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Refocusing School Leadership departs from the more traditional conceptualization of leadership, looking behind the daily routines of human resource leaders to highlight the assumptions and values and beliefs they bring to their work as well as the values and meanings embedded in the various contexts of school life. Starratt explores how educational leadership is grounded in one’s own humanity as well as in a deep appreciation of the richness, complexity, and enormous potential of people, and he attempts to restore the centrality of human development in the work of educating the young—education is not simply about educating minds, but about developing whole persons. Starratt argues for a refocusing of educational leadership on affirming and enabling those talents, dispositions, interests, life experiences, and cultural proficiencies that comprise their humanity to enrich the work of learning. The vision of the school should speak of the extraordinary possibilities for human achievement in our young people, as well as the talents of their teachers to nurture those possibilities. Starratt’s focus on leadership as human resource development will energize the efforts of faculty, staff, and students to improve the quality of learning—the primary work of schools. This book is a valuable resource to prepare aspiring leaders, whether administrators or teachers, to deal with the way schools are currently run and to imagine and create better ways to promote quality learning for all.
This fully updated Second Edition offers an unflinching and comprehensive overview of the full range of both practical and theoretical issues facing educational leadership today. Editor Fenwick W. English and 30 renowned authors boldly address the most fundamental and contested issues in the field, including culturally relevant and distributed leadership; critical policy and practice issues predicting the new century′s conflict; the paradox of changes; and the promises, paradoxes, and pitfalls of standards for educational leaders.
Successful School Leadership identifies the characteristics, behaviours and practices of successful and effective school leaders through the adoption of a systemic view of the quality of school organizations. Edited by Petros Pashiardis and Olof Johansson, chapters explore the similarities and differences between successful and effective school leaders and across various socioeconomic contexts. Capitalizing on the experiences of the international contributor team, this book will inform the preparation and further development provided to school leaders in an era where ministries of education, universities and multinational organisations (such as the OECD) are increasingly interested in the leadership of our schools. Systematic analyses of multi-perspective data provided from around the world and offers the readers a comprehensive picture of the key behaviours and practices central to successful and effective school leadership. An original contribution to the theoretical perspectives on the subject is derived through insights from empirical research, case studies, and bibliographical literature from the field.
This book is a longitudinal life history of the lives and work of primary school principals in Ireland. It provides a unique opportunity to peer inside the realities of leading schools in changing times. In a system that until recently did not prepare principals for the onerous roles and responsibilities, a small system with limited mobility, inter-personal relationships emerge as critical, frequently privileged over professional relationships. Consequently, principals struggle to bring about change, to build trust in order to cultivate a transformative leadership agenda, while several aspects of systemic structures and processes emerge as constraints on leadership capacity building. In the absence of comprehensive leadership portfolio development, classroom teachers, catapulted into the principal’s office, tend to be cautious and careful in ways that tend to perpetuate the status quo while putting a premium on the exercise of soft power and an over-reliance on the good will of colleagues. Several of the ‘leadership lessons’ that emerge from this in-depth analysis concur with an increasing international consensus that due to complexity and increasingly performative policy demands, learning about leadership for all is an absolute necessity. However, care must be taken to avoid overly scripted programmes. Critical to the cultivation of a professionally responsible leadership disposition, rather than capitulation to ‘technologies of control,’ is professional renewal cultivated through adequate attention to the Zone of Proximal Distance.
A bestseller--more than 300,000 copies sold, translated into seventeen languages, and featured in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Miami Herald, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Fortune; Shows how discoveries in quantum physics, biology, and chaos theory enable us to deal successfully with change and uncertainty in our organizations and our lives; Includes a new chapter on how the new sciences can help us understand and cope with some of the major social challenges of our timesWe live in a time of chaos, rich in potential for new possibilities. A new world is being born. We need new ideas, new ways of seeing, and new relationships to help us now. New science--the new discoveries in biology, chaos theory, and quantum physics that are changing our understanding of how the world works--offers this guidance. It describes a world where chaos is natural, where order exists ''for free.'' It displays the intricate webs of cooperation that connect us. It assures us that life seeks order, but uses messes to get there.Leadership and the New Science is the bestselling, most acclaimed, and most influential guide to applying the new science to organizations and management. In it, Wheatley describes how the new science radically alters our understanding of the world, and how it can teach us to live and work well together in these chaotic times. It will teach you how to move with greater certainty and easier grace into the new forms of organizations and communities that are taking shape.
Provides the most up-to-date and comprehensive review of contemporary research in education policy implementation. A companion to Allan R. Odden’s Education Policy Implementation, also published by SUNY Press, this book presents original work by a new generation of scholars contributing to education policy implementation research. The contributors define education policy implementation as the product of the interaction among particular policies, people, and places. Their analyses of previous generations of implementation research reveal that contemporary findings not only build directly on lessons learned from the past, but also seek to deepen past findings. These contemporary researchers also break from the past by seeking a more nuanced, contingent, and rigorous theory-based explication of how implementation unfolds. They argue that researchers and practitioners can help improve education policy implementation by not asking simply what works, but rather focusing their attention on what works, for whom, where, when, and why. Meredith I. Honig is Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Washington at Seattle.
To move forward in the school improvement process, school leaders must address the behaviors of difficult and resistant staff members while sending the message that a few people cannot halt change. This book will help school leaders understand how to prevent and address negative behaviors to ensure positive school change.
Schools are built and operated from a particular angle or philosophy. For example, Thomas Jefferson, American forefather, and past President of the United States believed that education was needed to "rake" the good individuals from the bad ones. John Dewey, a pragmatic, wanted to cultivate students with social and acceptable attitudes so as to make them good citizens. Horace Mann, the "Father of American Education," advocated "public" education so that all could be educated without concern for cost or availability. He believed real democracy would demand an educated citizen. However, such good and noble philosophical reasons have all but gone by the wayside in our current "modern" era of educating America's children. Though some educators and citizens can produce some modified version of why children need to be educated, much has been lost.In 1950, W. Edwards Deming was invited by General Douglas McArthur to help Japan recover from World War 2. As an American engineer, Deming focused on how to utilize research and data to restructure a weak nation. He longed for Japan to become a prosperous industrial nation. His philosophy, emphasis on data, and developed principles were well-received and Japan did become one of the world's industrial leaders, and even today, that legacy remains. In this book, the author addresses the Deming principles with applications being made to education and the American Public School system. Leaders who become principle-driven are more consistent, fairer, and produce schools that are better equipped to teach and train effective teachers and successful students. The purpose of this study is to help prod school leaders (principals, assistant principals, department heads, and lead teachers, to look beyond the status quo of leading by whims or worse, by the "seat of the pants." Principle-driven people are more predictable, more democratic, and more likely to be successful in bringing about changes needed to help public education train the minds and hearts of American children. Dr. Richard A. NeSmith
This volume originates from the International Study of Principal Preparation (ISPP), a collaborative project representing nearly a decade of research on principal preparation in countries throughout the world. The authors examine the dynamic changes that are affecting the way principals work and transforming the world of educational leaders.