ERIC Number: EJ1180504
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2014-Dec
Pages: 16
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0119-5646
EISSN: N/A
Ecological Leadership: Going beyond System Leadership for Diffusing School-Based Innovations in the Crucible of Change for 21st Century Learning
Toh, Yancy; Jamaludin, Azilawati; Hung, Wei Loong David; Chua, Paul Meng-Huat
Asia-Pacific Education Researcher, v23 n4 p835-850 Dec 2014
Driven by the impetus for the school system as a whole to actualize deep twenty-first century learning, innovation diffusion has become increasingly an important vehicle for isolated pockets of successes to proliferate beyond the locale of the individual schools to form connected clusters of improvement at a greater scale. This paper articulates an ecological leadership model for enabling such system-wide innovation diffusion in the context of Singapore. Through the explication of leadership practices demonstrated by two exemplar schools that have successfully levelled up their school-based innovation, we argue that ecological leaders have to go beyond system leadership to think and act in a more encompassing way. Specifically, ecological leaders have to embody systems thinking and East-Asian collectivist beliefs to benefit other schools, converge and contextualize the kernel of innovation, align efforts by mitigating tensions and paradoxes within and across the subsystems in the ecology, leverage on resources in the ecology and manage the emergent dynamics engendered through interactions with multi-level actors. These five thrusts cut across the five dimensions of ecology: microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem and chronosystem. With the favourable socio-political climate that encourages collaboration rather than competition, we posit that leaders can endeavour to forge ecological coherence. This can be achieved by establishing synergistic structural and socio-cultural connections within and across the five subsystems of influences underpinning the hub school and networks of innovation-adopting schools, thus bringing forth transformative changes in the system.
Descriptors: Educational Change, Educational Innovation, Educational Administration, Foreign Countries, Models, Instructional Leadership, Collectivism, Educational Resources, School Administration, Networks, Institutional Cooperation, Sociocultural Patterns, Asian Culture, Elementary Secondary Education
Springer. 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013. Tel: 800-777-4643; Tel: 212-460-1500; Fax: 212-348-4505; e-mail: service-ny@springer.com; Web site: http://www.springerlink.com
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: Elementary Secondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Singapore
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A