Creative leadership? ‘It’s just the norm’

ABSTRACT

Creativity in teaching and leadership continues to be a topic of interest in education. This article focuses on comments made by a school’s leadership team as part of a larger study in which a mixed methods case study design involving the school’s leadership team and staff who taught Arts (either as specialist teachers or generalist classroom teachers) was used. The research took place in a 6-year-old Preparatory Year to Year 9 (P-9) school in a growth corridor in metropolitan Melbourne. Staff members in the school provided responses to a questionnaire, participated in focus group discussions and were invited to maintain journals during the course of the study. Comments made by members of the school’s leadership team are analysed in this article using perspectives of pedagogical leadership and relational power. The article finds that the school's leadership team models and encourages experimentation with new ideas across the school as the team promotes the development of collaborative professional learning approaches in their relatively young school. The article concludes that professional learning communities (PLCs) within the school will be well-placed to pursue the collaborative approaches modelled by the school’s leadership team to ensure that a school-wide focus on student learning continues.

KEYWORDS:

• Creative leadership
• pedagogical leadership
• relational power
• risk-taking
• professional learning communities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Associate Professor Ron Keamy is an experienced educator having taught across a wide range of education and training contexts, including primary schools, special education settings, prison education, loss and grief education, and as a workplace trainer. He is currently a Director of Learning and Teaching in the College of Education at Victoria University, and teaches mainly postgraduate courses and supervises doctoral candidates. Kim’s research is mainly in the area of educational leadership, which was also the focus of his doctoral research. Kim has also conducted research into pedagogical approaches utilised in pre-service teacher education courses, and in the professional learning of in-service teachers.