Leadership Capacity for Lasting School Improvement

Rating:
Summary: For anyone charged with a role of leadership
Review: Leadership Capacity For Lasting School Improvement by Linda Lambert (Professor Emeritus and Founder of the Center for Educational Leadership at California State University - Heyward), brings together real-life experiences and the experience-based wisdom of educators around the world to present and illustrate the five major prerequisites for high leadership capacity, as well as offering in-depth advice on the complex task of leading an education institution. Individual chapters directly address the changing role of the principle, parents as leaders, district leadership, major participation patterns and more, in this excellent and highly informative resource ideal for anyone charged with a role of leadership responsibility in the corridors of academia.

Rating:
Summary: Finessing school cultural change.
Review: This book is written for practising school leaders. It offers guidance in fine tuning whole-school cultural change, a topic that practitioners have handled intuitively and singularly for ages.

The intellectual modelling that underwrites Lambert's book are the Leadership Capacity Matrices For the readers of my vintage, it is good to see useful variants of Hersey and Blanchard's Situational Theory of Leadership model. Instead of plotting task behaviour against relationship behaviour that Hersey and Blanchard used, Lambert has used degrees of participation and the degree of leadership skill on the axes.

Seeking Quadrant 4.
Clearly quadrant 4 is the outcome that school leaders seek- High on participation and high leadership skill. The pointers are:
1.Principal, teachers, parents and students as skilful leaders.
2.Shared vision resulting in program coherence.
3.Inquiry-based use of data to inform decisions and practice.
4.Broad involvement, collaboration, and collective responsibility reflected in roles and actions.
5.Reflective practice that leads consistently to innovation.
6.High or steadily improving student achievement.

The role of the school leader can often be a lonely task and there is a dearth of material which actually guides school leaders through aspects of change that articulate, finesse and embed intentions.

For me this is a timely and practical book.