Susan Lovett – författare

This book focuses on what school leaders need to know and understand about leadership for learning, and for learning to read in particular. It brings together theory, research and practice on leadership for literacy. The book reports on the findings from six studies that followed school principals from their involvement in a professional learning program consisting of five modules on leadership and the teaching of reading, to implementation action in their schools. It describes how they applied a range of strategies to create leadership partnerships with their teachers, pursuing eight related dimensions from a Leadership for Learning framework or blueprint. The early chapters of the book feature the use of practical tools as a focus for leadership activity. These chapters consider, for example, how principals and teachers can develop deeper understandings of their schools’ contexts; how professional discussions can be conducted with a process called ‘disciplined dialogue’; andhow principals might encourage approaches to shared leadership with their teachers. The overall findings presented in this book emphasise five positive positions on leadership for learning to read: the importance of an agreed moral purpose; sharing leadership for improvement; understanding what learning to read involves; implementing and evaluating reading interventions; and recognising the need for support for leaders’ learning on-the-job.

This book advocates for an alternative to the hierarchical positioning of leaders. It proposes to value leadership practices which emerge from collective concerns about learning and the realisation that collegial interactions offer opportunities for rich explorations of pedagogy and new understandings to be developed. The book draws upon illustrative examples from a longitudinal study of early career teachers, entitled “Teachers of Promise: Aspirations and realities”. It explores matters of personal ambition, support from significant others, and barriers to teacher leadership. It shows that these vary from context to context and individual to individual. Examples highlight the ways in which each teacher’s experience has been enabled and constrained by different considerations. In combination, the examples offered demonstrate the need for the teaching profession to be more systematic in identifying and supporting talented teachers who could be the leaders of learning for tomorrow. The book shows that individuals themselves need to have an openness to consider how they might become more effective teachers through their engagement in leadership work. This, it suggests, involves developing a different conception of leadership to counter the prevailing view that leadership is typically positional and defined by its distance from classroom teaching. The more promising portrayal is to link teacher leadership explicitly with learning.