Works - Books

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Parents want to work with their children’s teachers to help them succeed in school. What Brain Research Says about Student Learning provides parents and teachers the most recent findings in brain research and learning theory in a very approachable way. The reader will see how the child’s brain develops, learns, remembers, and creates new meaning and understanding. User-friendly discussions of learning and teaching theories will show strategies both parents and teachers can use to capitalize on this new understanding about the child’s developing brain. Topics include: learning environment, developmental stages, lesson planning, teaching strategies, assignments, and assessments. The book concludes with a variety of actual samples from these topic areas.

Virtually anyone who has attended college can attest to poor teaching approaches by very bright professors. Professors simply are not trained or taught how to best teach their content. They are not aware of learning theories, brain research, pedagogy and andragogy. They teach the way they were taught—their mimetic isomorphism.Not only will this book share insights from all these areas, but it will also help professors prepare syllabi, create curriculum, prepare lesson plans, create assignments, and develop assessments with these concepts in mind. Further, we will embed differentiation, culturally relevant strategies, and the use of technology to enhance learning.

Educational leaders work within a system that does not best leverage attributes of their professional employees. This book focuses on three areas: leadership, motivation, and organization, as they related to educational leadership. Each of these areas has a particular chapter devoted to it. Each chapter begins with a review of the extant literature covering the theme. 40 elite, professional, and Olympic athletes and coaches were interviewed for this book to learn their perspectives on what makes the best leaders in athletics in the areas of leadership, motivation, and organization. These interviews are subsequently interwoven into each of the three chapters outlined above. The book concludes with a chapter that pulls all these aspects together and utilizes a newly created Leadership Congruency Model.

University leaders, both senior leadership and boards of trustees, are desperately looking for answers to enrollment concerns across the nation. This book is written by current practitioners in the field. These people live enrollment management every day; they know the field. They can talk to lay leaders from a practitioner’s perspective. Readers will enjoy reading a book that helps them to quickly understand enrollment management and how to quickly make a difference.

The Quantum University begins with an analysis of the current state of higher education organizational structure and leadership based on classical scientific approaches. It then focuses briefly why the classical approaches are inappropriate for human organization, such as universities.

From this baseline, the book shares descriptions of quantum physics, ecology, chaos theory, and other newer sciences. These sciences provide us important lessons for how we run our universities. These new sciences are a much cleaner fit and metaphor for our institutional structures and leadership models. 

The Quantum University finishes with a thorough investigation of what a new university structure would look like and the type of leadership it would need. Each chapter is accompanied with a guest essay written by different practitioners from across the nation. In addition, each chapter shares a fictitious story of “Leslie.” She is a new board of trustee member and struggles with her leadership role. By the end of the book, her insights have provided a new direction not only for herself, but also for the university.

Shared Governance begins with the premise that today’s higher education governance practices have lost their focus and vitality. By re-examining the original suppositions of shared governance, along with an infusion of seminal democratic values and principles, a contemporary model is envisioned.

From historical perspectives on shared governance, the book then takes a view of current governance models through the lens of Critical Theory and Open Systems Thinking. Political, corporate, and school system models are briefly reviewed before moving on to application to colleges and universities.

Each chapter concludes with a continuous story of a young and maturing college vice president as she grapples with a static and worn governance system at her institution. She strives to reinvigorate the notion of shared governance and to bring staff and students into the process.

The final three chapters of the book each include an essay written by individuals who have served on the ground level of shared governance at their institution. These people include: an administrative assistant who helped to create a Staff Council; a Student Government Association president who took a nascent SGA and gave students a new voice; and, an associate dean who mentored students in this developmental process.

Assuming the Mantel of Leadership is a book of real-life case studies and activities that are contextual-based within the reader’s own setting and experience. The reader is expected to respond to the cases and the activities by utilizing and reflecting upon their own institution’s policies and context. The scope of exercises is intentionally broad in order to cover situations across academic affairs, student affairs, and enrollment management.

American schools should be laboratories for modeling democratic concepts. However, our school systems are the antithesis of democratically run organizations. Teaching professionals, students and parents have very little power or genuine influence in decision making. Reframing Decision Making in Education begins by describing the current status of American schools and concludes with a description of the organizational structure, leadership, and decision making practices necessary to make our schools operate in a manner congruent with those democratic principles we espouse as a country.

This book describe a democratic structure and a decision making matrix to help reform leaders begin such an endeavor. Woven through each chapter is a fictional story of Principal Samantha Levy. We see Ms. Levy’s struggles as she begins the process of making change in her high school and its impact on those around her.

As a professor of educational administration/leadership and as a former school leader, Perry Rettig found himself extremely dissatisfied with the dry, passive, and detached textbooks for such programs. He also found that the students in his programs had been disappointed, too. While traditional texts do a good job of detailing theory and conceptual models important to school leadership, these same theories and constructs are taught without any real-life and meaningful interaction. Practicing Principals is an interactive book that demands that students experience and thoughtfully analyze these theories and constructs in actual, real-life situations before they take on the job. Students, professors, school boards, professional organizations, and the administrators themselves are demanding that university programs become more authentic. With Practicing Principals, Rettig gives the novice the opportunity to practice how they would handle real-life situations and then analyze their work with their peers, their professors, and even their own building administrators.

This book theorizes that models based on the classical sciences have misguided educational leadership. Dr. Rettig sees the open dynamics of twentieth-century science — specifically, quantum mechanics — as a better and more natural model, and describes what he sees as a method of leadership light years beyond those of today. Dr. Rettig illustrates his erudite critique of the contemporary school administration structure with the story of Leslie O'Connor, a fictional administrator, who makes her way through familiar-seeming training techniques. For anyone interested in the organization and administration of school systems, this book provides an original and compelling perspective.