Product Description

Praise for the First Edition: 'This book offers a challenge to all school leaders. Within its pages the reader will find no checklists on how to become a successful leader, no rehash of the tenets of leadership according to a host of theoreticians, but rather an invitation to participate in a personal journey' - "School Leadership and Management". The book presents a personal perspective on what it means to care enough to lead. It demonstrates an understanding of the role of leaders and what occurs when leaders bond with others in significant ways in the development of our schools. This book embraces the notion that leaders must establish a connection with all others in an organization in order to reflect the common core values that establishes the organization to the next moral and ethical level. This book intends to widen what it really means to be a leader and explores the yet unexplored and heretofore dimensions of moral leadership.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #613424 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04-17
• Released on: 2003-04-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 184 pages

Review
"Caring Enough to Lead is a great book made even better in its newest edition. Pellicer's passion connects to the heart of what makes ordinary people become extra-ordinary leaders. To read and reflect on the additions to this newest edition will change your life." -- Elaine Wilmore, President The University of Texas at Arlington Caring Enough To Lead is based upon Leonard Pellicer's three-plus decades of varied experience as a professional educator. He not only has served, but he has observed and listened and recorded what he has learned. -- Richard W. Riley, Former U.S. Secretary of Education

Book Info
Text illustrates vital concepts of leadership through a series of questions, short vignettes, selected quotations, and personal stories. Features a foreward by Richard W. Riley, former U.S. Secretary of Education. For administrators, principals, teachers, and counselors. Previous edition: c1999. Softcover, hardcover available. DLC: Educational leadership--United States.

About the Author
Leonard O. Pellicer is Dean of the School of Education and Organizational Leadership at the University of La Verne and Distinguished Professor Emeritus from the University of South Carolina. He has served in a number of teaching and leadership roles over the past thirty-five years. He served as the first director of the South Carolina Educational Policy Center, at the University of South Carolina, and was also the director of the African American Professors Program, a program designed to address the problem of a shortage of African American professors at predominantly white higher-education institutions. His experiences prior to joining the faculty at the University of South Carolina include service as a high school and middle school teacher, high school assistant principal, high school principal, and director of a teacher education center that provided staff development opportunities for teachers and administrators in five Florida school districts. In 1986 to 1987, he was a Fullbright Scholar in Southeast Asia. During this period, he taught graduate classes at the University of the Philippines and used his expertise in school leadership to assist in developing programs to train school leaders in the region. From 1992 to 195, he spent a good deal of time in the Republic of South Africa as a member of a team that developed a field-based training program for black principals in the "new South Africa." He holds a bachelor's degree in English education and master's and doctoral degrees in educational administration from the University of Florida in Gainesville. For more than twenty-five years, he has written, consulted, and spoken extensively in the areas of school leadership, instructional leadership, and educational programs for disadvantaged students. He has coauthored two other books with Lorin Anderson for Corwin Press, including A Handbook for Teacher Leaders (1995 and Teacher Peer Assistance and Review: A Practical Guide for Teachers and Administrators (2001).

Customer Reviews

An Interesting Insight Into Leadership
Leonard Pellicer's Caring Enough to Lead contains many interesting and thoughtful reflections to become a successful leader. He uses reflections at the end of each chapter to let the reader think about how they lead or how they can become a good leader. The reflections were very useful to me to see what kind of a leader I hope to become.

I particularly enjoyed his anecdotes about various happenings in his life. They give the book the feeling of someone who actually cares about what he is righting about rather than just someone who is writing just to get a paycheck. He stresses that caring is the most important thing to becoming a successful leader and it shows in the book.

However, if you are looking for a book that tells you exactly how to become a good and moral leader, this may not be the book for you. This book gives you the tools you will need to find out what kind of a leader you are and at the same time steers the reader in the direction he or she would need to go to become a good leader.

I am currently studying to be a teacher and I feel that this book is a good resource for any future or current teacher or administrator. It gives the reader a chance to critically look at how he or she leads and can become a better leader by making the right questions are being asked. By asking yourself a few key questions and knowing what those answers mean to being a good leader can help the reader become a much better and more caring leader.

Pellicer's personal experiences are what make this book work. His extensive experience in the education field shows that he knows what it takes to be a caring leader. I that Pellicer's reflective thought process will help me to become a better leader in the education field and ultimately make me a better teacher in the long run.

This is an awesome book!
I am not writing this review to seek favors or to boost the book sales of one of my colleagues. I just happen to be blessed with the profound honor and pleasure of having worked under the author's guiding hand for the past two years. I can tell you from firsthand experience that Leonard Pellicer "walks his talk". He is a touching, masterful, giving, caring person, and far and away the most wonderful leader with whom I have ever had the pleasure of learning from. He has created an academic workplace completely committed to the full realization of its vision statement. The result is that I work with the most caring and loving group of people imaginable. It just doesn't get any better than this.

"Caring Enough to Lead" is a fantastic book. I love how he illustrates the path of the heart with simple yet profound personal life examples. Such a technique can easily go sideways with self-absorption, but not in this case. One of the most delightful features of the book is my certainty that the chapters which speak the loudest to me today (among them: "some of the questions", "what I believe about people", "water buffalo", "to be a teacher", "successful schools", "sharing power", and "professional educator") will no doubt change along with my need to respond to a given difficulty or circumstance in the future. To wit, some of its struck me as a gem that I need to realize at this time, and other sections will no doubt simmer for a while and then resurface when I most need their wisdom.

Overall, the book rings in my heart very much the way "The Holy Man" by Susan Trotter (my favorite book of all time) did. Exactly the opposite of technical and boring, it is a refreshingly delightful and interesting read. I have never before stopped to actually DO the suggested exercises in books, but I found myself actually doing that with this one, because what I gleaned from each chapter was simply too valuable to let pass by without trying to apply its lessons to my life.

This book is a treasure find in a field of tired and rehashed ideas. I realize that it's dangerous to wish for things other than they are, but I believe it would be a much better world if more leaders had Leonard's heartfelt leadership style. Reading this book provides a solid step in that direction.