The Future of Education

All current school reform efforts aim to improve teaching and learning. But there are huge differences in how this is done. Approaches depend on motivations and capacities of leadership. Leadership concerns itself with organizational improvement. In more precise terms, leadership concentrates on establishing widely agreed, valued and worthwhile directions (both strategic and tactical) for the organization and implementation of what is required to stimulate, motivate, guide and support people to move in those directions. A generic definition of impactful and effective leadership concerns direction and influence. If stability is the goal of what is called “management”,  improvement is the goal of leadership. Any reform creating innovative schools to meet the challenge of the 21st century is difficult unless leaders share its aims and are prepared to make it work. Our evidence suggests that successful leadership plays a highly significant role in improving school reform and learning. Social change requires leadership that encapsulates vision as well as achievable practice. This means leadership can effectively be investigated at intermediate levels, as it is conceptualized and developed within the following suggested frameworks: (1) Networks of educational centres, (2) Administrative coordination networks, (3) Professional bodies and associations, (4) Policy bodies.
The paper explores who provides such leadership, how it is productively distributed across the school system and what stimulates and sustains its development. There is strong focus on which forms of leadership are most likely to foster learning and how such successful forms of leadership contribute to school reform and innovation. A prime concern of this paper is to investigate leadership practices at the intermediate level and how these contribute to educational reform agendas. The paper traces research findings which underlie productive, helpful or successful leadership practices in improving student learning and school reform. It describes those successful practices, as well as their relationship to the school organization and ultimately to enhanced learning outcomes. Comparative analysis looks t examples in Catalonia and the United States. The research focus includes twin perspectives. On one hand, there is the need for a new model of school organization to provide students with life skills required in our emerging knowledge society. On the other hand, there is the importance of understanding the critical nature and role of leadership in this change process. This links directly to the key factors of developing networks, new structures and distributed leadership models central to the knowledge and information society.

Keywords: Educational Leadership; Transformation; Change; Knowledge Society; Networks;

References:
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