Faced with a vast list of roles and responsibilities and answering to a broad array of stakeholders, school administrators can feel like they must constantly play the role of invincible superhero. Rarely do they have the opportunity to engage in the kind of reflection, inquiry, and collegial sharing that is so effective in teacher professional development. In Leading and Learning, Fred Brill draws on personal narratives from new and experienced school administrators to examine common themes, concerns, successes, and failures. From these stories, practices and protocols emerge to help administrators navigate the complexity of their jobs, and better manage their own professional development. Leading and Learning examines the administrative roles of school leaders from "enforcer" to "system-builder," to "instructional leader" as well as the psychological, emotional aspects of the position, and the impact of school culture. Fred shares research on the success and structures of professional learning communities and shows how the power of combining PLCs with the practice of reflective storytelling results in better school leadership and professional growth. Woven throughout the book are stories from over 260 interviews with school administrators that will energize readers while generating chuckles and knowing nods. The book's goal is to provide a model that inspires change in schools and in administrator induction programs. By offering a detailed analysis of effective (and ineffective) leadership, Leading and Learning gives readers a new method for making decisions, solving problems, and working to get things done in their school communities. And by demonstrating the power of reflective storytelling and collaborative learning, it provides school leaders with an effective process for more clearly translating belief into action. - See more at: http://www.stenhouse.com/html/leading-and-learning.htm#sthash.uRaZninD.dpuf

Stories in the media about the cancer-causing risks present in everyday life can cause alarm and confusion, and make it difficult to know how to alter one's lifestyle. The Cancer Prevention Manual, Second Edition, is a handy guide to all key issues in cancer prevention, presenting medical and scientific information in a plain, accessible style. Written by authors with distinguished careers studying the illness, and based on a solid scientific grounding, this book provides the facts about how our lifestyles pose cancer risks, and what we can do to change them.

Parvum Opus (Latin for small work) is a weekly column on the English language, and more, that I've been writing since just before Christmas of 2002. I'm an English teacher, writer, and editor: one of those compulsive readers and proofreaders. In the Middle Ages, when the great universities were established in Europe, students studied the Trivium and the Quadrivium. The Trivium consisted of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. The Quadrivium consisted of arithmetic; geometry; music, harmonics, or tuning theory; and astronomy or cosmology. Someday, I may change Parvum Opus to Trivium Pursuit. My original intention was to write a short note on one point of English usage per week. It would be not just a grammar tip, but a comment on the way language is used and misused. The first issue was on the word "actionable," in which I explain why you do NOT want to create an "actionable business plan." But since language is always about something, I wrote about the substance as well as the form of language. I could not, for instance, ignore the Iraq war. My views on that and other public issues have shifted since that first year of writing, which lost me some friends and readers in subsequent years. A few years ago I shifted most of my political comments to my Cincinnati Independent Examiner column, at www.examiner.com/independent-in-cincinnati. Parvum Opus also includes a lot of comments, questions, information, and corrections from steady readers over the years. Sometimes they wrote the column for me, and I thank them. This volume even includes my poem about making mistakes.