Overview

Leadership in Crisis? Restructuring Principled Practice focuses directly on the needs, interests and concerns of school principals as they respond to a turbulent, unpredictable and under-resourced shift to school-based management. It addresses the implications of a wide range of aspects of the current systemic restructurings of Australian state schooling, with some comparative aspects (England, New Zealand, Asia-Pacific) for educational leadership. It surveys and analyses current developments, drawing on case-studies and other research in the field, and it is sensitive to the opportunities as well as the limitations of the current situation.

Accepting that principals are the key to the success or failure of the whole enterprise of schooling reform, and that the business of educating the citizens of the future must continue to be carried out, this book seeks to outline and justify principled practice for principals engaged in school-based management. Hence, while it acknowledges the specificities of local contexts and the particular forms prescribed by state and national frameworks, Leadership in Crisis? attempts to establish broad principles for leadership which are generalisable beyond the Australian situation.

The driving force of the book is a stress on leadership over management, and its call for principled, humane, ethical leadership.

Proudly published by Post Pressed

Table of Contents

• A Principled Practice for New Times
  John Knight and Lisa Catherine Ehrich
• Principals as Agents of Change in New Times
  Merv Wilkinson
• Criteria for Leadership in Times of Rapid Change
  Anne Feeney
• Progressive Attempts to Turn Crisis into Challenge
  Terry Simpson
• En/Gendering Leadership: Reconceptualising our Understandings
  Brigid Limerick and Neil Cranston
• Leadership for Schools as Learning Organisations
  Peter Galbraith
• Changing Schools: Creating a Discourse for Teacher Leadership
  Ross Brooker, Bob Elliot and Ian Macpherson
• Principals and Preventive Legal Risk Management
  Doug Stewart
• An Ethical Analysis of Leadership Competence for a Competitive Educational Market
  Ray Land
• Flexible Delivery of Continued Professional Education for Principals: Models, Issues and Trends
  Roy Lundin
• A Case-study of Educational Leadership under School-Based Management
  Anne Feeney
• Principal's Experiences of the Professional Development of Teachers
  Lisa Catherine Ehrich
• Taking Control in Times of Crisis
  Dawn Penney and Brad Fox
• Principals with Principles: A Crisis of Leadership in New Zealand Education
  Keith Sullivan
• Positioned Leadership: Education and the Politics of Location in Rural and Remote Postcolonial Australia
  Cathryn McConaghy
• The Cultural Politics of Leadership in Indonesian Schools
  Ella Yulaelawati
• The Principalship in Fiji Secondary Schools: A Critical Postcolonial Perspective
  Priscilla Qolisaya Puamau
• Enriching the Learning Community: Leadership and Informal Education at School
  Peter Willis
• Prefatory Notes on a Principled Human-Centred Practice
  Lisa Catherine Ehrich and John Knight

Reviews

...What sets this collection of essays apart from others of similar focus is its attempt to go beyond criticism, offer (alternative) principles for dealing with the 'hard times, new times' of rapid change in education... these are not simply calls to return to a mythical 'golden past'... the authors are not content to think within the bounds of 'what is' but to broaden these debates to consider 'why now?' and 'what now?'

...And what might the parameters and particulars of a reconstructed educational leadership look like, which foregrounds principles of care, responsibility, respect and knowledge? As one author notes, 'these are not simple issues'. The sketches found in this collection, however, make significant contributions to their understanding.

Trevor Gale