Following on from their bestselling title Leadership Dialogues, Dave Harris and John West-Burnham's Leadership Dialogues II: Leadership in times of change examines eight more themes crucial to the effective education of our young people in schools.
We are living in times in which school leaders are looking for both simple answers and detailed instructions to help them progress to their goals. But in a period of rapid change, like the one we are in now (at least for the foreseeable future), there is no step-by-step guide, there is no instruction manual – only strong tools to support leadership teams on their journey.
Leadership Dialogues II is not a book containing all the answers; rather it is a book containing many of the questions that will help school leaders work with their colleagues to find the answers for their own schools within the communities in which they work. Harris and West-Burnham believe that the best people to interrogate the problems and find the answers are those people working in, leading and governing these schools every day, and so they have compiled this helpful resource to promote more constructive dialogue and debate – which will result in the generation of feasible solutions specific to their own schools.
Each of the eight themes in Leadership Dialogues II is of contemporary relevance to 21st century education and is split into five sections, each containing an outline on why this is an important topic, some key quotes to engage your thinking, a 10-minute discussion to provoke debate, some questions for your team to consider and – to help frame the dialogue's outcomes – downloadable, printable resources for each section. The resources are often in tabular form and relate to the material, which means they can be used with little extra preparation, and are all available for download in PDF and Word formats for ease of circulation. The only thing you have to do is think, discuss and then act.
The eight themes explored are:
- Securing equity and engagement
- Clarifying the purpose of education
- Middle leadership – the engine room of the school
- Managing resources
- Learning and technology
- Education beyond the school
- Alternative staffing models
- Developing evidence based practice
Suitable for school leadership teams in any setting.
