A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

The Role of Leadership in Sustaining School Reform: Voices From the Field - July 1996

New Conceptions of Leadership

A useful metaphor for the challenge of sustaining leadership is that of agricultural harvests. Those with a long view of agricultural productivity adopt strategies that rely on self-renewing systems. That is, resources that crops take out of an ecosystem are replaced with resources that are themselves renewable. The cycle of production is maintained by balancing crop choices, land use practices, and soil enrichment activities to ensure long-term function, rather than by applying some scarce resource taken from elsewhere.

Sustaining leaders demonstrate skill in creating systems that are renewable, in the broad sense; they consider not just what will work today, but what will work henceforward. Start-up activities may draw on everyone's adrenalin rush, charging overtime against temporary energy reserves. They may also use outside resources--consultants from an educational lab or corporate-financed whole staff retreats. But they recognize that if innovation is to be effective and remain fresh and if problems are to be solved as they arise, then the resources of the school as a system have to be invested wisely. When the dust of innovation settles, everyone needs to have found a team role that can be coordinated and managed in an ordinary workday with funding that represents the community's predictable long-term support.
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[Chapter 5 Conclusions] [Table of Contents] [A Few Important Ideas]