Instructional Leadership as Art: Connecting ISLLC and Aesthetic Inspiration

(Paperback)

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In this book, Zach Kelehear offers readers a new perspective on an important, dynamic, and sometimes daunting issue: managing successful school-based leadership. Kelehear uses an arts-based approach to weave together notions of research-based leadership skills for successful school-based management with standards of professional competence as represented by the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) Standards for School Leaders. The author encourages readers to engage in the seemingly persistent problems and old trials of school management from a new perspective resulting in some refreshing possibilities for supporting student achievement in schools. It is also the goal of this arts-based approach that the reader might begin to more fully recognize the complexity of leading and managing students and teachers within the constantly evolving culture of today's schools. As a result of this qualitative inquiry, the author invites a new vision for old assumptions in schools, for teacher leadership, and for student learning.

Reviews

[This] book goes beyond conventional dichotomies-quantitative or qualitative research; effective leadership as an art or a craft-recognizing that both have much to offer to informed practice, that both are essential. Arts-based investigations, as Zach Kelehear suggests wisely, can more readily gain a firm foothold on the nature of human interactions embedded in school cultures. -- Liora Bresler, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Zach Kelehear has provided a stimulating portrait of educational leadership as that leadership performs itself in furthering authentic teaching and learning. The practice of instructional supervision has too often been exercised exclusively as a bureaucratic, control mechanism that has been revealed again and again as self-defeating for promoting the growth of the vast majority of teachers. In suggesting that instructional supervision can be an aesthetic performance, he helps educators see its necessarily organic consistency with the aesthetics of learning and with the aesthetics of teaching. -- Robert J. Starratt, Boston College
We might be familiar with the art of leading as a set of spontaneous and intuitive skills, but Zach uses art as the lens for improving the management, clarity, purpose, and practice of schools. He isn't using art as a metaphor for education; he envisions art as a way of living a professional and personal life. And he shows how leaders can change schools for the better by clarifying values, differentiating supervision and leadership, listening and conferencing, planning professional development, and setting goals with teachers as colleagues. -- from the Foreword by Carl Glickman, scholar in residence, Educational Administration and Policy Program, University of Georgia

Author Bio

Zach Kelehear has devoted his career to supporting student achievement through innovative and engaging instructional supervisory practices. At the college level he has taught varied topics such as school law, organizational change, and policy development but his primary professional interests lie in matters of mentoring, supervision, and school leadership. He is currently associate professor of educational leadership and policies at the University of South Carolina.