Authors:
- Exposes connections between principal agency and structural constraints
- Demonstrates how change becomes a continuity
- Absolute necessity for leadership preparation
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
Part of the book series: Studies in Educational Leadership (SIEL, volume 20)
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Table of contents (12 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Rhetorics, Realities and Research on School Leadership
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Front Matter
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Career Trajectories of Primary Principals
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Front Matter
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Policy, Practice & Principalship
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Front Matter
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Sustaining Leaders, Sustainable Leadership: Future Directions
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
About this book
This book is a longitudinal life history of the lives and work of primary school principals in Ireland. It provides a unique opportunity to peer inside the realities of leading schools in changing times. In a system that until recently did not prepare principals for the onerous roles and responsibilities, a small system with limited mobility, inter-personal relationships emerge as critical, frequently privileged over professional relationships. Consequently, principals struggle to bring about change, to build trust in order to cultivate a transformative leadership agenda, while several aspects of systemic structures and processes emerge as constraints on leadership capacity building. In the absence of comprehensive leadership portfolio development, classroom teachers, catapulted into the principal’s office, tend to be cautious and careful in ways that tend to perpetuate the status quo while putting a premium on the exercise of soft power and an over-reliance on the good will of colleagues. Several of the ‘leadership lessons’ that emerge from this in-depth analysis concur with an increasing international consensus that due to complexity and increasingly performative policy demands, learning about leadership for all is an absolute necessity. However, care must be taken to avoid overly scripted programmes. Critical to the cultivation of a professionally responsible leadership disposition, rather than capitulation to ‘technologies of control,’ is professional renewal cultivated through adequate attention to the Zone of Proximal Distance.
Authors and Affiliations
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School of Education, University College Dublin, Belfield, Ireland
Ciaran Sugrue
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Unmasking School Leadership
Book Subtitle: A Longitudinal Life History of School Leaders
Authors: Ciaran Sugrue
Series Title: Studies in Educational Leadership
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9433-6
Publisher: Springer Dordrecht
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, Education (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
Hardcover ISBN: 978-94-017-9432-9Published: 22 October 2014
Softcover ISBN: 978-94-024-0811-9Published: 23 August 2016
eBook ISBN: 978-94-017-9433-6Published: 06 October 2014
Series ISSN: 1572-3909
Series E-ISSN: 2543-0130
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXVI, 302
Number of Illustrations: 3 b/w illustrations, 1 illustrations in colour
Topics: Administration, Organization and Leadership, Educational Policy and Politics