Coaching leadership learning through partnership

Abstract

This article is focused on the concept of partnership within the learning relationship. It develops the argument that leaders’ personal experiences of reciprocal learning relationships will influence their leadership practice, and thus ultimately the school culture. The examination of values and beliefs is central to this process. The co-creation of new knowledge through a learning partnership challenges each person to examine their previous ways of knowing, and their core values and beliefs. Understanding their own learning processes, through the process of meta-cognition and the resulting experience of responsibility for and ownership of one's own learning, effectively highlights for leaders the culture of dependency that can be created through hierarchical, ‘one-way’ power relationships in education, whether in the classroom or staffroom. If we want to make a difference to these traditional notions of hierarchical leadership and hierarchical teaching and learning relationships, we have to provide adult learning that challenges previously learned ways of being. Designing such conditions for leadership learning requires locating new learning spaces–even when those spaces may be beyond our own experiences. At the interstices of the boundary breaking experience, the new learning will occur that is essential to the development of new learning relationships.

Keywords:

• partnership
• learning relationships
• leadership education