Sustainable Leadership E-Book

Andy Hargreaves

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Serie: JB Leadership Library in Education
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2005

Seitenzahl: 449

Beschreibung

In Sustainable Leadership, Andy Hargreaves and Dean Fink address one of the most important and often neglected aspects of leadership: sustainability. The authors set out a compelling and original framework of seven principles for Sustainable Leadership characterized by Depth of learning and real achievement rather than superficially tested performance; Length of impact over the long haul, beyond individual leaders, through effectively managed succession; Breadth of influence, where leadership becomes a distributed responsibility; Justice in ensuring that leadership actions do no harm to and actively benefit students in other schools; Diversity that replaces standardization and alignment with diversity and cohesion; Resourcefulness that conserves and renews leaders' energy and doesn't burn them out; and Conservation that builds on the best of the past to create an even better future. This book is a volume in the Jossey-Bass Leadership Library in Education--a series designed to meet the demand for new ideas and insights about leadership in schools.

Leseprobe

Contents

Acknowledgments

The Authors

Introduction: Sustainability and Unsustainability

Leadership and Change

The Need for Sustainability

Corporate Sustainability

Unsustainable Educational Leadership and Change

Toward Sustainable Change

Sustainable School Leadership

Seven Principles of Sustainability

Studying Sustainability

Conclusion

Chapter 1: Depth

A Sense of Purpose

Deep and Broad Learning

Slow Knowing

Conclusion

Chapter 2: Length

The Problem of Leadership Succession

Succession Outside Education

Succession Planning

Succession Management

Succession Duration and Frequency

Succession and the Self

Conclusion

Chapter 3: Breadth

Lone Leaders

Toward Distributed Leadership

Aspiration or Actuality?

The Distributed Leadership Continuum

Conclusion

Chapter 4: Justice

Unjust Leadership

Just Leadership

Becoming More Just

Conclusion

Chapter 5: Diversity

Biodiversity

Organizational and Cultural Diversity

Denying Diversity

Restoring Diversity

Networked Diversity

Conclusion

Chapter 6: Resourcefulness

Improvement and Energy

Closed and Open Systems

Mechanical Waste

Ecological Restraint and Renewal

Three Sources of Renewal

Conclusion

Chapter 7: Conservation

Combing and Recombining Elements from the Past

Wisdom and Memory

Dismissing the Past

Forgetting the Past

Romanticizing the Past

Renewing the Past

Conclusion

Conclusion: Sustainability in Action

A Meal, Not a Menu

Five Action Principles

Spheres of Sustainability

Last Word

Research Sources

Index

MORE PRAISE FOR

Sustainable Leadership

“Modern educational leadership is driven by moral purpose, and in Sustainable Leadership, Hargreaves and Fink give us a first-class primer on how to make such leadership ubiquitous.”

—DAVID HOPKINS, HSBC Chair of International Leadership and formerly chief advisor to the Secretary of State on School Standards, Department for Education and Skills, England

“When leaders depart from their initial values and purposes, their organizations change in untoward ways. In Sustainable Leadership, the authors convince us that when leaders focus on what is truly important and sustainable, organizations will thrive. This is, thank God, no cookbook. It is a distinctive contribution to the literature.”

—SEYMOUR B. SARASON,

professor of psychology, emeritus,

Yale University

Copyright © 2006 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Excerpt from the Nobel Lecture by Wangari Maathai © The Nobel Foundation 2004.F. R. Scott’s poem “Villanelle for Our Time” reprinted with the permission of William Toye, literary executor for the Estate of F. R. Scott.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hargreaves, Andy.

Sustainable leadership / Andy Hargreaves, Dean Fink. — 1st ed.

p. cm. — (Jossey-Bass leadership library in education)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7879-6838-0 (alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-7879-6838-2 (alk. paper)

1. School management and organization. 2. Educational leadership.

I. Fink, Dean, 1936– . II. Title. III. Series.

LB2805.H32 2006

371.2—dc22 2005013835

THE JOSSEY-BASS

Leadership Library in Education

Andy Hargreaves

Consulting Editor

THE JOSSEY-BASS LEADERSHIP LIBRARY IN EDUCATION is a distinctive series of original, accessible, and concise books designed to address some of the most important challenges facing educational leaders. The authors are respected thinkers in the field who bring practical wisdom and fresh insight to emerging and enduring issues in educational leadership. Packed with significant research, rich examples, and cutting-edge ideas, these books will help both novice and veteran leaders understand their practice more deeply and make schools better places to learn and work.

ANDY HARGREAVES is the Thomas More Brennan Chair in Education in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College and the author of numerous books on culture, change, and leadership in education.

For current and forthcoming titles in the series, please see the last pages of this book.

To our children,

Stuart, Lucy, Danielle, and Tracy,

environmentalists, educators, and advocates

whose contributions to the public good

will live on long after this book and its authors

have been forgotten

Acknowledgments

Much of this book arises out of research conducted for and funded by the Spencer Foundation of the United States under the title Change Over Time? A Study of Culture, Structure, Time and Change in Secondary Schooling and codirected by Andy Hargreaves and Ivor Goodson. We have also drawn on two other projects: Change Frames, funded by the Ontario Minister of Education Transfer Grant in partnership with one of the province’s largest school districts, and Succeeding Leaders, supported by the Ontario Principals Council.

