‘Leading in the Baby Room: A Guide for Baby Room Leaders’ – a downloadable 82-page book with leadership stories and examples from the baby room

Description

Wow! I wrote a book! It started out as a booklet to accompany the Introduction to Baby Room Leadership but it quickly grew into something a lot bigger and deeper than that.

This is a book specifically for current or aspiring baby room leaders. It aims to take you on a professional learning journey, to grow your confidence and skills as a baby room leader through an action-based, empowering and supportive approach. If you’re looking for a place to start your leadership development and embody more of your potential as a baby room leader, I hope that you’ll find that right here.

Topics in the book – 

Starting with self-leadership

Crafting an inspiring vision

Leading with values

Reflecting on practice to spark change

Action-planning to improve practice

Motivating your team

Coaching to support professional learning

Why you should read this book

Here’s the thing: you deserve to grow and develop as a baby room leader. Baby room leadership isn’t just about maintaining the status quo, inheriting a baby room and keeping it ticking over. Your leadership is about making positive change and inspiring others. If you’re going to make that happen, you’ll need to see yourself as a leader and be ready to embrace leadership as a responsibility and a journey.

To embrace leadership as a journey, you’ll need support and targeted training and resources. You don’t deserve to constantly have to adapt training and materials designed for preschool or toddler room professionals. You need examples and reflections that come from within the baby room, and that’s what this book will offer.

You also deserve to have your time taken seriously. This book is not theoretical. Yes, there are helpful models and ways of thinking about situations to support genuine change and improvement, but the focus is on what you can do here and now to improve your leadership practically. We are action-orientated throughout the book. Each chapter has a series of practical steps that you can take based on what you’ve read about.

Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of lots of conversations with lots of different baby room leaders around the UK. In the reflections, stories and examples that are part of every chapter in this book, I’ve tried to capture the voices of all of these baby room leaders. The characters are made-up, but the experiences they share and the points they make all come back to real conversations I’ve had and real research that I’ve done.