By adopting the dictum that all knowledge is knowledge from a point of view, educators can arrange the literature on leadership into nine categories from three conceptually distinct points of view, namely the Leader, the Follower, and the Investigator. Students who come to appreciate and account for point of view not only increase their…

The International Leadership Association's "Guiding Questions: Guidelines for Leadership Education Programs" (Ritch & Mengel, 2009) provides a framework to attend to leadership program development, redesign, evaluation, organized program review, questions concerning academic legitimacy and developing common program benchmarks. This article…

This paper is designed to introduce readers to teacher-philosopher-practitioner, Paulo Freire and to illustrate the power of his educational ideals for the task of teaching leadership. Readers will encounter Freire, understand how one's definition of leadership needs to match one's approach to teaching leadership, review a proposed Freirean…

Approximately four months ago the author was sitting at his desk at the Air Force Academy preparing a course in leadership that he would be teaching during the fall semester. Then, something happened that would have a drastic impact on his professional life as an educator and a military officer. He was informed that he would be deploying to Kabul,…

In this article the author questions whether the understanding of teaching and leading is the same today as it was last year? The chances are that the concept of what it means to be a teacher and a leader has changed. After describing three leadership types: servants, managers, and monkeys, Buskey suggest several things that are needed to improve…

Defending emotions is neither banal nor senselessness. It is not falling into sentimentality (Camps, 2011, p. 33) would say. Emotions take shape within human actions and imply leadership, not just in a purely mechanistic sense, but in the sense set out by Sartre (1973), dealing with the way the individual understands emotions and the role they…

As both Friedman (2007) and Wagner (2008) have eloquently emphasized in recent years, children need to learn more complex material in preparation for further education and work in the twenty-first century. Teachers, therefore, must learn instructional approaches that develop the knowledge and skills students need to succeed in an increasingly…

Within this essay and the author's reflections on the articles in this special issue, the question considered is: where have all the disruptions gone? On a fundamental level, educational leadership should have something to contribute, since it holds in trust the very educational systems that go a long way to producing the human condition, and…

While educational policy-makers bemoan the ways in which educational reforms falter, they both valorize and punish leaders for their key role in change. In this paper, using a national study funded by the English Creative Partnerships programme, we suggest that it may be helpful to understand the limits to change by seeing change leadership as…

Since the 1980s, there has been a burgeoning literature on women and educational leadership. The focus has primarily been on the underrepresentation of women in leadership informed by a feminist critique of the mainstream literature. Over time, key feminist theories and research have been appropriated in education policy and are now embedded in…

This commentary focuses on school leadership as connective activity. Leadership is essentially about designing, managing and energizing the right connections, and untying the wrong ones, in order to make schools successful, equitable, happier places. The author's basic proposition is that school leaders who influence students and their communities…

The history of leadership in educational settings that has a principal focus on student learning is one dominated by Western cultures, particularly those in the USA; also, it has developed two near-identical models of leadership commonly known as "instructional" or "learning-centred". This paper explores the relevance of these models in the…

Emotional factors play a part in the learning process, and, so too for leadership. Fullan (2001) identified self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, social skills, adaptability, stress management and general mood as fundamental characteristics of emotional intelligence. If leaders exemplify these characteristics, this will positively…

Democratic leadership rests on sacred values, awareness, judgement, motivation and courage. Four turning points in a 38-year school administrator's career revealed decision-making in problematic moments stemmed from values in a personal and professional code of ethics. Reflection on practice and theory added vocabulary and understanding to make…

The current de-democratization process in which the world now apparently finds itself ". . .represents the longest continuous period of deterioration in the nearly 40-year history of Freedom House's annual assessment of the state of political and civil liberties in every country of the world". As Gilley (2010: 161) observes, ". . .the hottest…