Larry Sackney

Canadian perspectives on beginning principals: their role in building capacity for learning communities

Purpose – This paper sets out to posit that the new economy places a new set of demands on schools and those who lead. Mindfulness, intentional engagement of people and adaptive confidence are needed developmental features of beginning principal success. The paper examines how beginning principals in Canada respond to the capacity‐building work of leading learning communities.Design/methodology/approach – The paper examines data from a number of Canadian studies of beginning principalship and makes sense of these data using learning community and leadership literature.Findings – Beginning principals must create a learning community culture that sustains and develops trust, collaboration, risk taking, reflection, shared leadership, and data‐based decision making. Mindfulness, engaging people in capacity building and the development of adaptive confidence are key features of new principal maturation.Originality/value – Beginning principals need to first develop personal, then collective efficacy, as well as...

Postmodern Expressions of Educational Leadership

Almost four decades ago, Marshall McLuhan introduced the concept of the global village, in which he saw all people as part of a worldwide community connected through global communication and economic networks. He cautioned that survival in such a community would depend on the ability of individuals to think globally even as they acted locally. Today the global village can be said to be a reality, but McLuhan’s caution has gone unheeded. We continue to think locally, even as we engage in actions that bring us into global contact and that have global ramifications. The grand scale of the problems associated with this condition can best be seen in the devastation wrought by global terrorism.

School improvement in high-capacity schools Educational leadership and living-systems ontology

Although school improvement continues to present as an unresolved educational problem, the required changes are relatively straightforward. Essentially, schools need to be retooled with students’ experiences and high-quality instruction at the center of the design. In this article, we present the findings of research into the leadership of high-capacity learning community schools, wherein the design features yielded school-wide improvement in teaching and learning. Specifically, educational leadership emerged organically throughout the school, and the school leaders took a collaborative, learning-oriented approach to regulating, coordinating, expanding and protecting professional practice. These leadership activities reflected the ontology of living systems, as different from managed systems, and enabled the leaders to create an environment within which authentic teaching and rich learning flourished.

Building and Leading Within Learning Ecologies

This chapter utilizes an ecological perspective to draw attention to the dynamic connections, relationships and mutual influences that impinge on teaching and learning and the consequential implications for school leaders. Presented are concepts and strategies that equip leaders to conceptualize learning systems from an ecological perspective, to examine the mutual influences and interconnections among various aspects of school life and to frame and reframe conditions for enhancing teaching and learning. Concepts and strategies are organized around four domains of conditions: cognitive, affective, cultural and structural. The premise is that reciprocal relationships exist among the domains and that the learning ecology emerges when the domains are constructed and led in ways that enable people to make meaningful collective and individual responses to the compelling disturbances that arise in schools. Constructing the four domains from an ecological perspective requires leaders to pay attention to the processes and patterns of living systems. It challenges leaders to think about holistic patterns of activity and mutual influences within the school. The connections among cognition, affect, culture and structure indicate that the character of the relationships shapes how people teach/or learn. For leaders, the task is to discover the meanings and purposes that underlie specific actions so that they can move beyond judgments about unacceptable or confusing actions and thereby lead to joyful teaching and learning experiences for everyone.

Leadership and Learning: The Canadian Context

There are six chapters from Canada in this publication covering a broad range of issues considered important in understanding the demands placed on those leading and teaching in our schools. The six topics addressed are linked starting with a discussion of leadership for learning as it is being influenced by research and practice in the Canadian context (Mitchell and Sackney 2010). This is followed by the succession challenges confronting educational jurisdictions in finding leaders that can provide instructional leadership that enhance teaching and learning in schools (Fink, The succession challenge: Warm bodies or leaders of learning, 2010). Subsequent chapters address the moral issues administrators face in dealing with diversity (Ryan, Administrative approaches to diversity: Sharing and imposing meaning, 2010), the lessons learned from improving leadership on a large scale (Leithwood et al., Lessons about improving leadership on a large scale from Ontario’s leadership strategy, 2010), the policy implications of building leadership capacity on a broad level (Pedwell et al., Building leadership capacity across 5000 schools, 2010), and building internal and external accountability capacity through evidence-informed leadership at all system levels (Burger et al., Internal and external accountability: Building evidence-informed leadership capacity at all system levels, 2010). This chapter summarizes Canadian contributions to policy, practice, and research on leadership for learning.