“Todd Whitaker and Annette Breaux offer concise, practical suggestions for reinforcing effective teaching practices. The Ten-Minute Inservice is a powerful resource for school leaders who want to make the most of every opportunity to promote growth and improve school climate.”
―Justin Baeder, director, The Principal Center

“An integral piece of building teacher capacity is the transformation of faculty meetings, from a time for sitting and listening to an opportunity for reflecting and learning. Whitaker and Breaux demonstrate how simply that can be done with quick, easily implemented inservice activities that focus on the fundamentals of teaching.”
―John G. Gabriel, principal, John Champe High School, Loudoun County, Virginia; coauthor, Dealing with the Tough Stuff

All school leaders want to help their teachers become more effective—but most administrators have too much to do and not enough time to do it. The Ten-Minute Inservice shows you how to enhance both teaching and learning in the most efficient and effective way possible.

This step-by-step guide helps principals and staff developers improve teaching school-wide through weekly ten-minute inservices. These forty high-impact inservices—which can be incorporated seamlessly into staff meetings or offered as stand-alone training—cover a range of topics, from handling challenging behavior and motivating students to engaging parents and making lessons meaningful. Each inservice includes helpful tips on how to introduce the topic, sample scripts to follow, and implementation activities to ensure that the lessons learned really stick. Also included is free access to downloadable PDFs and PowerPoint slides of key material from the book to save you time and make your workshops even more effective.

With this book in hand, you’ll be making yourself a great school leader, ten minutes at a time!

Praise for The Ten-Minute Inservice

“As a principal, I know firsthand how difficult it is to provide meaningful PD with limited time. Whitaker and Breaux provide compelling and practical examples that all leaders can seize upon to deliver powerful learning opportunities for teacher improvement.” —Eric Sheninger, principal, New Milford High School, New Jersey; National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) Digital Principal 2012 Award Recipient

“Whitaker and Breaux provide an extremely practical guide for effectively and efficiently transforming professional development and school improvement at any school.” —Dr. Jeffrey Zoul, assistant superintendent for teaching and learning, Rock Island-Milan School District, Illinois

“Creative People Must Be Stopped is among the best books ever written about human imagination in the workplace. David Owens is a master innovator, having practiced his craft as a product designer, researcher, teacher, creativity coach, and executive. The breadth and depth of his experience fills every page of this little gem, which is chock full of hundreds of big and little steps that you can take right now to do more creative work and to lead more innovative teams and organizations.”
―Robert Sutton, Stanford Professor, Author of the New York Times bestseller Good Boss, Bad Boss

“This is no rarefied academic treatment on innovation as an abstract ideal, but a nuts and bolts handbook to dissecting our thought patterns about innovation. Owens dispels the myth that innovation is a binary trait that either exists or does not in a given product, process or business model. Creative People Must be Stopped addresses the myriad ways that novel ideas can fail in the marketplace. Working through a combination of thought experiments and real world examples, the book demonstrates how failures in understanding the context for innovation can prove every bit as deadly to progress as failures of imagination.”
―Mark Rowan, President, Griffin Technology Inc.

“Dave Owens has delivered the survival guide every would-be innovation team requires before entering the fracas battle of bringing ideas to life. Read ‘6 Ways We Kill Innovation’ if you are serious about making stuff and making stuff happen in this dangerous world for good ideas and the creative people who love them.”
―Peter Durand, Alphachimp Studio, Leading expert in graphic facilitation

While most organizations give lip service to promoting innovation and creative ideas, they all too often sabotage “outside-the-box” thinking among the rank and file. In this book, David Owens has identified the six dominant types of constraints (individual, group, organizational, industry-wide, societal, and technological) that can keep creative new ideas from being formulated, developed into marketable products and services, or adopted by the intended users. Creative People Must Be Stopped organizes these innovation killers into a conceptual framework that demystifies what innovation is, how it happens, and how we stop it without even trying. This proven framework has been used to diagnose the primary causes of innovation failure within hundreds of organizations that have gone on to develop strategies that foster innovation rather than stopping it in its tracks.

Filled with illustrative examples from real-world organizations, the book explores each type of constraint in detail and shows how it operates and why. This analysis is followed by a discussion of ways that particular constraints can be overcome. Every chapter concludes with a “Constraints Diagnostic Survey.” These asessments are based on Owens’s research and consulting work, and they provide a pointer to the most urgent and potentially limiting constraints an organization may be facing. In addition, Creative People Must Be Stopped contains an exercise tool designed to help move leaders toward action to overcome the constraints that have been identified. Owens also explores the big-picture issues that can arise when spearheading an innovation team and discusses the steps needed to help organizations become more strategic about innovation.

Creative People Must Be Stopped gives leaders the tools they need to foster an atmosphere of creativity and innovation.