Ecological Leadership: Going Beyond System Leadership for Diffusing School-Based Innovations in the Crucible of Change for 21st Century Learning

Abstract

Driven by the impetus for the school system as a whole to actualize deep twenty-first century learning, innovation diffusion has become increasingly an important vehicle for isolated pockets of successes to proliferate beyond the locale of the individual schools to form connected clusters of improvement at a greater scale. This paper articulates an ecological leadership model for enabling such system-wide innovation diffusion in the context of Singapore. Through the explication of leadership practices demonstrated by two exemplar schools that have successfully levelled up their school-based innovation, we argue that ecological leaders have to go beyond system leadership to think and act in a more encompassing way. Specifically, ecological leaders have to embody systems thinking and East-Asian collectivist beliefs to benefit other schools, converge and contextualize the kernel of innovation, align efforts by mitigating tensions and paradoxes within and across the subsystems in the ecology, leverage on resources in the ecology and manage the emergent dynamics engendered through interactions with multi-level actors. These five thrusts cut across the five dimensions of ecology: microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem and chronosystem. With the favourable sociopolitical climate that encourages collaboration rather than competition, we posit that leaders can endeavour to forge ecological coherence. This can be achieved by establishing synergistic structural and socio-cultural connections within and across the five subsystems of influences underpinning the hub school and networks of innovation-adopting schools, thus bringing forth transformative changes in the system.

Partnership between a central agency and its schools

“…The development of such partnerships is however not well understood or still nascent, particularly in centralised education systems (Shaari and Osman, 2014;Toh et al, 2014); we hypothesise that laterality is important because it enables autonomy at the school and teacher levels. The complementarity of centralised structural affordances and decentralised lateral networks' propensities could bring forth a more balanced interplay to meet the demands of the 21st century where demands abound, and resources remain often constant.…”

“…In a small study within a centralised situation, working towards school reform, shared resources in a partnership such as willing teachers, niche programmes, and external agencies were emphasised in strengthening individuals' capacity (Toh et al, 2014). These human and material resources were perceived to exert more influence on the social and political surroundings than individual agency.…”

Teacher development through language-related innovation in a decentralised educational system

“…Hargreaves (2003) uses rail networks as well as emotional landscapes, Kirsch et al (2020) refer to an onion model that peels back layers or cuts through crosssections to examine the professional development of teachers and Daly et al (2020) refer to the 'nuanced dance' of educators and educational communities 'continuously responsive in interacting with the policies, resources and colleagues ' (p.656). In our research, we draw on an ecological perspective to acknowledge the interconnectedness of different levels that form communities and the critical relationships between individuals and their environment (Toh et al 2014).…”

Moving forward – how to create and sustain an evidence-informed school ecosystem

“…For the former, I will refer partly to a review I wrote for the Further Education Sector in the UK (Godfrey, 2016a). For the latter, I will rely heavily on the work of Toh et al (2014) who describe features of 'ecological leadership'.…”