Minds Unleashed : How Principals Can Lead the Right-Brained Way

Educational leadership continues to be the most powerful key to ensuring the successful future of all other professions, and thus, the quality of lives for people around the world. This book, your weekly reader, will allow you to have the conversations to help faculty and staff, to help kids. More importantly, these readings invite your thinking to go to different places in your mind as you search for meaning. They are designed to cause new thinking about some familiar issues, and of course, creativity in their solutions. It is this book’s intent to offer solutions for leaders at all levels to do things right, and to do what’s right, or better said, to do things “right-brained.” Our 52-weekly chapters will help you, first and foremost with your personal and professional capacities, as we address topics pertaining to all of the co-centric circles of impact noted above in the diagram.

Dr. Ryan A. Donlan, as Assistant Professor in Indiana State University’s Department of Educational Leadership in the Bayh College of Education, served for twenty years in K-12 education, much of that time as a principal and superintendent. He is an avid leadership and teacher trainer and is a public speaker and visionary for the future of education. Dr. Donlan, once a frequent skydiver, today enjoys more conservative pursuits. He has also written/co-written Gamesmanship for Teachers: Uncommon Sense is Half the Work and The Secret Solution: How One Principal Discovered the Path to Success. Dr. Donlan can be followed on Twitter at www.twitter/ryandonlan and his website visited, at http://www.ryandonlan.com/


Steve Gruenert is the department chair of the Educational Leadership department at Indiana State University. He helped design the Indiana Principal Leadership Institute, has coordinated the Principal Preparation Program at Indiana State, and has been a principal at both the high school and middle schools levels. His research passion is school culture and climate, and he continues to engage with leaders at the national and international levels, helping them to think about the role of culture in school improvement.