The Power of Experience: Principals Talk about School Improvement is a guide for principals, both aspiring and established, who hope to make a measurable difference in the achievement of all students, and who strive to create a positive, safe, and student-centered learning environment in their schools. Gleaned from interviews with more than fifty principals who have been either instrumental in bringing a school to US Department of Education National Blue Ribbon status or who were identified as National Distinguished Principals by the National Association of Elementary School Principals, this critical source draws on the wisdom and experience of school leaders from across the nation and from select locations around the world. From Kenya to California, Alaska to Wisconsin, these principals reflect great diversity but unity of purpose: reaching and teaching all children by building exceptional schools through exemplary leadership. Whether new to the field or a veteran principal, readers will benefit from the collective wisdom, insight, and experience of principals who have built remarkable schools designed to promote student achievement.
"What is the value of a life deeply lived? Can fragments from the past help you navigate the future? What good is wisdom in a world bewitched by ephemera? Some of our best writers over 50 tackle these and other questions in this honest, hard-hitting collection about the search for meaning in the second half of life. In moving works of self-discovery, they illuminate the fine art of growing up and the power of experience to transform your life"--Publisher website (May 2008)
The New York Times bestselling authors of Switch and Made to Stick explore why certain brief experiences can jolt us and elevate us and change us—and how we can learn to create such extraordinary moments in our life and work. While human lives are endlessly variable, our most memorable positive moments are dominated by four elements: elevation, insight, pride, and connection. If we embrace these elements, we can conjure more moments that matter. What if a teacher could design a lesson that he knew his students would remember twenty years later? What if a manager knew how to create an experience that would delight customers? What if you had a better sense of how to create memories that matter for your children? This book delves into some fascinating mysteries of experience: Why we tend to remember the best or worst moment of an experience, as well as the last moment, and forget the rest. Why “we feel most comfortable when things are certain, but we feel most alive when they’re not.” And why our most cherished memories are clustered into a brief period during our youth. Readers discover how brief experiences can change lives, such as the experiment in which two strangers meet in a room, and forty-five minutes later, they leave as best friends. (What happens in that time?) Or the tale of the world’s youngest female billionaire, who credits her resilience to something her father asked the family at the dinner table. (What was that simple question?) Many of the defining moments in our lives are the result of accident or luck—but why would we leave our most meaningful, memorable moments to chance when we can create them? The Power of Moments shows us how to be the author of richer experiences.
Do you feel the weight of high school-the courses, the requirements, the credits-and question whether your young adult will be prepared with the skills needed for life? Cheryl Bastian, twenty-six year veteran homeschooler, mother of eight, and educational consultant designed More than Credits: Skills High Schoolers Need for Life, a ready-to-use guide parents can reference as they walk alongside their teens and young adults through five personal development credits¿Nutrition and Wellness,¿Personal Fitness,¿Personal Awareness and Career Exploration, ¿Philosophy, and¿Personal Finance.Each course intentionally prepares learners to be future-ready while gaining a better understanding of who they are and what they believe. In addition, they will discover how they can use their unique giftings and strengths to add value and contribute to their communities or workplace. Content offers ¿practical skill acquisition through personalized project-based learning, ¿experiential opportunities, ¿related literature and writing suggestions, and ¿meaningful discussion topics and questions. High school is more than checking boxes and meeting requirements. It's about young adults being equipped with the skill sets and emotional intelligence necessary for life beyond graduation.
