Caring Enough to Lead was an easy to read, interesting, thought-provoking book. By sharing personal experiences and perspectives in his book, Dr. Pellicer helped me begin to understand what it means to be a leader and to focus on some of the attributes and attitudes of an effective leader. The questions at the end of the chapters caused me to stop and reflect on my role as a leader in my school and in my classroom. The short chapters in the book enabled me to read one or more chapters at a time depending on how much time I had available.

Leonard Pellicer posed many questions in his book, Caring Enough to Lead. By using questions as chapter titles he captured my attention as an educator. I found myself writing comments to myself throughout the book because of the thought provoking questions that he presented. In Pellicer's book, he quotes Autry(1991)"...proper management involves caring for people, not manipulating them." This sums up to me how caring is the most important leadership quality. As a special educator, one of my favorite quotes was "...a leader without the capacity to give away love and caring is seriously handicapped!"

Leonard Pellicer's Caring Enough To Lead is an appropriate reading assignment for our Teacher Leadership course. While Pellicer provides his insights on educational leadership, he also prompts the reader to explore his/her thoughts on topics and therefore allows the reader to become a part of the discussion. Beginning with the title of the book, Pellicer's work is compatible with the Teacher Leadership 655 course organizing themes of leadership and stewardship. Pellicer's chapters focus on the specific goals of the course that include self evaluation of educational leadership, applying reform and renewal strategies, and demonstrating effective problem solving skills. In chapter twenty of the book, Pellicer states, "People choose to follow a leader because they can identify with the leader's values... The leader's actions serve as the conformation that the head, the heart, and the hand are truly joined, and the leader is indeed authentic, or as I like to call it, congruent" (122). I find this statement by Pellicer to be the strongest connection to the course because all of our class discussions have an underlying theme of discovering leadership values. I think about our course as I prepare to attend, on the way home from class, and sometimes on the job a thought will pass through my head. I'm still thinking about the information that I gleaned from a specific session or I may be pondering some other question prompted by discussion or reading. My purpose for taking the Teacher Leadership class was to generically explore my leadership skills but after reading Pellicer, I am more interested in learning how to develop skills to become a "congruent leader" so that I can make things better for others.