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This site is a combination of research diary for my current university project (candidate for Doctor of Education at the University of Wollongong) and practitioner resource. I started out with the conviction that I could identify leadership forms that were appropriate for supporting schools through the transition to 21st Century Teaching and Learning. This didn’t survive a rigorous review of the literature on various forms of diffuse leadership practice, because distributed leadership practices are not well understood, but it’s still an idea out there somewhere.
As a result of this rather vexed and part-time journey, the site has bits everywhere. There is still a fascination with Web 2.0 and the use of technology in the classroom, because it is for me, as an educational leader, something of an enabler. But we are moving on from there to think about why some schools find it easy and some hard – and it’s not all about money.
Change is, ultimately, the most important and the most difficult part of schools to manage.
Imagine this scenario: you have had a successful teaching career over a decade. You’ve used the internet to do research; all your uni essays were typed in word; you use a personal computer extensively to prepare work for your students; you have even adapted to the extensive use of e-mail in the workplace. By all accounts, you are a competent user of technology, lacking only the courage to set up the multifunction remote required to run all the gadgets in your home entertainment system.
Then some expert appears to tell you that this isn’t enough and you missed the point entirely. You are informed that your assumptions that you could use information technology as a tool to enhance learning in a traditional way were wrong. ICT will not enhance your classroom teaching: it will transform it beyond all recognition. In fact, unless you embrace this new paradigm of teaching, you are failing to prepare students to prepare for their future. Rather, you are preparing them for your past.
The reaction of many practitioners is to keep the impending shift in the earth’s axis at arm’s length, hoping to engage with it when it has the bugs worked out, or to avoid thinking about it at all as retirement beckons. Such ostrich-like behaviour has its precedents, but it’s hardly appropriate behaviour when we know students are already inhabiting a different space from that of their predecessors, and that they are heading for a workplace requiring quite different skills from the one’s developed in the traditional classroom. As Gardner argued:
I discern two legitimate reasons for undertaking new educational practices. The first reason is that our current practices are not actually working… the second reason is that conditions in the world have changed significantly. (Howard Gardner)
So what makes people change their pedagogical practice? Part of the answer seems to be the much debated concept of Distributed Leadership. That is the focus of this study and this site: I am arguing that DL is part of the black box of organisational behaviour that differentiate the effective from ineffective school.
From http://www.news.com.au/common/imagedata/0,,6047877,00.jpg
Why should we continue teaching in the same paradigm as we did a century ago? The world has changed. How do we get there? You need the right leadership form.
Library of Congress CC
