Barbara Kohm worked for 14 years as an elementary school principal and for 10 years as an early childhood program director. During this time, her school won a national Blue Ribbon Award for Excellence in Education, and she learned that deep changes in curriculum and instruction required even deeper changes in power relationships and information flow. As she and her staff worked to raise student achievement, they found that they needed to think differently about their relationships with one another, their own learning, and about how they defined success. Most important, they needed to challenge assumptions that they held as absolute truths. She drew on these lessons in writing this book. She now works as a consultant and mentor to principals in a variety of school districts and is the author of “Improving Faculty Conversations” in the May 2002 issue of Educational Leadership. She can be reached at bgkohm@yahoo.com.