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Dr. Dianna Lindsay's picture
Dr. Dianna Lindsay
After 43 years in my chosen profession, I remain excited, alive, and learning! From an active Twitter Account to blogging, from teaching Constitutional Law to Pre-AP English, from a national winner...
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Treasures: Within Us For Leadership

  1. I just completed another leadership book by another former CEO. The unlikely title, Love Works, by Joel Manby, caught my eye and was recommended by my trusted colleague, Chris Gann!
  2. The author talks about the treasures we need to discover within us as leaders. This is hardly the talk we expect from powerful CEOs of major corporations! By extension in my judgment, the book is as appropriate to teachers as it is to leaders of schools. Manby boils his recommendations into seven areas which I would like to apply to schools and classrooms where students are at the center of decision-making and know it!
  4. 1. Truthfulness: define a reality for your students and be authentic to that truth. Remind them of your dedication to their success in ways that signal to them that you are a truthful and consistent educator.
  5. 2. Unselfish: think of yourself less and your students more. Place your hardest decisions against this rubric-how am I improving the quality of my instruction by making this decision or taking this action?
  6. 3. Forgiveness: release the all too tempting "grip of the grudge". Don't allow past events, mistakes or decisions to ruin your ability to forgive and forget. Move on; we all make mistakes; how long do we need to pay our debt to an organization before we can push past the error as adults?
  7. 4. Dedication:remain true to your values of fairness, equality, truth, and justice to free children from the oppression of ignorance. In addition, remember to be dedicated to the success of others. Don't we all need each other's dedication to continuously improve?
  8. 5. Patience:provide yourself the space and the pace to remain under control in the toughest of situations. If we are indeed models of our values, what better way to demonstrate those values than when we are under pressure? Classrooms are incubators for pressure or patience that choice is the teacher's!
  9. 6. Kindness:encourage enthusiasm and demonstrate it daily in class and in faculty meetings. It is an honor to serve and our enthusiasm for what we teach is contagious. Who would you rather be with at a meeting, a cynic or an optimist?
  10. 7. Trustworthiness: place confidence in someone new every day. Let someone know how you look to them to complete a certain task, act a certain way, or provide a certain kind of leadership. Who doesn't respond well to being entrusted to keep part of the institutional direction?
  11. Smiling students, proud of their work, happy in their schools, and grateful for their opportunities is proof that Love Works!