Breakfast Book Club: Leadershift
Five Wednesday mornings before the first bell, fifteen to twenty BC Principals,
one Maxwell book, finished before winter break.
Overview / The Assumption Gap
It’s 4:47 PM on a Friday. The Ministry’s latest pivot has just landed in your inbox. You are tired in a way that is structural, not occasional. You are quietly proud of the staff you’ve built and the kids you’ve come to know. And somewhere under all of it, you are aware that the way you led last year is not going to carry you into the next one.
That awareness is what we call the Assumption Gap: the quiet realization that growth does not just happen, even when you are doing the work. Leadershift is the framework that closes it. Five Wednesday mornings is how we read it together: the eleven essential shifts every seasoned leader has to make to stay relevant in the work, applied to your specific school.
“Growth doesn’t just happen, even when you’re doing the work. That’s the Assumption Gap. Leadershift is the framework that closes it.”
Peter Johnston
A book, not a binder.
Each cohort is built around one Maxwell book. You leave the series with a marked-up, dog-eared copy of Leadershift: yours, annotated, applied to your school. Not a slide deck destined for the same drawer as the binders from 2019. (We have all opened that drawer. We see no need to add to it.)
Five Wednesdays. Done before Christmas.
Just the right length to actually shift: long enough to install a habit, short enough not to feel like school. The kind of structured PD that respects a principal’s December.
A reading cohort, by design.
Not a webinar. Not a one-way broadcast. Up to twenty BC school leaders reading the same chapter in the same week, around the same virtual table, with the same Maxwell Leadership Certified Facilitator. The cohort IS the curriculum.
The Five Sessions
The two shifts that determine whether you stay relevant or quietly plateau. Why the leaders who keep getting better stop trying to play every instrument and start writing the score.
You will leave with: one shift you will start naming inside your school this week.
The two shifts most seasoned leaders quietly avoid, and the way avoiding them costs you the moral authority your staff is waiting for.
You will leave with: the one hard conversation you have been putting off, named, and a way to have it before December.
From running the school to building the leaders who will run the school next. The shift from being indispensable to being intentional, and why the strongest principals make themselves replaceable on purpose.
You will leave with: one VP, one new teacher, or one emerging leader in your building whose growth you will deliberately invest in across 2027.
The two shifts that change how Monday morning feels in your building. How leaders who connect first earn the right to direct, and why a team of similar voices is more fragile than it looks.
You will leave with: one staff meeting reframe (what you will do differently before winter break).
Three shifts that determine whether your leadership outlasts your title. The work of becoming the kind of principal a teacher names in their retirement speech twenty years from now.
You will leave with: one sentence that names what you actually want to leave behind in this work, and one act in January that puts it into motion.
The Format
Dates: Five Wednesdays, November 18, 25 · December 2, 9, 16, 2026
Time: 7:00 to 8:30 AM PT (90 minutes, before the first bell)
Format: Zoom · live, not recorded
Investment: $59+GST members / $79+GST non-members. The fee covers the cost of your book
Cohort: Capped at 20. First come, first served. A reading cohort of fifteen to twenty BC principals
Facilitator: Peter Johnston, Maxwell Leadership Certified Speaker · Facilitator · Coach
Sessions will not be recorded.
Real conversation requires confidentiality. What is shared in the room stays in the room, and the trust that creates is the point. (Also: your archive of unwatched recorded webinars is full enough.) The cohort does not end on 16 December, though. Each Breakfast Book Club has its own private sub-community inside the BCPVPA online community, where the relationships built over five Wednesday mornings carry forward into the rest of the school year.
Facilitator
Peter Johnston
Director of Professional Learning & Development, BCPVPA
Peter leads professional learning for BC’s principals and vice-principals and facilitates every Breakfast Book Club cohort himself. A Maxwell Leadership Certified Speaker, Facilitator, and Coach (and a DISC Behavioural Consultant), he built the BBC around a simple conviction: you have like-minded colleagues one virtual table away, and the right book, read together, is how you find them.
Register for the series.
Reserve your seat before the cohort fills.
Twenty principals, five Wednesday mornings, one book you actually finish. Registration is open now. First come, first served.
Pricing: $59+GST members · $79+GST non-members · fee covers the cost of your book
Refund policy: 30 days’ notice: 100% · 15–29 days: 50% · under 15 days: no refund
Questions: peter@bcpvpa.bc.ca · general PLD: pldinfo@bcpvpa.bc.ca
Save your seat
Also this season
Similar offering: BCPVPA also runs a three-day Leadershift Destination Learning retreat at the Inn at Laurel Point in Victoria (26–28 November 2026): same Maxwell book, same facilitator, different depth. Fully independent: read it together for five weeks, live it together for three days, or do both.
The season: Leadershift is the first of four Breakfast Book Club cohorts across 2026–27, followed by Everyone Communicates, Few Connect (January), Today Matters (April), and Strong Ground / Brené Brown (May–June).