists. And, he wants you to see the dangers of believing what’s happening around you is uncorrelated with what’s happening within you. With this knowledge, you will be able to see your young learners and broader community in a powerfully new way—enhancing your ability to lead a truly transformational effort.
The Boron Letters
Gary Halbert and Bond Halbert
It’s painful to visit traditional school district websites. They often have templates the 90’s would be proud of, mission statements that seem to be playing the same fiddle every other district in the country is playing, and incomprehensible navigation options that provide no clear “next step” when visiting. One of the biggest components of learner-centered transformation is communicating the why, what, and how of your transformational effort. If your community doesn’t feel connected to the messaging (which they should be involved in creating), then you’ll just look like another building that houses kids Monday through Friday. Or, worse, people will create their own story about this supposed “transformation” and rally to shut it down. Gary and Bond Halbert, authors of The Boron Letters, don’t want this to be your fate. Two copywriting and marketing experts, the Halbert brothers wrote this book to show just how powerful and important effective communication is regardless of what you’re “selling.” See how you might take their lessons and apply it to your communications strategy.
The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
Alan W. Watts
A great pairing to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile, The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan W. Watts explores the self-imposed limitations we create in search of security and comfort. As a pioneer in learner-centered transformation, odds are you stopped seeking comfort long ago. However, many people in your community likely do. It’s human nature. We seek control in the hopes of creating future certainty. That’s one of the reasons why the traditional education system is based around an “average.” When we create around an average, we hope to produce young adults who represent this picture—we hope to produce “sure things.” As a learner-centered pioneer, explore Watts’s work to boost your arguments for the necessity of education transformation.
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