Re-thinking educational leadership : lessons from contemporary science

Abstract

New Zealand education has experienced considerable organizational restructuring since the late 1980s. Traditional and long-standing centralised systems have been dismantled and replaced by school-centred education. These changes have produced turmoil and fears as well as a set of new and sometimes conflicting challenges for the educational leader that so far are not perceived as being adequately addressed. This thesis suggests that many current problems for the educational leader can be traced to both analyses of the problems confronting them, and solutions to those problems that are based on mechanistic metaphors of the school and education drawn from seventeenth-century Newtonian physics. It is argued that the analyses and solutions based on these metaphors may be fundamental to the apparent inability to 'lead' schools, and that more effective metaphors might be taken from developments in contemporary science. The thesis discusses these developments and suggests a number of links between these new sciences and the management of schools. Key developments include quantum theory, systems theory, information theory and chaos theory. Underlying each of these is a conception of 'order' that is fundamentally different from the traditional one. The changing images generated in these areas of contemporary science are seen as stimuli for forming new and more empowering insights and perspectives on the school organization, its functioning, and its leadership. And the thesis suggests that adopting a conception of order based on these new approaches may be a necessary, if not sufficient condition of the constructive development of school leadership.