ABSTRACT
Assuming the principalship of a school-becoming the formal school-leaderappears to involve taking on certain requisite duties and challenges. Everything we know about the role suggests that it is hectic and fast-paced, involving significant amounts of interpersonal contact, of which more is unplanned than planned. And this seems to be the case for virtually all school principals. Indeed, at the close of many days, most principals would express considerable support for the applicability of ‘chaos theory’ (Gleick, 1987) as an explanation for their work: the metaphorical butterflies, flapping their wings in the Far East, seem to have created unique and unpredictable ‘weather patterns’ in Joan Fitzgerald’s school in Newfoundland. But this is as close as we come to identifying natural laws of school leadership.
