Creative leadership for tomorrow’s schools : in search of new metaphors

Abstract

Given the present time constraints, I will neither explicitly examine the context in which schools operate, nor focus on the struggle by larger societal forces to have schools shape that context. Instead, my comments in this lecture will be grouped into three major sections.

In the first section, I will deal with the concept of educational leadership in a time of reform. In the second section, I will examine the defining characteristics of modern school reform. The third and last section of this lecture will present an emerging vision of creative leadership that will, I believe, help give life to these central elements of school reform. In so doing, I will introduce a few emerging metaphors of creative leadership that may have an effect on how our schools of tomorrow will be led. The focus in this lecture will therefore be on an emerging vision of schooling and the evolving concepts of creative leadership needed to nurture the development of that vision.