The NEW Team Habits: A Guide to the New School Rules is a step-by-step workbook to building leadership teams and helping them grow. It is recommended for schools that seek concrete strategies and approaches to creating better teams that work together more cohesively. Effective school teams need to be unified in their approaches, support, practices, and applications. Organizational leaders looking to take a step down the hierarchy to address team habits in school environments will find The NEW Team Habits the perfect primer to guide the way. Chapters use individual team participation and team building routines as focal points, considering both underlying philosophy and strategies and why team interaction and structure are the foundation of organizational change. This book's structure is designed to achieve clarity and buy-in to the process. Therefore, it's recommended that educators and leaders use it as a step-by-step workbook for team building changes, to be used by a team leader committed to applying the exercises, which can take up to 90 minutes (30 for leader's independent pursuit, 60 minutes spent with the team itself). The specific time structure attached to these activities may stymie those who anticipate a more general, freer form of organization, but they are important keys to achieving these building blocks. From clear explanations and enactments of rules for sharing information and understanding and analyzing mistakes to check-in practices covered in rounds supported by charts and fill-in blanks, The NEW Team Habits provides not just admonitions and ideals, but a concrete process that teams can follow to solidify and strengthen their goals. It should be noted that the guide is not an ethereal concept. It's based on hundreds of seminars, workshops, and conferences where its principles were put into action in very different environments and tested over and over again. Teams have habits that not only shape their group identities, but influence organizations as a whole. Leaders interested in building better teams from the ground up will find The NEW Team Habits a key to better leadership, teams, and ultimately, better communities with stronger interactions. Small habit changes lead to bigger revisions, and so The NEW Team Habits should not be considered the end-all to the process, but the first step in a series of evolutionary team growth experiences.

Diane C. Donovan

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.

Howard Behar

This short, visual, and practical book will make you smile, think, work, and practice so you and your team get better and more responsive.

Tom Vander Ark, Getting Smart

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!

Jaime Casap

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.

Michael Horn, The Entangled Group

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.

Jose Dotres, Miami-Dade County Public Schools