Learning to Lead Together

"Learning to Lead" examines the dilemmas principals face in engaging teachers in shared leadership. The text makes a contribution to the field of educational leadership, administration, and leader preparation through cases and the description of professional development initiatives to prepare pre-service principals and administrators for shared leadership. Authors from the United States, England, and Australia present a broad brushstroke of principals sharing leadership through original field-based research, set within a theoretical framework of democratic schooling.This text covers a timely topic. This is the first text to explore the importance of principals sharing and distributing leadership. Until recently, most of the focus has been on teachers and collaborative leadership building. Through real-life single and multiple case studies, the text addresses how principals and their staff's struggle with the challenge of shared leadership, and how they attain some of the promise leading to teacher growth and development, as well as to higher levels of student learning. The cases in the text provide pre-service principals and administrators with excellent examples of the real-life applications of various theoretical concepts. A variety of models and approaches of shared and distributed leadership are presented in school, district, and regional contexts, allowing students to see the commonalties that these settings share, as well as the differences between them.The text discusses strategies that principals use to share leadership and the impact that those strategies have on teachers, school culture, and learning opportunities for students. Examples of preparation programs and the support that teachers want, if shared leadership is to be effectively implemented to meet student needs, provide future principals with the tools and insight that they need to be successful.