of the school leader. You may also argue with other readers about what particular stories mean. We include ambiguous and negative stories because, along with positive and straightforward ones, they can be important sources of learning.
How to Use This Book
There are many ways that you can use this book. You can use it for independent reading and reflection. You can read and think about the stories, beginning with the first one and moving through the book to the last. Or you can flip through the stories, skipping around, reading those stories that are of particular interest to you. You can read this book by yourself, considering a story or two every day as a centering activity. You can form or join a group of school leaders to read and discuss these stories together, exploring with others their meaning, reflecting on your own assumptions and thinking, and considering how they might apply to your own situation and practice.
This book can be used as a resource for programs that prepare aspiring school leaders for service and as a resource for programs of professional development for practicing school leaders. This book can serve as case material for instructors and groups of learners to read, analyze, and apply to their own situations and practice. We strongly recommend working with these stories in groups.
The stories in this book can serve as a foundation for a variety of learning activities. They can be used as examples of practice to be analyzed and discussed, reflected upon individually and in groups, and considered points of comparison to learners’ own thinking and practice. These stories can become the basis of role playing, whereby learners assume the roles of persons in the stories and act out the story line as written or as key facts of the story might be changed. Learners can create and improvise extensions of stories, imagining, acting, and discussing what might come next and why. Moreover, these stories can be used to help aspiring and practicing school leaders tell their own stories about particular situations, persons, or contexts. Composing one’s own stories and conveying them to others can help learners organize their thoughts, reflect upon their own assumptions and actions, and raise important issues. Sharing stories can stimulate collaborative analysis and joint problem solving. Sharing stories can be both instructive and inspirational. Indeed, there are many other learning activities that might spring from this book of stories.
Last but not least, this book of stories can be used by practicing school leaders in working with faculty, staff, parents, and students. For principals and other school leaders who wish to strengthen caring in their schools and classrooms, these stories can provide sources of learning for all—that is, concrete examples of caring action and interaction that can be thought about, discussed, and perhaps adapted and applied. These stories provide vivid examples of caring school community that schools may wish to cultivate. They provide examples for developing caring school leadership among teachers as well as administrators. Importantly, they can help schools collectively develop shared expectations for caring in administrative and teacher leadership alike. We envision these stories being used in teacher professional development workshops, in professional communities, and in schoolwide improvement sessions. We can see these stories used to remind administrators and teachers of the aims, virtues, and mindsets of caring and the importance to students of cultivating caring school communities. Indeed, we can imagine a principal starting each faculty meeting with a story of caring to recenter the work of the school around a core value. We can imagine these stories serving as a springboard for administrators and staff to tell their own stories to stimulate expanded and deeper caring.
At the end of the introductions to each collection, we provide a set of questions to guide your reading, reflection, and discussion of stories. We crafted these questions so that they may be readily adapted to individual reading and reflection, group discussion, leader preparation and professional development, and joint administrator-staff work in schools. Each set of questions is organized into three subsets. The first subset contains questions to promote general understanding of caring, its key elements, and its expression through action and interaction. The second contains questions to develop understanding of the particular practices within each collection. The third subset contains questions to promote reflection upon and application of practices in the stories to readers’ own situations. These questions ask readers to compare their own assumptions, biases, and practices with those reflected in the stories. They ask readers to consider context and how stories might play out similarly or differently in their own situations. They ask readers how they might answer the question that is the title of the long-running ABC television series What Would You Do? if presented with situations in the stories.
Our questions were inspired by a number of authors and teachers, such as Gordon Donaldson, Robert Garmston, Parker Palmer, and Donald Schön. We favored questions that direct readers toward understanding and meaning, and that push readers toward personal and professional reflection.
Many writers of teaching case materials propose a rational sequence of steps for case analysis. Generally, these steps begin with understanding the facts and establishing what happened in the case. Readers are then asked to define the problem of the case, diagnose the causes of that problem, search for and assess alternative ways to address the problem, decide upon a course of action, and finally reflect upon the likely outcomes of that action. Along the way, readers are asked to consider rationales for their responses. There is merit in applying such an approach to working with the stories in this book. At the same time, not all the stories lend themselves well. Sometimes such an approach fails to encourage personal or emotional engagement and reflection. Moreover, we recognize that school leaders often think quite differently about real-life problems and situations of practice and may employ other approaches effectively. With this in mind, we designed our questions to invite and support a wide range of mindsets and strategies to engage the stories.
Finally, we hope that you find these stories enjoyable to read, that you find them challenging, and that you find them reaffirming of the importance of caring in school leadership. We hope that you find them illuminating, instructive, and inspirational.
Acknowledgments
This book is inspired by scores of practicing educators with whom we have worked in schools and in our classrooms. It is also inspired by the K–12 students who we see prosper in schools when they are both challenged and cared for.
We are deeply grateful to those practicing and retired educators and others who contributed stories to this book. We are indebted to the following persons, listed alphabetically, who shared their stories with us and gave us permission to share them with you:
Jacob Bellissimo, Renee Blahuta, Melissa Brock, Maya Bugg, Mary Bussman, Heather Byrd, Kristin Cantrell, Beth Cohen, Michael Cormack, TJ D’Agostino, Miah Daughtery, Lora Dever, Clinton Dowda, Vince Durnan, Jonathan Ellwanger, Andrea Evans, Abigail Felber-Smith, Kim Finch, Richard Frank, Ari Frede, Lauren Gage, Chris George, Nick Gesualdi, Joseph Goins, Andrew Goltermann, Cathey Goodgame, Heather Harris, William Hayes, Victoria Hollis, Robyn Huemmer, Jordan Hughes, Catherine Humphrey, Jeni Irwin, Avery Kenly, Kristyn Klei-Borrero, Debra Klein, Peggy Korellis, John Marshall, Matt Matthews, Cathy McGehee, Matt Miller, Alecia Mobley, Peter Monaghan, Monique Morris, Milton Nettles, Melinda Novotny, Emily Lilja Palmer, Julie Pavlini, Alice Phillips, Carolyn Probst, Renee Racette, Jake Rodgers, Ken Roumpos, Maisha Rounds, Matt Rush, Beatriz Salgado, Molly Sehring, Lisa Shalla, Julie Shively, Josh Simmons, Nicolle Smith, Chase Spong, Sonia Stewart, Nancy Strawbridge, Malia Turnbull, Jennifer Vest, Laura Vilines, Joan White, Ingrid Wilson, Jacquelyn Wilson, Tracy Wilson, Chris Winningham, Nancy Wong, Amy Woodson, Jim Woywod, Mary Yeboah, and Carol Young
We thank Lauren Gage, Avi Lessing, and Alicia Reese for their invaluable assistance to elicit student artwork for this book. We thank Anna Caldwell for editing and preparing many of these drawings for publication. Personal appreciation is extended to Sallie Smylie for her keen eye, critical perspective, patience and good humor, and sense of the whole puzzle we were trying to assemble as we were focused on individual pieces.
We
