ABSTRACT
With a little thought, a number of ‘common sense’ connections between leadership and learning come to mind. Leaders need to learn and leaders learn as they lead. Leadership of others involves being first able to lead oneself, a crucial premise of self-directed learning. Leadership and learning also share common skills, such as problem solving, reflection, and acting on experience. In educational organisations such as schools, leadership is needed to promote learning. In schools, learning should be the prime concern of all those who exercise leadership, and learning should both set the agenda and be the agenda for leadership. Leadership and learning are mutually embedded, so that as we learn we become more confident in sharing with, and leading, others. And as we lead we continuously reflect on, and enhance, our learning. Guy Claxton has suggested the new ‘four Rs’ of learning: resilience, resourcefulness, reflectiveness and reciprocity (Claxton, 2002). These dispositions are all as relevant to leadership as they are to learning, both of which are as much a matter of character as of skill. In talking about learning Claxton says:
Being able to stay calm, focused and engaged when you don’t know what to do is not merely a matter of technical training . . . Of course learning capacity is partly a matter of skill. But we also need a richer vocabulary that includes words like attitudes, dispositions, qualities, values, emotional tolerances, habits of mind.
