Understanding Leadership: Challenges and Reflections

Understanding Leadership enables school leaders to reflect on, question, test, understand and refine their personal mindscapes through reflective self-awareness.

Are current leadership roles and relationships appropriate in a rapidly changing world? Do we need to rethink key assumptions about leaders and leadership? Are you confident about the appropriateness and effectiveness of your chosen leadership styles and behaviours? These are questions facing leaders today and Understanding Leadership by Libby Nicholas and John West-Burnham can help find the answers, with an approach that is neither normative nor prescriptive but rather exploratory and developmental.

The eight chapters are underpinned by the following themes, questions and points of reflection: Creating a preferred future - leading change; Leadership as a moral activity; Learning as the core purpose of school leadership; Leading through collaboration and cooperation; Building capacity - sharing leadership; Leading through relationships; Leadership and personal resilience; and Why leadership?

There is also a hardback edition available, ISBN 9781785830266.