Intentional Moves: How Skillful Team Leaders Impact Learning
By Elisa B. MacDonald
(Corwin Press, 2023 – Learn more)
Reviewed by Katie Durkin
When I first decided to become a leader in my school, I was overwhelmed. Transitioning from a colleague to a leader in any situation can be daunting, and I wanted to learn more about how to successfully make this transition and help support my colleagues in a new role.
Enter Intentional Moves: How Skillful Team Leaders Impact Learning by Elisa MacDonald. This comprehensive and thorough text helped me feel more confident transitioning to a leadership role and has continued to support me over the past four years as I’ve honed my skills as a team leader.
Intentional Moves is divided into three parts, with the first two parts dedicated to helping the audience understand the concept of leadership and gain essential information about adult learners. The third section examines 10 “primary intentions” that MacDonald suggests using as a team leader. These primary intentions are the moves that skillful team leaders make to help their teams be high functioning with intentional impact.
A reference book with an essential intro
In the first chapter MacDonald suggests approaching the hefty 500-page text more as a ready reference than a one-time read.
(For anyone familiar with Jennifer Seravallo’s The Reading Strategies Book or The Writing Strategies Book, MacDonald used those lengthy texts as a model to structure Intentional Moves and make it more manageable for busy readers.)
MacDonald does recommend reading the two beginning sections first to ensure you have a conceptual foundation before jumping into the heart of the book and its strategies. I would agree. The introductory chapters provided the framework I needed to really think carefully and thoughtfully about each of the ten primary intentions.
Diving deep into each Primary Move
What I appreciated most about the third section of the book was the organization. Each of the ten moves MacDonald provides has a specified chapter, and each chapter follows a similar format.
First, she gives an overview of the Skillful Team Leader (STL) move to ensure the audience understands what the primary intention is and how it benefits both the leader and those on the leader’s team. Then she discusses what the particular move promotes and when to use it and provides some suggested related reading. In every case, MacDonald provides incredibly valuable information that helps us see the leadership move in action (including ‘how to’s’ with scripts).
I found all of the suggestions MacDonald provides to be relatable and usable. As I was transitioning from a colleague/teacher to a leader, I really appreciated the subsection in each of the chapters labeled “Think Like a Teacher.” MacDonald lays out how the move she’s describing mirrors what teachers are already doing in their classroom. I found this to be comforting because it showed me that I was already doing some of these skillful moves with my students, and how, with MacDonald’s support, I could translate those skills into my new leadership role.
Each chapter about the primary moves is a treasure trove of information, with MacDonald also providing specific resources – such as tables, charts, and graphic organizers – to help readers make connections and put these moves into action. Because of the thoroughness of this book, I can see myself returning to Intentional Moves year after year, perusing the text to find different resources I can use depending on the needs of my team.
Making the 500 pages manageable
While I highly recommend this book, I don’t think I would be doing my due diligence with this review without emphasizing the length. Intentional Moves is a wealth of knowledge, but it is also long. In my case, I read it over the course of a year, starting in early summer and finishing during the school year.
I’m glad I didn’t rush through it because my slower pace allowed me time to really reflect on its ideas. I think that this would be a great book to read in a book club with a leadership team at your school. The chapters are manageable and each month, or week, could be devoted to a different topic discussed in the text.
If you would like to read it cover to cover, I would recommend saving it for the summer months so you’re ready to begin to apply the knowledge you gain at the start of the next school year. If your time is limited, I want to highlight particular chapters that I found to be important. Chapter 2 is extremely helpful – it focuses on what MacDonald calls the “Team Function, Impact Matrix.” This is a great starting point if you want to begin analyzing your own team or to use the matrix with your team members.
While the book includes 10 research-based intentions, the ones I found the most useful in my space and situation were Primary Intention 3, which focuses on group culture, community and trust; Primary Intention 8, which covers being intentional with how we use and analyze student work/data, and Primary Intention 10, which concludes the book by honing in on assessing your own leadership and potential for growth.
I commend this book to anyone who is already in a leadership position OR is thinking about pursuing one. MacDonald lays out ready-to-use strategies for skillful team leaders in manageable chapters and describes with insight and honesty how these strategies will play out with different team dynamics. From the beginning, this book felt authentic to me – like MacDonald was personally coaching me to become an effective team leader.
Now that I’ve been a team leader for four years, I can say that Intentional Moves is a book I’ve returned to time and again. If you’re looking for a ready-to-use text to help you evaluate your own leadership style and make plans for the future, I highly recommend getting a copy of Intentional Moves.
Read another review of Intentional Moves:
“Team Leader Moves That Impact Adult Learning”
Dr. Katie Durkin has been teaching middle school students for over a decade, and currently teaches English Language Arts at public Middlebrook School (6-8) in Wilton, Connecticut, where she is a 7th Grade Team Leader. Katie was the 2020 recipient of the Edwyna Wheadon Postgraduate Training Scholarship from the NCTE. She writes regularly for MiddleWeb.
Katie is a zealous reader of middle grade and young adult books and enjoys sharing her love and passion for reading with her students. In 2022 she earned her doctorate from Northeastern University, where her dissertation research examined the impact of classroom libraries on middle school students’ reading engagement.
