You Win in the Locker Room First: 7 C's to Build a Winning Team in Sports, Business, and Life by Jon Gordon

 NFL head coach Mike Smith lead one of the most remarkable turnarounds in NFL history. In the season prior to his arrival in 2008, the Atlanta Falcons had a 4-12 record and the franchise had never before achieved back-to-back winning seasons. Under Smith's leadership, the Falcons earned an 11-5 record in his first season and would go on to become perennial playoff and Super Bowl contenders earning Smith AP Coach of year in 2008 and voted Coach of Year by his peers in 2008, 2010 and 2012.

You Win in the Locker Room First draws on the extraordinary experiences of Coach Mike Smith and Jon Gordon--consultant to numerous college and professional teams--to explore the seven powerful principles that any business, school, organization, or sports team can adopt to revitalize their organization.

Step by step, the authors outline a strategy for building a thriving organization and provide a practical framework that give leaders the tools they need to create a great culture, lead with the right mindset, create strong relationships, improve teamwork, execute at a higher level, and avoid the pitfalls that sabotage far too many leaders and organizations.

In addition to sharing what went right with the Falcons, Smith also transparently shares what went wrong his last two seasons and provides invaluable lessons leaders can take away from his victories, success, failures and mistakes.

Whether it's an executive leadership team of a Fortune 500 company, a sports team, an emergency room team, military team, or a school team successful leaders coach their team and develop, mentor, encourage, and guide them. This not only improves the team, it improves the leaders and their relationships, connections, and organization.

You Win in the Locker Room First offers a rare behind-the-scenes look at one of the most pressure packed leadership jobs on the planet and what leaders can learn from these experiences in order to build their own winning team.

Recommended by Maygan Adams at MWJH. Audiobook available in OverDrive/Sora.
 

Teach Like a Pirate: Increase Student Engagement, Boost Your Creativity and Transform Your Life As An Educator by Dave Burgess

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Based on Dave Burgess's popular "Outrageous Teaching" and "Teach Like a PIRATE" seminars, this book offers inspiration, practical techniques, and innovative ideas that will help you to increase student engagement, boost your creativity, and transform your life as an educator. You'll learn how to tap into and dramatically increase your passion as an teacher. Also, learn how to develop outrageously engaging lessons that will draw students in like a magnet and how to transform your class into a life-changing experience for your students. This groundbreaking inspirational manifesto contains over 30 hooks specially designed to captivate your class and 170 brainstorming questions that will skyrocket your creativity. Once you learn the Teach Like a PIRATE system, you'll never look at your role as an educator the same again.

Recommended by Maygan Adams at MWJH. This title can be found in the campus libraries at Lamar, Travis, MWJH, and HS.

Don't Ditch That Tech: Differentiated Instruction in a Digital World by Matt Miller, Angelia Ridgway, Nate Ridgway

Don’t Ditch That Tech provides practical ideas to help you find the sweet spot where classroom devices meet students’ needs. In this teacher-tailored guide, you’ll find tips on how to handle cart/lab scenarios, develop attention-grabbing strategies, build metacognitive practices, and more—all with differentiation in mind. Whether you're a tech newbie or the school’s device guru, you’ll walk away with new understandings and strategies for transforming and diversifying your approach to teaching in a twenty-first-century world.

Recommended by Danielle Harper, ELA teacher at MWJH. Found in Danielle's personal library. Digital version available in OverDrive/Sora.

Additional resources can be found at ditchthattextbook.com