School leadership during a pandemic: Navigating tensions

Purpose This paper explores, from the perspective of an Australian pracademic, how school leaders are leading during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Design/methodology/approach This essay explores the tensions navigated by school leaders leading during this time of global crisis, by looking to research as well as the author's lived experience. Findings The author finds that school leaders are navigating the following: accountability and autonomy; equity and excellence; the individual and the collective and well-being and workload. Originality/value This paper offers insights into school leadership, at all times but especially during times of crisis and during the COVID-19 pandemic

Redefining leadership in schools: The Cheshire Cat as unconventional metaphor

Moving away from the study of the principal as the central leader figure in schools, this article argues for an alternative narrative for school leadership. It draws on empirical data from a doctoral study to propose a new way of thinking about the school leader through the unusual metaphor of the Cheshire Cat. Examining the stories of 11 school leaders from one independent PK-12 Western Australian school, including middle leaders who are often absent in school leadership literature, this article provides insights into school leaders’ perceptions of themselves as leaders, and their private processes of decision making. These leader stories challenge the notion of school leadership as an archetypal story of a central figure, showing that it can instead be quiet, subtle, fluid, and even deliberately invisible. The visible-invisible Cheshire Cat school leader enacts collective vision, action, and transformation by acting as a deliberate and skilled collaborator in a complex, networked web. This reimagined school leader is one who makes careful decisions about how to best serve their communities, how to foster trust, and how to distribute power and agency, including when to appear and disappear, when to step forward and step back, when to direct and when to empower

Rethinking professional learning for teachers and school leaders

Purpose Situated within the conversation of the global push for teacher quality and for professional learning that positively shapes teaching practice in order to improve student learning, the purpose of this paper is concerned with transformational learning that actively shifts cognition, emotion, and capacity (Drago-Severson, 2009). Design/methodology/approach This paper is set against the backdrop of one independent, well-resourced Australian school during its professional learning intervention. It draws together findings from a narrative study that examined the lived experiences of 14 educators. The educators interviewed for this study included the researcher (also an educator at the school), two teachers, and 11 school leaders at middle and executive levels. Findings While the study set out to explore how educators’ experiences of professional learning (trans)form their senses of professional identity, it found that it is not just professional learning, but epiphanic life experiences that shape professional selves and practices. Learning is highly individualized, not one-size-fits-all. It is that which taps into who educators see and feel they are that has the most impact on beliefs, thoughts, behaviors, and practices. Originality/value This study suggests that transformational professional learning can occur in a wide range of life arenas. It recommends that the definition of professional learning be broadened, that teachers and schools think more expansively and flexibly about what it is that transforms educators, and about who drives and chooses this learning. Schools and systems can work from their own contexts to design and slowly iterate models of professional learning, from the bottom up and the middle out

Elevating the professional identities and voices of teachers and school leaders in educational research, practice and policymaking

Flipping the system is not as simple as upending the current decision-making tower in education; it is about eking out, listening to, and elevating the voices of those on the ground in our schools. Often, the subjective voices and intricate identities of teachers and school leaders are absent, marginalised, or simplified in educational research, practice, and policymaking. This chapter analyses interview data from an empirical study of one Australian school in order to interrogate the nexus between teacher, school leadership, and school as organisation, from the perspective of those working in classrooms and schools. The chapter advocates for considering the identities, voices, and professional autonomy of teachers, and also considering the complex, unpredictable work of school leaders as they navigate fluid and multiple identities, and competing pressures. It argues that the system has the potential to be an inclusive and collaborative crucible in which those working in schools are given platforms to speak, in which teacher and school leader experience and professionalism is trusted, and in which we seek to understand and grow, rather than to blame

Transformational Professional Learning: Making a Difference in Schools

Emerging from an education world that sees professional learning as a tool to positively shape teaching practice in order to improve student learning, Transformational Professional Learning elucidates professional learning that is transformational for teachers, school leaders, and schools. Written from the unique ‘pracademic’ perspective of an author who is herself a practising teacher, school leader, and researcher, this book articulates the why and the what of professional learning. It acts as a bridge between research and practice by weaving scholarly literature together with the lived experience of the author and with the voices of those working in schools. It covers topics from conferences, coaching, and collaboration, to teacher standards and leadership of professional learning. This book questions the ways in which professional learning is often wielded in educational settings and shows where teachers, school leaders, system leaders, and researchers can best invest their time and resources in order to support and develop the individuals, teams, and cultures in schools. It will be of great interest to teachers, leaders within schools, staff responsible for professional learning in school contexts, professional learning consultants, professional learning providers, and education researchers

Cyborgs, desiring-machines, bodies without organs, and Westworld: Interrogating academic writing and scholarly identity

