Title: Ready or Not
Author(s): Stacie G. Goffin, Valora Washington
Publisher: Teachers College Press, New York
ISBN: 9780807761557 Pages: 160 Year: 2019
At a time when so many of us are looking at a country and a world ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic and overwhelmed by the related economic and educational challenges, many of us are thinking, How did we get here, and where do we go now? It is perhaps in this context that reading Goffin and Washington’s latest edition of Ready or Not: Early Care and Education’s Leadership Choices—12 Years Later is a particularly refreshing experience. Reflecting on the original publication from 2007, the authors undertake a unique endeavor: They practice what they preach. They subject their own ideas to the adaptive leadership thinking that they suggest is necessary for the field of early care and education to live up to its great promise. The book takes a unique approach: It includes the four chapters of the original text, sandwiched between a prequel and a sequel that reinterpret the original work for a new time, and attaches postscripts to two chapters that require the most rethinking for the current context. The authors establish the credibility of their efforts early in the work by showing that true leadership in any field is about learning, embedding a section in the prequel that describes how their perspective has evolved over the last 12 years.
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