Dr. Zach Mercurio discusses his new book The Power of Mattering: How Leaders Can Create a Culture of Significance. Zach comes from student affairs roots and focuses now on significance, meaning, purpose, and mattering at work. He describes how mattering differs from belonging and inclusion and how much mattering matters. He also shares a practical framework for cultivating mattering through three actionable practices: noticing, affirming, and needing.

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Dr. Annmarie Caño discusses her book Leading Toward Liberation: How to Build Cultures of Thriving in Higher Education. This book offers a transformative approach to leadership in higher education that centers justice, healing, and systemic change. Drawing from liberation psychology and Latin American liberation theology, Annmarie Caño advocates for a model of leadership, acompañamiento (accompaniment), which includes centering inner work, reading reality, and engaging in a process of co-creating with others.

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In his book The Caring University, Dr. Kevin McClure shares a transformative approach to higher education workplace culture. He argues that institutions must prioritize the well-being of faculty and staff to enhance student success. He challenges traditional norms that treat staff burnout and overwork as inevitable, instead advocating for an intentional, proactive, and sustained investment in employee care. Kevin shares how higher education leaders can re-imagine the workplace through a lens of organizational care.

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The editors of this book join to discuss contemplative practices for transformation. The volume shares stories that offer life experience, powerful examples, and concrete practices to help bring being, embodiment, and inner work to becoming and social change. They discuss the power of creativity and imagination in these times and point to the power of the dualities of anger and compassion, pain and joy, being and community, and more.

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Dr. Jessica Riddell discusses mindsets and 10 tools to rethink, reimagine, and rebuild institutions of higher education from her research and book Hope Circuits. She offers a critique of the status quo and a call to "challenge the actual in the name of the possible."

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Drs. Shannon Leddy and Lorrie Miller, co-authors of Teaching Where You Are: Weaving Indigenous and Slow Principles and Pedagogies, discuss indigenous approaches to teaching and learning. They integrate perspectives, histories, and values from many different Indigenous cultures across North America to offer insights to guide different ways of approaching teaching, learning, education, and being.

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Assessment experts and student affairs leaders discuss the multi-level assessment process and how to utilize it as a leadership practice. This conversation helps explain this approach, what it offers, examples of how it is being done, and tips. They discuss assessment beyond measurement, leading learning and operations, as strategic planning, and through relationships.

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Dr. Paul Dosal reflects on his 15 years as an innovator, champion, and leader of student success and well-being. He shares lessons from creating institutional transformations for student persistence and retention through deliberative and intentional approaches, breaking down silos, predictive analytics, and creating cultures of care. He highlights blending technological tools and personal connections and relationships for holistic and systematic approaches to student success and well-being.

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Dr. Megan Gerhardt discusses moving from intergenerational differences as tension to opportunities. She shares ways we stereotype, shame, and blame other generations, as well as the four practices to help make intergenerational differences a strength in organizations.

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Editors and authors of the new book Addressing Student Success at Small Colleges join to discuss the power of small colleges in their community, unique niches, and culture. They also discuss the challenges around changing students and families, staffing, financial viability and possibilities around innovation, collaboration, and adaptability.

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