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.
Addressing the themes of transformation and professional growth as self-directed phenomena, and supported by a multi-disciplinary collaboration of secondary school teachers, this study was designed to investigate professional growth as an individually reflective and authentically collaborative phenomenon. Of interest to this researcher was some of the ways in which self-directed professional learning, personal and shared reflection, and authentic collaboration -in a supportive study group environment -could create changes in teachers' perceptions of themselves and their work, and catalyse professional growth. It was of interest whether these changes would be reflected in a cluster of effects on perception associated with the focus group intervention.
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