Editorial

Abstract

In this issue, the articles, opinion pieces and book reviews, while based on research in different contexts, each speak to the theme of the leadership of learning. They address different aspects of that theme, including approaches to the organisation of instruction, flexible models of educational provision in response to specific local challenges, personalisation of learning to meet individual needs, and engagement with families and the wider community. Underpinning all these is a concern to understand how individual educational leaders understand and articulate their role, their responsibilities, and their influence on the learning of the students in their care. Our first two contributions draw on research conducted in South-East Asia. Saito, Takahashi, Wintachai and Anunthavorasakul present a vivid picture of the realities of teaching and learning in school classrooms in, for example, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. The authors make a distinction between co-operative and collaborative learning, where the latter presents particular challenges for innovative teachers, because of the competitive nature of education in South-East Asian countries, where national examinations are used to create a hierarchy of schools according to their results. That spirit of competition, transferred to the classroom, can make it difficult to promote collaboration among groups of students. In our second article, Long Kim Le, Trung Tran, Hien Thu Thi Le and Trinh Tuyet Thi Le also report on research into instructional leadership, but their particular focus is on this as one of several competencies required of school principals, who have the crucial responsibility of setting high expectations for students’ learning. Long Kim Le et al., conducted an extensive study of more than 300 school principals in mountainous provinces of Vietnam. With educational providers increasingly relying on developing online learning, our readers will be able to relate to the authors’ conclusion about ‘the importance of Internet technology in helping schools in disadvantaged areas to keep pace with urban or other more privileged schools’. The theme of flexible educational provision continues in our third research article, by Val Poultney and Duncan Anderson. Rural primary schools – in this case, in England – face shortage of resources and even closure, when student numbers fall. Without innovative approaches to curriculum provision, the school may be lost as a resource and focal point for the local community; in this study, the response to that possibility was that increasing numbers of families were opting out of the public education system by choosing to home-educate their children. Poultney and Anderson explore the possibilities of flexi-schooling, where school leaders draw families into learning communities that acknowledge the attractions of home schooling, while reasserting the importance of the ethos, culture, safety, support and wellbeing that the school can provide. We include two opinion pieces on the subject of school leaders, leading and leadership. Returning to the question of school principals’ competencies raised in the earlier research article, Julia Mahfouz and Daniel P Gordon focus in particular on social-emotional competencies, calling for development programmes for school leaders to go beyond functional knowledge and practical problem-solving content, so that they pay attention also to principals’ social and emotional learning. Next, Helen Gunter and Steven Courtney challenge the conventional interpretation of educational leadership – sometimes decorated with adjectives such as ‘transformational’ or ‘distributed’ – as a functional, numbers-driven process. Instead, the authors argue for ‘educative’ leadership, which is inclusive – based on a belief that all children are educable and that eugenics-informed selection is unacceptable – and activist, because it recognises the wider context in which schools operate and can contribute to addressing social injustice. We conclude with two book reviews. Both reviewers, Gerry Czerniawski and Carol Azumah Dennis, note how the books under review, while being firmly rooted in the authors’ practical experience of school and highereducation leadership respectively, give prominence to critical thinking as an essential competence of educational leaders. That is a theme that pervades all of the contributions to this issue of Management in Education.