The first component of intelligence involves effective adaptation to an environment. In order to adapt effectively, organizations require resources, capabilities at using them, knowledge about the worlds in which they exist, good fortune, and good decisions. They typically face competition for resources and uncertainties about the future. Many, but possibly not all, of the factors determining their fates are outside their control. Populations of organizations and individual organizations survive, in part, presumably because they possess adaptive intelligence; but survival is by no means assured. The second component of intelligence involves the elegance of interpretations of the experiences of life. Such interpretations encompass both theories of history and philosophies of meaning, but they go beyond such things to comprehend the grubby details of daily existence. Interpretations decorate human existence. They make a claim to significance that is independent of their contribution to effective action. Such intelligence glories in the contemplation, comprehension, and appreciation of life, not just the control of it.—from The Ambiguities of Experience In The Ambiguities of Experience, James G. March asks a deceptively simple question: What is, or should be, the role of experience in creating intelligence, particularly in organizations? Folk wisdom both trumpets the significance of experience and warns of its inadequacies. On one hand, experience is described as the best teacher. On the other hand, experience is described as the teacher of fools, of those unable or unwilling to learn from accumulated knowledge or the teaching of experts. The disagreement between those folk aphorisms reflects profound questions about the human pursuit of intelligence through learning from experience that have long confronted philosophers and social scientists. This book considers the unexpected problems organizations (and the individuals in them) face when they rely on experience to adapt, improve, and survive. While acknowledging the power of learning from experience and the extensive use of experience as a basis for adaptation and for constructing stories and models of history, this book examines the problems with such learning. March argues that although individuals and organizations are eager to derive intelligence from experience, the inferences stemming from that eagerness are often misguided. The problems lie partly in errors in how people think, but even more so in properties of experience that confound learning from it. "Experience," March concludes, "may possibly be the best teacher, but it is not a particularly good teacher."
This text seeks to raise the curtain on competitive pricing strategies and asserts that businesses often miss their best opportunity for providing consumers with what they want - an experience. It presents a strategy for companies to script and stage the experiences provided by their products.
Having a customer-centric business model has evolved from being a nice-to-have to a must-have for any organization. A focus on products and services alone is no longer enough to outstrip the competition. In the current digital ecosystem, consumers can instantly compare products, prices and services with the touch of a button from the comfort of their home. Therefore, every organization must now focus on their overall customer experience to achieve the tricky but imperative balance between efficiency and personalization. In The Power of Customer Experience, Martin Newman presents clear data that proves the direct link between customer-centricity with profit and shareholder value. Drawing on examples from well-known companies like JD Sports, Delta Airlines, Lego, Selfridges, BMW, Hilton, Deliveroo and Uber, it analyses how organizations provide the most effective customer experience, and reveals the strategies that have allowed them to succeed. Featuring tips and tools throughout, it will enable readers to understand the impact of customer centricity on some of the best known brands, to gain invaluable insights that can be used to grow emerging brands and revitalize existing brands.
Unleash the Power of Heaven in Your Life We all face difficulties in life, situations that seem hopeless and detour us away from our dreams. Weighed down by the impossible, we forget that we have the power of heaven within our grasp--power that can change any situation and overcome every problem. With insight and passion, Bill Johnson shows how you can access this divine power through the Holy Spirit--and how the Spirit will endow you with the three supernatural gifts of 1 Corinthians 13: faith, hope and love. He reveals simple, practical ideas about these three aspects of Jesus' grace that will not only transform the way you think, act and love, but will transform the very atmosphere around you--and will unleash heaven's power in your world. Get Ready to Experience the Impossible!
The starting point of this book is the observation that there is a discrepancy between the lived reality of human beings and the fabricated, planned, and governed ‘reality’ of the state apparatus at both the local and national level. The book posits multi-locality as an emerging spatial configuration. The author draws from various theoretical sources, such as Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of state or royal science, the Nietzschean critique of idealism, Hägerstrnad’s time-geography, Hintikka’s theory of modalities, Lefebvre’s urban society, Castel’s network society, Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, and Bhaskar’s and Sartre's theories of presence and absence. He also discusses the implications of Faludi’s post-territorialist critique of planning and governance, and of the failure to operationalise the concept quantitively, basing his arguments in the lived experiences of multi-locals as well. The novelty of the book is how it analyses multi-locality from such a wide theoretical perspective: what is the nature and meaning of the different multiple and coexistent places for people, and how is this spatial transformation related to their mobility, everyday practices, and work. How does the presence and absence of places form their identity and their citizenship? He also addresses the inconsistency between multi-locality and traditional statistics and the planning and governance practices based on the assumption of unilocality and discusses the implications of this incongruity. The book will be of interest to scholars in urban studies and planning theory, as well as practitioners developing more adequate practices replacing outdated ones.
