Leading for Educational Lives: Inviting and Sustaining Imaginative Acts of Hope

This book is written for the growing number of people (teachers, administrators, support staff, parents, and community members) throughout the world who wish to face the challenges of school leadership in ways that feel right, make sense, and contribute to sustaining defensible educational practices.

Using and extending the evolving core ideas of the global inviting school movement, it provides a hopeful approach to educational leadership, management, and mentorship that combines philosophical defensibility, administrative savvy, and illustrative stories. A systematic framework for examining the challenges of educational leadership, the Educational LIVES model, is used to organize the book. It is centred on the idea that leadership is fundamentally about people and the caring and ethical relationships they establish with themselves, others, values and knowledge, institutions, and the larger human and other-than-human world.

Emphasized throughout the book are the special quality of relationships needed to appreciate individuals in their uniqueness and the types of messages that intentionally call forth their potential to live educational lives. We call this approach the inviting perspective and offer the experiences of educators from around the world who put imaginative acts of hope into practice daily as they lead, manage, and mentor.

"Provides school leaders with an optimistic framework for creating a positive approach to leading schools through a time of mounting demands and obstacles. The book includes an insightful explanation of Invitational Theory and Practice with artful application for becoming a professionally and personally inviting leader. Educators who aspire to create schools in which all stakeholders realize their full potential will find many suggestions for analyzing and improving communication, policies and practices. Each chapter concludes with a set of Mentoring Conversation questions that will spark reflective discussions and a deeper understanding of the profound concepts presented." --Joan R. Fretz, Executive Director, International Alliance for Invitational Education