Over 400 schools throughout the world have adopted Invitational Education to foster innovative thinking, sustained positive action, and the creation of socially and emotionally safe schools. As educators are now involved in an epic rethinking of what they do and how they do it, Developing Inviting Schools provides a dependable guide for improvement. Written by two of the creators of the Inviting Schools movement—Purkey and Novak—along with Joan Fretz who works with public schools,...

Invitational Leadership is a fresh and innovative model based on a single theoretical framework. The model shifts from emphasizing control and dominance to one that focuses on connectedness, cooperation, and communication.Based on sound philosophical and psychological assumptions, Invitational Leadership has been tested and successfully applied by leaders in numerous fields, including administration, business, nursing, dentistry, counseling, and other professions. Invitational Lead...

This edited collection examines the means to create, maintain, and enhance welcoming colleges and universities in the United States and abroad with personal accounts, case studies, models, programs, and other frameworks written by practitioners in higher education. The contributors explain how they have created inviting classrooms; established friendly educational experiences both within and beyond the classroom; engaged faculty and enhanced the teaching experience; and developed instrumen...

My Rubber Knife LifeBy: William Watson PurkeyThe theme of My Rubber Knife Life is to share the author’s adventures of a lifetime. His granddaughter, Emily, urged him to write his memoirs. She assured him that, during his ninety years, he had a led a very unusual life.As a child, Purkey created an imaginary world with a rubber knife and a scary Humpty Dumpty. When he was eleven years old, his mother fibbed about his age and he became a United States Senate Page Boy. H...

"The Six-C approach provides a framework within which people can work together to attack the problem, not each other. By ending each conflict with conciliation, those who use this approach can do much more than resolve conflict—they can build each other up so future conflicts will be easier to resolve."—Bob Bowen, Chief Executive OfficerThe Mandt System, Inc.Don′t let conflict get in the way of meaningful collaboration!Confli...