personalise space and consider the impact on government-driven model in the UK, both of to give more to their work,
to give more to their work, to identify with the
all the users of the room is surely sound.
Teachers and their students spend a lot of time
inside classrooms and all the research suggests
that people can be both assisted and hindered
in their work by their environment.
This is a brilliant overview of an extremely
important subject. Short of theory it may be but
that is sometimes no bad thing.When teachers
have absorbed what is useful to them from this
excellent guide book, then it would be the time
to ask why things happen as they do and,
perhaps more importantly, how the strategies
described here can be embedded in well-
established theory.There are other books in the
book shop and library that the interested reader
can delve into to deal with those questions.
An excellent book for the young teacher,
and also for the returner, and a good simple
read for those seeking reassurance that well
established routines still work in this modern
world. Unlike some books in this category, there
is a good user-friendly contents page and a
reasonable index.Those who can, do; those
who can’t, teach; and those who can do neither
write books about it. Rarely has an aphorism so
clearly been shown to be untrue.
Reviewed by John Gribben, headteacher
The New Work of Educational Leaders
Peter Gronn, February 2003
Sage Publications 192 pages 0-7619-4749-3
Peter Gronn explores changing leadership
practice in an era of school reform.The work of
leaders, he argues will be increasingly shaped by
the three over-riding themes: design,
distribution and disengagement.
Designer leadership is producing leaders
according to design specifications, which
require new assessment procedures and result
in accreditation and licensure based on
standards.These standards and competencies
are used both for leader preparation and the
development and professional upgrading of
leaders in post. Gronn's critique sees standards
as solutions in search of problems which
prescribe anticipated, legitimated and
programmed responses by leaders. He explores
the contrast between the profession-driven view
of leadership standards in the USA and the
Downloaded from mie.sagepub.com at East Tennessee State University on June 6, 2015
which Gronn argues are about control,
although he is equally critical of alternative
earlier models of leadership. He challenges the
presumed potency of individually focused
transformational-style leadership and its
appropriateness in self-managing schools partly
because of the associated intensification of
work.The new professional qualifications,
framed around competencies rather than
university academic qualifications, are stated as
endorsing heroic leadership, though this might
be challenged.
Gronn emphasises the importance of
distributed patterns of leadership, with the
modern manager placed in a network of
mutually dependent relationships.This has
been insufficiently recognised because of the
focus on the leader rather than leadership. In
arguing for distributed leadership, with the
complementary interdependent role behaviour
this requires, and asserting the importance of
co-ordination, Gronn states that the
conventional rhetoric of leader-followership is
undermined by a tension with current
leadership accountability measures which
exacerbate the intensification of work. I am not
convinced that others, including the National
College for School Leadership, insist on the
importance of heroic individualism.There
would be little disagreement with his definition
of distributed leadership as “stretched over the
social and situational contexts of the school”.
The distinctions he makes between the five
joint work units within organisations,
departments, divisions, crews, committees and
teams are clearly conceptually significant. I
would suggest the possibility is that the
successful leader achieves the distributed
leadership that Gronn articulates.
In practical terms, disengagement is
manifest in the inability of the education system
to recruit sufficient principals. Experienced
principals themselves perceive two broad and
dissonant orientations amongst their staff: a
culture of disengagement and a culture of
aspiration, though these are significantly
generational.There is an issue about the supply
of leaders which is international and Gronn
argues is caused by the increasing
intensification of work which the second part of
this book explores in some depth.This is part of
the cultural change which encourages teachers
goals and needs of the schools, and to learn how
to work more effectively with others through
distributed leadership.This process discourages
them from seeking promotion to leadership
roles.
The second half of the book builds on these
three themes, exploring first what leaders
actually do in contexts other than education,
and the profound implications for leaders of the
work of committees and associated meetings,
and teams. Gronn's consideration of the
dynamics of these two most prominent
institutionalised forms of leadership clarifies
their significance for school leaders and school
leadership.The final chapters on the emotions
of leaders and leadership as being greed-based
depend on a definition which asserts that
greediness has colonised new work practices.
This is particularly the case for the autonomous
or semi-autonomous professions such as
teaching where the micro-management and
control of schools is achieved through
networked electronic information systems and
new accountability requirements.Whether there
is genuinely a two cultures problem within
schools, as Gronn claims, of professional
collegiality and entrepreneurialism, or whether
these are complementary elements achieved by
creative school leaders can be questioned.
Perhaps the hero leader is one who can most
effectively demonstrate the standards and
competencies as a minimum performance level,
and can ensure the empowerment of others
through distributing leadership productively.
Gronn is always challenging with soundly based
arguments thought many of them can be
challenged, which is precisely their strength.
Even his ultimate conclusion that the new
educational leadership work ethic is the cult of
salvation through greedy work.
Reviewed by Harry Tomlinson
MiE, Vol 17 issue 4 39