Live Your Excellence

Book excerpt: This Action Guide is a tool to accompany Live Your Excellence: Bring Your Best Self to School Every Day by Jimmy Casas. A practical book to help all educators rediscover themselves in order to bring their best self to school every day, Live Your Excellence begins with the premise that by cultivating a mindset that centers on investing in students, colleagues, and-most of all-themselves, educators can shift schools away from a culture that runs on compliance, blame, and fear to a culture based on investment and caring. Jimmy shares inspiration, stories, and strategies to help overcome the negative undercurrents that exist in school cultures today and explains how educators of all stripes can embrace an investment-based approach to everything they do, from collaborative leadership, to working with challenging students, to feelings of inadequacy. His insights into navigating the complexities of working in schools is an invaluable resource for all educators who desire-more than anything-to rediscover their own excellence and make a difference. This Action Guide is just that: a road map to taking action steps based on the ideas found in Live Your Excellence. This Action Guide is intended to take the contents from Live Your Excellence and organize them into such a way that provokes discussion, reflection, and--most of all--action. It is written in a way that allows participants to read and understand critical concepts while also applying these in the classrooms and schools in which they serve.