We were privileged to have outstanding research support on all projects from colleagues who worked with us to collect, organize, and analyze the case study data on which we have drawn in this book. We are indebted to Michael Baker, Colin Biott, Carol Brayman, Martha Foote, Corrie Giles, Ivor Goodson, Shawn Moore, Paul Shaw, Robert White, and Sonia James Wilson. Outstanding administrative and research assistance was provided by Nancy Stahl, Paul Chung, and Kristin Kew in Boston and by Leo Santos in Toronto.

Our greatest professional thanks go to the teachers and administrators who worked openly with us, gave generously of their time, and responded with continual criticism to draft reports of our findings. We thank Lucy Hargreaves for providing insight and information on Education for Sustainable Development initiatives in particular.

Our greatest personal gratitude and love is reserved for our wives, Pauline and Ramona, who for over seventy years between them have sustained each of us beyond measure.

A.H.

D.F.

The Authors

Andy Hargreaves is the Thomas More Brennan Chair in Education at the Lynch School of Education in Boston College. The mission of the chair is to promote social justice and to connect theory and practice in education. Raised in a Northern English mill town, Hargreaves taught primary school and lectured at several English universities, including Oxford University, before moving in 1987 to the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Canada, where he later cofounded and directed the International Center for Educational Change. He took his current position at Boston College in 2002. Andy Hargreaves has authored and edited more than twenty-five books in education, which have been published in many languages. His previous book Teaching in the Knowledge Society: Education in the Age of Insecurity received outstanding book awards from the American Educational Research Association and the American Library Association.

Dean Fink is an independent consultant with extensive experience in over thirty countries. Born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada’s largest manufacturing city, he spent thirty-four years in public education, thirty of which were in leadership roles as department head, assistant principal, principal, and superintendent. After taking early retirement in 1993 and completing his Ph.D., he wrote Changing Our Schools (with Louise Stoll), followed by Good Schools/Real Schools: Why School Reform Doesn’t Last, and It’s About Learning and It’s About Time (with Louise Stoll and Lorna Earl). His most recent book, published in 2005, is Leadership for Mortals: Developing and Sustaining Leaders of Learning.

Introduction: Sustainability and Unsustainability

The Choices for Change

Recognizing that sustainable development, democracy and peace are indivisible is an idea whose time has come.

Wangari Maathai, Kenya’s assistant minister for environment, natural resources, and wildlife,

Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech,

Oslo, December 10, 2004

Leadership and Change

Change in education is easy to propose, hard to implement, and extraordinarily difficult to sustain. Pilot projects show promise but are rarely converted into successful systemwide change. Innovations easily attract early enthusiasts, but it is harder to convince more skeptical educators to commit to the hard work of implementation. Beacon schools and lighthouse schools may shine brightly, but they often draw outstanding teachers and sometimes even the best students from schools around them, leaving these other schools to skulk in the shadows. Large-scale literacy reforms achieve early results but soon reach a plateau. Extraordinary effort and extreme pressure can pull underperforming schools out of the failure zone, but they quickly fall back as soon as the effort is exhausted and the pressure is off.

Sustainable improvement depends on successful leadership. But making leadership sustainable is difficult, too. Charismatic leaders may lift their schools to impressive heights, but the leaders’ shoes are usually too big for successors to fill. When great leaders move to new challenges elsewhere, they are often tempted to take their best people with them, placing all they previously achieved in jeopardy. And while heroic leaders can achieve great things through investing vast amounts of their time and energy, as the years pass, this energy is rarely inexhaustible, and many of these leaders and the people who work for them ultimately burn out.

Better-quality education and leadership that will benefit all students and last over time require that we address their basic sustainability. If the first challenge of change is to ensure that it’s desirable and the second challenge is to make it doable, then the biggest challenge of all is to make it durable and sustainable. What does sustainability mean? What does it demand of us? What strategic work do we need to do to bring it about? We address these fundamental issues of educational leadership and change in this book.

The Need for Sustainability

Our book on sustaining and sustainable leadership is being produced in the year that the United Nations is launching its Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005–2014). In the words of renowned naturalist and environmental activist Jane Goodall, it is a time to “curb the hunger to consume,” to recognize that “our appetite is causing extinction,” because not only are we depleting natural resources beyond the point where they can be renewed, but we are also undermining the very foundations of entire ecosystems and of biodiversity itself.1

The prominence and urgency of having to think about and commit to preserving sustainability in our environment highlights the necessity of promoting sustainability in many other areas of our lives. Foremost among these are leadership and education, where our consuming obsession with reaching higher and higher standards in literacy and mathematics within shorter and shorter time lines is exhausting our teachers and leaders, depleting and making it hard to renew the resource pool from which outstanding educators are drawn and turning vast tracts of the surrounding learning environment in humanities, health education, and the arts into barren wastelands as almost all people’s achievement and improvement energies are channeled elsewhere.