Strategic leadership
Strategic leadership is based on long-term planning. It involves establishing and maintaining systems, allocating resources, and communicating vision. Principals need to maintain the focus clearly on the central vision for their school.
Breaking the Leadership Rules: The Five New Rules of Leadership
by Pamela Macklin
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This article summarises what makes an effective school leader, and includes leadership examples from political and business sectors. The author emphasises the need for school leaders to be skilled as managers, particularly in knowing how to manage complex school environments and how to get the most value out of the system.
Breaking the Leadership Rules: What is the Educational ‘Bottom Line’?
by Paul Power
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This paper from the Australian Curriculum Corporation Conference, Breaking the Leadership Rules, held in Hobart in 2004, is a quick read. The writer, Paul Power, pulls together the features of leadership that are successful both in education and in the business world.
Building leadership capacity: helping leaders learn
by John West-Burnham
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This National College for School Leadership (NCSL) thinkpiece from John West-Burnham presents an argument supporting the notion of distributed leadership in schools. A key idea in the argument is that organisations that are focused on the learning of children should have structures that reflect learning relationships.
Do Schools Work?
by Pat Thomson
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This article invites school communities to pay attention to what children really enjoy and will benefit from in terms of developing genuine expertise from their experience of school.
Enchanted Headteachers: Sustainability in Primary School Headship
by Ronnie Woods
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This report looks at the notion of 'enchanted headteachers'. These are principals who have successfully led their schools with commitment and enthusiasm. The author conducted a series of interviews with long-standing principals and examined the characteristics that have made them successful.
Mission Impossible? A Strategic View of Efforts to Lead the Transformation of Schools
by Brian Caldwell
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This article considers the challenges and possibilities for school leaders as they seek to transform schools, and provides examples of schools trying different models of leadership.
Reframing Reform
by Terrence Deal
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In this article, Deal looks at how reformers (rather than practitioners) need to shift their thinking, or world view, about what it means to reform.
Kaipaki School
Sue Quinnell is leading school curriculum development at Kaipaki School, a family-oriented, country school near Hamilton. Her story focuses on literacy and on the literacy-rich environment of the school.
Systems Thinkers in Action: Moving Beyond the Standards Plateau
by Michael Fullan
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In this article, Michael Fullan’s argument is simple and profound: If a system is striving for both “high equity and excellence”, then policy and practice have to focus on system improvement. This means that school leaders have to be almost as concerned about the success of other schools as they are about their own school. Sustained improvement of schools is not possible unless the whole system is moving forward.

