Connecting Leadership And Learning: Principles For Practice

by John E. C. MacBeath

This book returns us to some fundamental questions about the purpose of schools, the nature of learning and the qualities of leadership which make schools authentic places of learning.

206 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 25, 2008

Reviews

[Stuart Macalpine · Rating 5 out of 5]

MacBeath as Professor of Educational Leadership at Cambridge University brilliantly puts the moral, humane and down-right pragmatic case for Leadership for learning focused on leadership as a distributive behaviour, a deep understanding and focus on learning as a moral drive, professional dialogue and shared responsibility and accountability for improving learning. His work is completely aligned to our work East campus of UWCSEA and our learning about leadership alongside Cognitive Coaching, Fieldwork (Pam Harper) and Adaptive Schools (if we go there).

It does however offer a few new points or refinements: his mapping of educational leadership dialogue provides a great frame of reference; his layer cake of interconnected learning is again a great thought tool; his emphasis on learning being highly premised upon 'social and biological' considerations and created by an interplay of 'social, emotional and cognitive processes' is a good reminder and tempting to go back to our learning principles; and he gives a name to a few phenomena that I hadn't really had a monika for such as 'EBA - economic bureaucratic accountability' for the effort in, grades out model of accountability.

Overall a great book, and it helps that such as authoritative voice is so clear about the need for more complex and contextualised answers to educational improvement and that the focus is on learning focused relationships and dialogue.