This paper fashions a lens through which to view scholarly identity and the experience of academic writing. The lens of inquiry I apply is the metaphor of Season 1 of sci-fi HBO television show Westworld and its characters, especially its cyborg protagonist Dolores. Thrumming like electric currents through this lens of inquiry are Haraway’s theorization of the cyborg, the fictional worlds of science fiction and Wonderland, my own lived experience, and Deleuze and Guatta ri’s desiring - machines and bodies without organs. I engage in the cyborgic technology of writing in order to playfully explore what it means to be a cyborg academic operating in intersecting machinic worlds. I ask: Can we listen to our internal voices and write our own stories? Can we burn the world clean with our scholarship and the ways in which we interrogate ingrained and expected practices

Future Alternatives for Educational Leadership: Diversity, Inclusion, Equity and Democracy

This book offers provocations for what’s now and what’s next in educational leadership, simultaneously bringing the field both back to its basics—of equity, democracy, humanity, and education for all—and forward to productive, innovative, and necessary possibilities. Written during the pandemic reality of 2020, this collection shares the global voices and expertise of prominent and emerging leaders, scholars, and practitioners in education from the UK, the United States, South America, Canada, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East. The authors engage with the complexities and uncertainties of leading in education. They examine research, reflections, and real stories from which school leaders, education system leaders, policymakers, and researchers in the field of educational leadership, can learn, and in which they will find honesty, authority, and inspiration to guide the future of the field. The new perspectives and hopeful alternatives presented in this outstanding book are essential to researchers, school leaders, and policymakers, and are key to advancing education into positive and democratic futures

Coaching for professional growth in one Australian school: “oil in water”

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to build knowledge around the use of coaching to develop teachers’ professional practice in schools. It surfaces insider perspectives of teachers and school leaders in one Australian school, during the development of a model for teacher growth, which used a combination of cognitive coaching and the Danielson Framework for Teaching. Design/methodology/approach A narrative approach to interview data were used to examine the perspectives of 14 educators – teachers and school leaders – involved in the implementation of a school-based cognitive coaching model. Findings This study found that being a coach is an empowering and identity-shaping experience, that coaching for empowerment and capacity building benefits from a non-hierarchical relationship, and that coaching can be enhanced by the use of additional tools and approaches. Implementing a school-based cognitive coaching model, in conjunction with the Danielson Framework for Teaching, can have unexpected impacts on individuals, relationships, and organizations. As described by a participant, these butterfly effects can be non-linear, like “oil in water.” Originality/value In examining teacher and school leader perceptions of a coaching model that trusts teachers’ capacity to grow, this paper shows what coaching and being coached can look like in context and in action. It reveals that cognitive coaching and the Danielson Framework for Teaching can be congruent tools for positive teacher and organizational growth, requiring a slow bottom-up approach to change, an organizational culture of trust, and coaching relationships free from judgment or power inequity. It additionally shows that the combination of being a coach, and also being coached, can facilitate empowerment, professional growth, and changes in belief and practice

Wayfinding: Navigating complexity for sustainable school leadership

School leaders navigate a multiplicity of frameworks, roles, and expectations. The destination of school leaders is a complex and moving target, hard to pin down and even harder to set course for due to the complexities of the constantly moving parts of the reality of leading schools. The Australian Professional Standards for Principals reflect the overwhelming expectations placed on school leaders, who must be across global and local issues, curriculum, professional standards, policy, and wellbeing of all in the school community. Principals and senior school leaders constantly code switch between strategising, leading, teaching, administrating, coaching, counselling, complying, mediating, resolving, gatekeeping, resourcing, and negotiating. They are expected to align ethical action with coherent vision, deep understanding of context, and a working knowledge of education research. They are expected to be unwavering in their moral purpose and in the transparency, consistency, and logic of their decision making. As two senior leaders of pedagogy, curriculum, and staff development in schools in Australia, we authors bring to this chapter our lived experiences of school leadership. In addition to our leaderly identities, we explore our simultaneous researcher identities as, post-PhD, we continue to moonlight as researchers, academic writers, and academic readers. We are both also parents of primary school aged children, a role that influences how we approach leading. In this chapter, we explore the metaphor of wayfinding as a lens to theorise how school leaders navigate concurrent and complementary identities to lead with purpose, compassion, knowledge, and intentionality, in ways that are sustainable for themselves and their schools

Cutting apart together: A diffracted spatial history of an online scholarly relationship

Drawing on the notion of cutting together-apart introduced by Karen Barad and combining it with Lefebvre’s notion of a flaneur (f. flâneuse) who moves between temporal, spatial and political relationships, this article performs a collaboration mediated by social media, namely blogging and tweeting. It draws on the notion of history, space, and social relationships to describe how two women met online. This collaboration as inquiry is about working together despite our differences – finding places to meet rather than diverge, and to dialogue rather than debate. Through a duo-ethnography of how this relationship worked and did not work, notions about how the digital world can act as a mediator for academic work are explored