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Should educational leadership focus on best practices or next practices?

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Abstract

Policy makers and leadership developers now admonish both aspiring and practicing educational leaders to base what they do on evidence of “best practice”. Some argue, however, that today’s best practices stand a reasonably good chance of being unsuitable for schools in the future. Unfortunately, effective leadership in future schools is empirically unknowable. This paper unpacks the arguments about “best” and “next” practices concluding that there is an empirically defensible foundation for current and future leaders.

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Notes

  1. I have assumed that the term “educational leadership”, as it is used in this question, refers to the field as it is represented in the published literature—the forum in which members of the profession and academy publicly debate consequential issues about leadership.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. C/O Jessica Finlayson, OISE/UT, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5S 1V6

    Kenneth Leithwood

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  1. Kenneth Leithwood
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Correspondence to Kenneth Leithwood.

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Leithwood, K. Should educational leadership focus on best practices or next practices?. J Educ Change 9, 71–75 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-007-9045-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-007-9045-7

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