Going through the Emotions: Leadership That Gets to the Heart of School Renewal

Abstract

Holistic school renewal will require a qualitatively different discourse than the current uneasy conversations about school improvement and school effectiveness. Leadership for whole school renewal requires emotionally safe spaces for learning and growing together. Visions of school leadership as distributed, distributive and shared are grounded in notions of collaborative inquiry within dynamic learning communities. For shared leadership to breathe new life into whole school renewal, all leaders, including and especially the principal need to maintain a focus on the moment-to-moment emotional attunements that define experiences in spite of cognitive constructions and beliefs that may coexist along side of these.