Educational leadership continues to be the most powerful key to ensuring the successful future of all other professions, and thus, the quality of lives for people around the world. This book, your weekly reader, will allow you to have the conversations to help faculty and staff, to help kids. More importantly, these readings invite your thinking to go to different places in your mind as you search for meaning. They are designed to cause new thinking about some familiar issues, and of course, creativity in their solutions. It is this book’s intent to offer solutions for leaders at all levels to do things right, and to do what’s right, or better said, to do things “right-brained.” Our 52-weekly chapters will help you, first and foremost with your personal and professional capacities, as we address topics pertaining to all of the co-centric circles of impact noted above in the diagram.

Minds Unleashed is a powerful ‘weekly read’ for leaders and teams, very unique in its approach, and certainly a way to get a group talking about some of the important issues we face in K-12 education. I highly recommend it! Having a book in which chapters can be read in just minutes at a time, in any order, is certainly something that I appreciate and can recommend to those in my professional learning network. -- Amber Teamann, principal, Wylie ISD
Do you have 15 minutes a week to sharpen your leadership skills? Minds Unleashed is a collection of 52 weekly readings that will give you a new way of looking at leadership. With fresh examples and vivid metaphor, this book will spark creative solutions to problems old and new. -- Daniel H. Pink, author of "Drive" and "A Whole New Mind"
Principals are busy people. Our breaks are seldom, and lunchtimes frequently come after students have been dismissed. If we are not intentional with our time to reflect on practice, we risk becoming stagnant. Ryan and Steve have provided educational leaders with a tool for reflection and growth. This book makes it easy to spend minutes each week reading and thinking about our teams, our school districts, and ourselves. If you are looking for a book to help initiate conversations about leadership, challenging the status quo, and encouraging positive deviance, then turn to Minds Unleashed: How Principals Can Lead the Right-Brained Way. -- Michele Corbat, principal, Morrish Elementary School, Swartz Creek Community Schools

Dr. Ryan A. Donlan, as Assistant Professor in Indiana State University’s Department of Educational Leadership in the Bayh College of Education, served for twenty years in K-12 education, much of that time as a principal and superintendent. He is an avid leadership and teacher trainer and is a public speaker and visionary for the future of education. Dr. Donlan, once a frequent skydiver, today enjoys more conservative pursuits. He has also written/co-written Gamesmanship for Teachers: Uncommon Sense is Half the Work and The Secret Solution: How One Principal Discovered the Path to Success. Dr. Donlan can be followed on Twitter at www.twitter/ryandonlan and his website visited, at http://www.ryandonlan.com/


Steve Gruenert is the department chair of the Educational Leadership department at Indiana State University. He helped design the Indiana Principal Leadership Institute, has coordinated the Principal Preparation Program at Indiana State, and has been a principal at both the high school and middle schools levels. His research passion is school culture and climate, and he continues to engage with leaders at the national and international levels, helping them to think about the role of culture in school improvement.