Having the ‘presence’ and courage to see beyond the familiar: Challenging our habitual assumptions of school leadership

Abstract

Leadership in education is at a critical point in relation to practice and research; intensification of work and a preference to prescribe what works contribute to the privileging of formal, individual and task-based forms of school leadership. Consequently, our ability to conceptualise school leadership practice and research beyond what has become familiar can be undermined without us realising. This paper informs a workshop that is aimed at current and aspiring school leaders and researchers of school leadership; the popularisation of distributed forms of school leadership is the focus. Issues of premature popularisation mean that distributed forms of leadership may end up being yet another ‘fad’, potentially causing us to miss what lies beyond the field of school leadership where more relational and emergent conceptualisations of distributed leadership exist. Courage will be needed to suspend dominant views and grapple with what the implications of a broader meaning of leadership means for our schools, research and education policy.