In My TBR Stack:

Branded: Tell Your Story, Build Relationships, and Empower Learning
by Eric Sheninger and Trish Rubin
Jossey-Bass
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

BrandED shows school leaders how to move beyond mascots and clever taglines to showcase their school's assets—and enhance communication with students, parents and all stakeholders. Through smart conversations about the genuine power of branding in education, this book shows how a "BrandED" mindset can improve schools by strengthening relationships, improving communication, telling your story, and increasing resources. Ideas borrowed from the world of business are adjusted for the unique needs of education. Practical tools, templates, and resources allow you to implement the strategies presented quickly and easily, while stories of real-world schools illustrate what BrandED thinking can do for your students, teachers, and community.

Today's school leaders cannot remain in the ivory tower. This book will help you drive positive transformation as you craft and share the powerful story of your unique school brand.

• Leverage digital tools to become the storyteller-in-chief and build better community relationships
• Strengthen internal and external communications among students, teachers, parents, and other stakeholders
• Increase resources by establishing strategic partnerships and strengthening ties to key stakeholders
• Promote connectivity, transparency, and community to build a positive culture that extends beyond the schoolhouse door

Authors Eric Sheninger and Trish Rubin, experts on school branding and change leadership, show you how BrandED thinking captures the focused spirit of the outstanding work taking place in schools every day; work that can be easily recognized, talked about, and valued. Get the word out, and invite the community in to build the positive relationships that benefit everyone.

On My Radar:

Race and Social Change: A Quest, A Study, A Call to Action
by Max Klau
Jossey-Bass
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Recent events have turned the spotlight on the issue of race in modern America, and the current cultural climate calls out for more research, education, dialogue, and understanding. Race and Social Change: A Quest, A Study, A Call to Action focuses on a provocative social science experiment with the potential to address these needs. Through an analysis grounded in the perspectives of developmental psychology, adaptive leadership and complex systems theory, the inquiry at the heart of this book illuminates dynamics of race and social change in surprising and important ways. Author Max Klau explains how his own quest for insight into these matters led to the empirical study at the heart of this book, and he presents the results of years of research that integrate findings at the individual, group, and whole system levels of analysis. It's an effort to explore one of the most controversial and deeply divisive subject's in American civic life using the tools of social science and empiricism. Readers will:

• Review a long tradition of classic, provocative social science experiments and learn how the study presented here extends that tradition into new and unexplored territory
• Engage with findings from years of research that reveal insights into dynamics of race and social change unfolding simultaneously at the individual, group, and whole systems levels
• Encounter a call to action with implications for our own personal journeys and for national policy at this critical moment in American civic life

At a moment when our nation is once again bitterly divided around matters at the heart of American civic life, Race and Social Change: A Quest, A Study, A Call to Action seeks to push our collective journey forward with insights that promise to promote insight, understanding, and healing.