INNOVATION AND IMPROVEMENT IN ACTION

Innovation and Improvement in Action

Innovation and Improvement in Action

Introduction

Scholars of leadership in education have advanced on an assumption that education authority is best understood by situating studies in schools, colleges, and universities, by treating these organizations as discrete and somewhat impermeable institutions, and by focusing on the behavioral repertoires and characteristics of administrators, trustees, and boards of education. While there is nothing inherently incorrect with this approach, we propose that education authority will be incompletely appreciated and insufficiently envisioned if studies fail to take account of the mediating function that education has performed in the political, economic, social, cultural, and moral development of the rising generation, particularly in locations like the United States, where authority over education is decentralized and where education managers are competently needed to assist learners organize transitions over a life course. (De Kock, 2004, 422) Like leadership in other localities, educational leadership takes place in the context of local, national, and global processes. It is influenced by devout and secular conviction systems, and its leverage is sensed in formal institutions and informal arenas and in large and small structures of association discovered inside and after the boundaries of formal schemes of schooling. Considered in this light, educational leadership is inevitably diffuse, convoluted, and laden with possibilities.

Traditional investigations of leadership in education have tended to aim on two dimensions: the traits of individuals who live at high-level administrative roles, and the nature of the organizations within which they do their work. Indeed, research on leadership in education has yielded a high capacity of mostly descriptive writings on school leaders, deans, and department chairs, and on superintendents, principals, and, since the 1980s, teachers who suppose quasi-administrative roles as teacher leaders. This body of literature has advanced on an assumption that the work of education managers is best appreciated in organizational terms, that is, as molded, if not vitally very resolute, by the environment of the formal institutions inside which they carry out their roles. Taken simultaneously, these characterizing characteristics constitute a now sixty-year-old tradition of work that has tended to join studies of leadership to school- or university-based, role-related, organizationally insular processes. Additionally, while some scholars have tried to address the orientations, experiences, and insights of women and minorities in diverse administrative positions, the bulk of the mainstream literature has acknowledged other than problematized the current power structures that have dominated educational administration at all grades of the U.S. education system. The outcome has been a literature that focuses on a somewhat slender sampling of white men in formal institutional settings. This longitudinal study was aimed at increasing our comprehending of how teachers learn. It was undertaken inside a national discovery program in education (De Kock, 2004, 422).

Discussion and Analysis

Beyond this sampling limitation, the literature on leadership in education also reflects theoretical constraints that have limited scholar's ability to capitalize on the full variety of opportunities that the field of education offers. For demonstration, studies begun in the 1940s and extending to ...