The Jossey-Bass Reader on Educational Leadership

So far this book has been informative, speaking of strategies school leaders need to put in place that enhance school culture, observations, and community building.

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The leader, at the helm of an organization, charismatic, visionary, influential, and most definitely in charge of everything, is a bit elusive in this collection of book chapters on educational leadership. John Gardner describes a leader as, "an individual (who) induces a group to pursue objectives held by the leader or shared by the leader and his or her followers" (p. 17), but even this is qualified by a parenthetical "or leadership team." Jerome Murphy negates the notion of the heroic leader, replacing it with the unheroic leader - one who recognizes his/her own weaknesses, listens more than speaks, and lets go in order to take charge. Megan Tschannen-Mann's leader is one who fosters trust, sets the tone, and serves as a model, but emphatically does not order people around. Terence Deal and Kent Peterson's leader is among other things historian, symbol, potter, poet, and actor, but definitely not controller. Robert Starratt's leader has "presence," bringing him or herself fully and authentically into interactions with others, and being "wide awake to what's in front of" him or her (p. 56). Jack Welch this is not.Permeating almost every chapter of this book is a different conception of leadership, one that takes the emphasis off one heroic individual, and distributes leadership throughout the organization. If leaders exist, they are, according to Thomas Sergiovanni, to be "leaders of leaders" (p. 376). "It's just not possible any longer," writes Peter Senge, "to "figure it out" from the top, and have everyone else following the orders of the "grand strategist" (p. 4). An underlying theme, made explicit in Margaret Grogan and Charol Shakeshaft's chapter, is that the appropriate form of leadership in educational settings is (and you can agree or disagree with this) female in character: relationships are webs, not pyramids; power is exercised "with" and not "over." Sergiovanni agrees, contending that the female style is more democratic, participatory, and inclusive than the male style.Much of the content of this reader is an exploration, with examples and cases from education (most obviously K-12) of this distributed, participatory form of leadership. There are riches here if you have the patience to wade through the 500+ pages and find them. For example, in Roland Barth's chapter on risk, he argues that individuals must be allowed to fail if they are to learn: "If you take away a person's right to fail, you take away her right to succeed" (p. 291). And Stephen Fink & Anneke Markholt's discussion of expertise in teaching - and in particular the inadequate job we've done of defining it - is enlightening. Starratt's chapter on presence - I wasn't holding out too much hope for the value of this one - turns out to be inspiring.If you reflect on the vision of leadership in education presented here, you may ask what it is about education (as opposed to business or the military, for example) that calls for this form of leadership. And you may also wonder, with increasing bureaucratic control over much of education at all levels, whether participatory leadership, which seeks to empower the many in an organization, isn't at odds with the directives coming down from the institutional or corporate administration, or school district. In the end, though, nobody's leading if there isn't buy-in, and essentially that's perhaps the biggest theme of this book, and its strength. Its weakness is a lack of much discussion of crisis leadership, which, no matter what the organization, requires a more directive style. Given the diversity of educational contexts, I doubt you'll read it from cover to cover, but it is worth dipping into for the parts that speak to you.

Great book. Well written and easy to read

Great leadership resource, views from many different school leaders.

Awesome 👍

Came on time, no problems!

Well organized