The NEW Team Habits
A Guide to the New School Rules
- Anthony Kim - Education Elements, Founder and CEO
- Keara Mascarenaz - Education Elements, Partner, Organizational Design
- Kawai Lai - VizLit, Co-Founder
To achieve their ambitious goals, it is essential that education leaders build effective teams. Many leaders want to shift the way their teams collaborate, make decisions, and learn together, but struggle to make lasting change. Written for leaders who want to improve their teams, this guide is a follow-up to the best-seller, The NEW School Rules, a framework for transitioning to a more responsive, innovative organization. The NEW Team Habits goes further, providing battle-tested practices the authors have used with hundreds of leadership teams to build better team habits.
Readers will find
• a five step learning cycle for building team habits
• videos, readings, and other resources to build knowledge
• engaging team activities to drive learning
With tools leaders and teams can use right away, this guide provides the inspiration, steps, tools, and activities you need to improving your team habits for learning, meetings, and projects.
Leadership has one responsibility: to grow your people. The three habits are steps to set those conditions. It’s really a simple equation . . . grow the people, the people grow the organization, and the organization grows the results.
This short, visual, and practical book will make you smile, think, work, and practice so you and your team get better and more responsive.
The traditional education system was set up as a single-player sport. You were responsible for your work, your assignments, your test scores, your grades, your behavior, and so on. If you work in education, this model continued throughout your career as an educator. The problem is we now live in a team-based world, and unless you played a team sport, most of us never learned how to be part of a creative and productive team. We never learned the habits and skills critical to team effectiveness. We certainly didn’t have a guide or the ability to practice good habits.
This guide is a playbook, specifically focused on helping teams build habits as a collective unit, instead of as individuals. This step-by-step guide allows teams to practice battle-tested activities that will help them develop productive and practical habits of learning, meetings, and projects.
Any team that works through this playbook will come out as a more effective and productive team on the other side!
Shared habits are at the root of culture, which makes The NEW Team Habits an excellent guide for building a strong team culture that delivers for our students. Far too few thought leaders pay enough attention to these operational questions. Bravo to Anthony Kim, Keara Mascareñaz, Kawai Lai, and Education Elements for digging in here.
Equity, diversity, and inclusion are a high priority for many districts across the country.A genuine commitment and a strong understanding of how to secure the presence of these tenets in the teaching and learning landscape will continue to be at the center stage of visionary and innovative strategic plans. The NEW Team Habits has the potential to provide actionable approaches to making equity, diversity, and inclusion part of our daily practice.