ABSTRACT
Every educational jurisdiction has developed what it thinks its school leaders should look like and the skills, beliefs and knowledge they should possess. It is helpful in developing our understanding of these modern leadership standards how they evolved and how universal skills have survived and evolved in the changing contexts. In developing an agreed communal view of what is required of a principal, it is argued that school leaders and school communities should develop their own school leadership profiles. This is not rocket science, and the process builds communities, and also enhances perceptions of the roles of school staff.
The heuristic modelling in this chapter gives a sense of direction for the profile building exercise, and it uses strategies that can be built on by all participants in the education process. In this chapter we explore the concepts of school leader leadership behaviours, and these have been explored with particular reference to the context of whole-school renewal and change. Particular emphasis has been directed at exploring behaviours associated with a leader’s predisposition to engage in school change activities. The impact of a leader’s behavioural drive and personal efficacy on the initiation and development of a school renewal agenda and the capacity to effect change in the school’s learning environment becomes a self-evident truth. What we like about this process is that it can extend personal introspection beyond the mandated line-management criteria to issues that school leaders feel they need to examine, without showing their cards to observers making external judgements about their performance.
