ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an interesting contrast to the previous one. The central concern, with the particular anxieties and coping strategies of senior professionals re-entering a phase of learning, remains the same. But Agnes McMahon’s study differs in certain crucial respects. First, in addressing the learning needs of new headteachers, she is focusing on learning ‘on the job’, which is both more directly practical, and more openly visible to colleagues, than that of the EdD. In so far as headteachers are expected – and expect themselves – to be instantly and perpetually competent and knowledgeable, their learning has to be conducted ‘invisibly’. Yet there is also pressure, for those who espouse the notion of schools as learning communities, to model ‘being a learner’. Agnes explore these tensions in the context of an experimental peer mentoring programme, which paired experienced and new headteachers.
