The Courage to Grow: Leading with Intentionality shows educational leaders how to design and carry out a leadership professional development plan. It is a guide that allows leaders to construct their own learning to measure knowledge, assess growth, and improve performance. This training manual is for the teacher leader, beginning principal, practicing principal, assistant principal, department chair, district office administrator, aspiring leadership candidate, and professor of principal preparation. Chapters begin with a section called Learning with Intentionality, as defined as an intense energy or desire to grow exponentially, followed by a personal application of Caring with Intentionality. Chapters 2 - 7 include a leadership self-assessment utilizing the ISLLC Standards and conclude with growth activities. Depending on their leadership roles, the readers can select activities best suited to grow performance from present realities to ideal conditions for learning. The reader is then encouraged to design a personal Action Plan that takes into account knowledge from each chapter, strategies for growing performance with intentionality, and self-assessment results. Finally, each chapter includes websites, resources, and activities to improve leadership.
About the Author: Kristine Servais is associate professor of educational leadership at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. Servais has studied school principals and, in particular, transformational leadership as a means for schools to collaboratively create a community of learners. Specifially, her research has focused on the roles, responsibilities, and relationships of the principal as a transformational leader in school-university partnerships. Servais provides administrator workshops and academies on the topics of professional learning communities, meeting management, team building, and type preference. She also has been a middle school and elementary teacher, middle school assistant principal and principal, and director of field experiences for pre-service teachers. The middle school at which she was principal was recognized as a National Blue Ribbon School of Excellence. Kellie Sanders is a principal at Walker's Grove Elementary School in Plainfield, Illinois. She has been a middle school teacher for ten years and a middle school assistant principal. She has a doctorate in educational administration, and her primary focus has been on the purpose, perceptions, and practices of leadership assessment. An area of continued focus for Kellie has been facilitating professional development for teachers and principals in the area of diversity, equity, social justice, and social emotional learning.