ABSTRACT
School leaders who seek to prepare learners for today’s dynamic and complex contemporary society focus on the learning that matters (what is worth learning): they open up possibilities beyond more traditional conversations about methods of teaching (how will it be learned) and evaluation (how to know that learning has happened). While questions about instruction and assessment are important, too often questions of teaching methods and evaluation narrow a school’s focus, leading to incremental solutions that do not address deeper problems of education. Schools may get better at delivery and assessment, but not face the more fundamental challenge of remaining relevant to their learners and their communities in a swiftly changing world. How do school leaders transform the learning that students experience in the classroom? What is possible when relevant and compelling learning is at the heart of school decisions? This chapter offers a window into what learning that matters looks like in the classroom with Year 4 and 12 students, and presents leadership for the twenty-first century as a complex ecology of influences that requires leaders to adopt a more distributed notion of leadership: leadership as the process of engaging the social network in co-creating ideas and directions.
