Leadership in the swamp: seeking the potentiality of school improvement through principal reflection

‘Art, its creation and leadership [can be] revealing and frightening’: how school leaders learn to frame and solve problems through the arts

“…Instead, the focus was on individual leadership approaches. While many educational leadership scholars tout the value of reflective practise, the literature offers few recent studies (Wright 2009). Studying school leaders in a longitudinal fashion will generate further insight into how they use problem-solving activities learned through the arts in the workplace.…”

“…We agree that leaders can benefit from engaging in thoughtful reflection about problems of practice, which we define, following Schön (1983: 40), as situations perceived in need of change. Although, the benefits of reflective journaling have been explored in healthcare (Hunter 2008, Grant et al 2010) and business human resource development (Peck andVarner 2003, Killian 2010), little attention has been given in the field of K-12 education to how school leaders reflect during problem-solving situations (Wright 2009), how these skills might be enhanced through the arts and how these arts activities might differ in terms of the cognitive and emotional processes they promote.…”

“…Despite the interest in developing educational leaders as reflective practitioners and aside from leadership assessments that contain items on problem-solving (e.g. School Internship Assessment [Martin et al 2005]), little recent scholarship has contributed to theoretical or practical understanding of the ways reflection and problem-solving skills evolve and unfold in the context of educational leadership preparation (Wright 2009). New approaches that incorporate 'interactive learning' include case studies, scenarios and role-plays (Milstein andKrueger 1997, Kelehear 2008).…”

Negotiating Identities in the Transition from Graduate Student to Teacher Educator

“…(Wright, 2009). Ironically, paradox existed as I "led" my students through this series of pre-determined questions and detailed steps to foster intuitive forms of reflection.…”

“…As previously described by Melody, the Managing the Learning Environment course adopts a professional decision-making model whereby the teacher is viewed as a reflective practitioner who engages in informed decision-making. Since my own research focuses on reflective and reflexive thinking (Wright, 2009), I embraced this opportunity to model the very practices that I am critiquing in my graduate work.…”