Collective Thinking and Leadership

Collective Thinking in Schools

Ebony River College became the school context for most of the 2-year fieldwork. Established in the early 1990s this government school has three campuses: two 7-10-year levels (Brindle and Casey Campuses both pseudonyms) and one 11-12-year levels. Formed from five schools in the region, the then new metropolitan college was a combination of technical and high school students and teachers. The campuses were and still are today in different geographic suburb locations.

Costs for Schools in Collective Thinking

For some years now, as Gronn (2003) puts it, leadership has been in 'vogue'. But many researchers identify that leadership is a contested domain, defying unitary explanations for the exercise of it. Others argue that a focus on leadership is not a recent phenomenon in education but reflects a renaissance. These views suggest that the concept and practice of leadership is relational and contestable. While forms of distributed leadership appear to be more inclusive, the basis on which such claims are made is contextual and contestable. Viewed from this critical perspective, the focus becomes then to not only critically examine the adding of teachers as leaders in schools, but also to attempt to identify and understand how views about what is 'in' and 'out' take form in the first place; and how this affects the ways in which people frame and experience leadership.

A number of scholars argue for the need to enlarge and embed issues within a broader context. At the time of the fieldwork for the study reported on in this article, similar to scholarly observations in other international contexts state and national policies were directing the conversation toward the importance of a productivity agenda—earn and learn and a social inclusion agenda. In this sense, Australia is not immune from policy directions and developments elsewhere, especially in Britain. Through our colonial roots, Australia has often been positioned in the research and policy literature as taking its lead from England. This meant school principal leaders were expected to lead and manage a school within a complex and contentious set of issues: markets, marketization, equality, equity. New challenges, such as school-based management resulted (Harris, pp. 11).

With these challenges came consequences for the idea and practice of school leadership. In the past, few may have questioned the idea that school leadership meant principals and principal leadership. The narrower scope and nature of principals' work meant demands upon teachers beyond classroom practice in schools were limited. But contemporary policy shifts for greater accountability through performance focused structures and processes, such as standards and high-stakes testing, have changed the conditions and, as researchers question, the purposes for school leadership. A number of researchers remark that to meet these changing demands for leadership in such conditions the idea and practice of teachers as leaders was brought to the forefront in policy rhetoric. However, Hatcher (2005) alerts the reader that distributed forms of leadership are not devoid of issues of power. Collaboration, often a taken-for-granted feature of these collective notions of ...