School leadership as connective activity

This monograph focuses on school leadership as connective activity. The central message is that leadership is essentially about designing, managing and energising the right connections, and untying the wrong ones, in order to make schools successful, equitable, happier places. As such, a school leader’s job is connecting, disconnecting and in some cases reconnecting pathways, including those which may have faded in the rush to change, in order to create better places for students to grow and learn. This is the central activity of school leaders. The product of connective leadership activity in schools is a more clearly articulated, closely aligned and consistent organisation—one in which there is a high degree of internal harmony between the structures, values and relationships which guide student learning and lives. In other words, practice flowing from leader and school purposes resonates with greater consistency throughout the school.  The basic proportion is that school leaders who influence students and their communities positively are not those who focus just on secluded patches of their organisational turf, but leaders who consciously ‘make connections’ within, across and beyond it. Due to the rushed, multileveled demands which continue to drain leaders’ psyches, the challenges they face are perennial, thus making it difficult to safeguard the time and intellectual space to work them through. Copyright © 2012 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.