The Mindful School Leader: Practices to Transform Your Leadership and School
About this ebook
If you think you don’t have time for mindfulness, think again. This handbook, named a Best Courageous Book of 2014 by The Center for Courage and Renewal, was written with school leaders in mind—your responsibilities, your stress, and your schedule. When you add mindfulness into your day, bit by bit, you’ll become a more effective leader and a more positive force for your staff and students.
With the help of this inspirational yet practical guide, you’ll start fitting pieces of practice into your busy home and work life, whether you are sitting in your office or walking down the hall. Features include
- Real-life profiles of mindful school leaders
- Practice exercises to try right away
- Guidance so you know if you are "doing it right"
- Hard-to-find resources, including mindfulness apps
Mindful school leaders are better at managing meetings, responding creatively to complex situations, and achieving resilience at work and at home. Take the first steps to transform your life—and your school.
"This inspiring book makes a strong case for school leaders to include mindfulness in their personal and professional lives. Based on solid research and enhanced by compelling examples of real people, it shows how school leaders can feel more grounded, connected, clear and focused. Mindfulness makes leaders more effective with relatively little effort, but be advised that the benefits can be contagious, transforming your school from the inside out."
Christopher Germer, Clinical Instructor
Harvard Medical School
"In The Mindful School Leader, Brown and Olson offer with remarkable clarity and depth a thorough introduction to the practice of meditation, the science behind its benefits, and many firsthand accounts of lives and work situations transformed through this practice. Although this book was written for those in leadership roles in education, it will be inspiring for anyone interested in understanding their own minds and finding more ease in life and work."
Joseph Goldstein, Co-Founder
Insight Meditation Society
About the author
Valerie Brown, JD, MA, PCC, transformed her high-pressure, twenty-year career as a lawyer lobbyist, representing educational institutions and nonprofits, to human-scale work with leaders and teams to foster trustworthy, compassionate, and authentic connections. She is an accredited leadership coach, international retreat leader, writer, and Chief Mindfulness Officer of Lead Smart Coaching, LLC (www.leadsmartcoaching.com), specializing in application and integration of mindfulness and leadership, and is a Co-Director of Georgetown’s Institute for Transformational Leadership. She holds the following degrees: Juris Doctorate, Master of Arts, and Bachelor of Arts.Her books include The Road that Teaches: Lessons in Transformation through Travel (QuakerBridge Media, 2012) and the highly acclaimed, The Mindful School Leader: Practices to Transform Your Leadership and School (Corwin, 2014). Valerie’s received extensive training from the Center for Courage & Renewal and Parker J. Palmer; the Institute for Transformational Leadership at Georgetown University; the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, & Society; the Center for Compassion Focused Therapy; the Ojai Foundation; the C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology (NYC); Chestnut Hill College (PA) Certificate in Holistic Spirituality; The Leadership Circle ProfileTM; and Transformational Educational Leadership. Valerie is an ordained Dharma Teacher in the Plum Village tradition founded by Thich Nhat Hanh and a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). As a certified kundalini yoga teacher, she helps leaders discover the wisdom of the body. She leads an annual transformational pilgrimage to El Camino de Santiago, Spain, to celebrate the power of sacred places.
Kirsten Olson is Chief Listening Officer at Old Sow Coaching and Consulting, where she works with education and learning-sector leaders nationally and internationally. She received a masters and doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and is also the author Wounded by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up To Old School Culture (Teachers College Press, 2009) and Schools as Colonizers (Verlag, 2008). Kirsten is a founding board member of the Institute for Democratic Education in America (IDEA), a national not-for-profit organized to create greater educational equity, social justice, and to foster passionate learning.
