There are many accomplished school leaders in Australia, but the profession has yet to develop credible systems for recognising their impact. This article provides a progress report on research initiated by professional associations of school principals, to provide school leaders with authentic and feasible methods for documenting their practice…

School leaders rightly tend toward collaboration and consensus-building when it comes to important decisions affecting students. But there are moments when, perhaps to their own surprise, they may find themselves willing to "go to the mat" on an important decision, whether consensus has been reached or not. Smith, a professor and chair…

Leading a long-established LLC as an Interim Director poses particular challenges and rewards. Uncertainties abound for the program and for the individual. Professionally speaking, taking on the hybrid role of faculty/ administrator can be both difficult and exciting. Ultimately, the solutions are in the details. Listening carefully to students,…

School leaders need to be able to give and receive feedback--to give it skillfully to teachers, and to receive it skillfully from, well, everyone. Most educators agree that feedback can be necessary and helpful--yet the unending cascade of new directives governing feedback often feel like a waste of time. In this article, the authors offer…

Framing communication into five strategies, we call upon our collective thirty years of public school administration and leadership identifying communication in the abstract and sharing application examples from practice. Together we have found that blending research and practice in the area of communication has proven to be successful in our…

This book explores ways in which educational leaders can apply the wisdom of the Tao in their day-to-day work in schools. It offers an alternative to the standard ways of western thinking to give the leader more possibilities when confronting a situation. We tend to value immediate and decisive action, winning, directing, and getting one's way.…

All higher education institutions are struggling with a rapidly changing market and financial landscape. Here is a management-centered analysis of what happened when a college president, recognizing the need to make a radical adaptation to those changes, tried moving a campus community to a new organizational model, without collegial consensus,…

Many articles about school improvement talk about data-driven instruction and statistics. In the barrage of evaluative numbers, school leaders can forget that teaching and leading are arts, not sciences. Positive outcomes depend on the ambience of the school, which is a direct result of the leadership style of its principal and assistant…

Faculty are a critical component to the success of the academic branch campus. In an environment where academic quality is constantly in question, the management and leadership of the academic staff are important, particularly when that staff is spread across multiple geographic locations. In this chapter, the author begins by describing the broad…

Self-authorship, as described by Baxter Magolda (2008), is about trusting ourselves (our internal voice), rather than relying on external voices to guide our lives. Young professionals attempt to navigate new experiences based on prior knowledge and begin to distinguish what others tell them from what they believe and value on their own. The path…

In this article we develop the arguments of Glatter on the importance of adopting a more "organisation-oriented" approach to educational leadership development. Through a critical review of current publications and national courses in the field, we argue that educational leadership is still very skills focussed at the expense of more sophisticated…

MBO (Management by objectives) was firstly put forward by Peter F. Drucker (who was a well-known scholar of management in America) in 1954. MBO was applied in many organizations after a number of management scholars developed and perfected it. MBO is a comprehensive and democratic systemic management style which is work-centered and…

In order to be able to discuss, in meaningful ways, how school leaders should be educated one needs to sketch the context in which they are going to lead, that is the visions and purpose of education and the schooling, which is dominant in society. In most societies one sees clashes of many discourses and cultural/political fights. In order to…

A camp director explains his supervisory style as being based on one-minute goals, one-minute praise, and one-minute reprimands; his experience as a parent; a decentralized model of staff supervision; and building relationships with staff by talking and listening to them. Gives American Camping Association standards for staff supervision and…

Community College District Twelve, a multi-college district serving a two-county area in southwestern Washington, has attempted to incorporate at administrative levels many of the humanistic, process-oriented principles of management discussed by Maslow and Maccoby. A concept of the ideal leadership style for District Twelve guides the selection…