Sustainability and Leadership

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Sustainability and Leadership

• Summary Comments
• T. Paterson

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Sustainability and Leadership

• Easy to propose, hard to implement, and
  extraordinarily difficult to sustain!
• Sustainable Improvement depends on successful
  Leadership.

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Sustainability and Leadership

• Sustainable Educational Leadership and
  Improvement preserves and develops deep
  learning for all that spreads and lasts, in ways
  that do no harm to and indeed create positive
  benefit for others around us, now and in the
  future. Hargreaves and Fink

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Sustainability and Leadership

• Sustainable educational change and leadership is
  three dimensional it has depth, breadth, and
  length
• The other four principals act to fill out the
  full meaning of sustainability and its challenges
  for leadership in schools
• The seven principals are interconnected a meal,
  not a menu.

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Sustainability and Leadership

• Seven Principals of Sustainability
• Depth sustainable leadership matters
• Length - sustainable leadership lasts
• Breath - sustainable leadership spreads
• Justice - sustainable leadership does no harm and
  actively improves the surrounding environment.
• Diversity - sustainable leadership promotes
  cohesive diversity
• Resourcefulness - sustainable leadership develops
  and does no deplete material and human resources
• Conservation - sustainable leadership honors and
  learns from the best of the past to create an
  even better future.

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Sustainability and Leadership

• A commitment to sustainable leadership must move
  us beyond the micromanagement of standardization,
  the crisis management of repetitive change
  syndrome, and the all-consuming obsession with
  higher and higher standards at any cost into a
  world where we can bring about authentic
  improvement and achievement for all children that
  matters, spreads, and lasts. Sustainable
  leadership acts urgently, learns from the past
  and from diversity, is resilient under pressure,
  waits patiently for results, and does not burn
  people out. Sustainable leadership is just and
  moral leadership that benefits all of us, now and
  in the future. Sustainability works in sound
  environmental management and in the best business
  practices its time to put it to work in
  education as well.
• Hargreaves and Fink.

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Coping with Ethical Dilemmas

• How Good People Make Hard Decisions by Rushworth
  Kidder
• Individual vs. Community
• Short-Term vs. Long Term
• Justice vs. Mercy
• Truth vs. Loyalty

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Sustainability and Leadership

• Ethical Dilemmas are very complex aspects of
  change
• They must be dealt with, to honour what the value
  systems are existing, and to faithfully allow
  transition to what is more effective or
  sustainable.
• Ignore them at your own peril!

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Sustainability and Leadership

• Sustainable Leadership is a value system.
• The goal of sustainable leadership (at every
  level) is to assist in articulating what values
  are in play, and to move towards more sustainable
  values

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Sustainability and Leadership

• Recognizing that sustainable development,
  democracy and peace are indivisible is an idea
  whose time has come.
• Wangari Maathai, Kenya assistant minister for
  environment, natural resources, and wildlife,
  Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Dec. 2004

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Sustainability and Leadership

• Democracy is a relatively short experiment in
  power sharing.
• The spread of democratic principles have
  consistently radiated outward to include more
  rights for greater numbers of groups of
  individuals.
• This process started with the signing of the
  Magna Carta (Latin for The Great Paper) in 1215.

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Sustainability and Leadership

• Magna Carta is often a symbol for the first time
  the citizens of England were granted rights
  against an absolute king.
• Many later attempts to draft constitutional forms
  of government, including the United States
  Constitution, trace their lineage back to this
  source document.
• Magna Carta has influenced international law as
  well Eleanor Roosevelt referred to the Universal
  Declaration of Human Rights as "a Magna Carta for
  all mankind".
• The Magna Carta is thought to be the crucial
  turning point in the struggle to establish
  freedom and a key element in the transformation
  of constitutional thinking throughout the world.
• Wikipedia

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Sustainability and Leadership

• Democratic rights continue to influence all our
  institutions and are the fundamental principles
  behind distributed leadership.
• They will have an inevitable and profound change
  on the organizational structures of our learning
  institutions.

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Sustainability and Leadership

• The only optional part with be the implementation
  timeline
• Sustainable Leadership beckons us to recognize
  this and make the transition in the most
  painless, and efficient way possible.

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Sustainability and Leadership

• There is no good reason to assume that
  distributed leadership will stop at the level of
  Teachers.
• While we struggle to implement Teacher Leadership
  models now, Student and Parent leadership will be
  demanded shortly!

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Sustainability and Leadership

• Information Technology acts to accelerate the
  transmission, acceptance, and implementation of
  ideas
• This occurs regardless of their popularity with
  those currently holding the reigns of power!

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Sustainability and Leadership

• Power is never relinquished peacefully.
• It must be taken by force. - Frederick Douglass
  first African American nominated for Vice
  President of the United States 1792)

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Sustainability and Leadership

• As current school leaders and leaders in schools,
  that leaves all of us with a very straight
  forward alternative

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Sustainability and Leadership

• If youre not going to lead, get out of the
  way. representative from Papua New Guinea
  speaking the U.S. representative at Bali
  Environmental Conference 2007

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Sustainability and Leadership

• Thank you to all for a very enjoyable and worthy
  conversation!
• Your districts are enriched by your presence!