Out of The Box Thinking

This past week was whir wind of activities for me!!!!  Between school, home and studies I'm trying to figure where the week went.  As I research and read for my Literature Review, I am being drawn to the same common themes and  issues of  leadership.Specifically the three that have run through all of my readings, which consist of the idea of shared leadership (distributed leadership), analysis of practice, and teacher and principal perception.

 In an  article entitled Managing to Lead: Reframing School Leadership and Management,Spillane stated, " Leadership and management make a a difference in increasing school productivity and turning around struggling schools.  But common ways of thinking about leadership and managing limit how we think about the work.  Too often we place the burden for saving a failing school on the principal, perpetuating a view of successful school leaders as heroes and less successful ones as failures. 

As I consider Gardner's Five  Minds For the Future and current challenges and problems we are currently facing in education, consideration must be given to how we think and approach these issues.  "If we are to address  the many issues that are currently in need of  much solving  we will have to go beyond  existing knowledge and synthesis to pose  new questions , offer new solutions, fashion works that stretch existing genres or configure new ones; creation builds on one or more established disciplines and requires an informed field to make judgments of quality acceptability." (Gardner, 2000).  "School leaders and policy makers can change this state of affairs by becoming  savvy--  more discriminating, more creative and true out of the box thinker. " (Spillane, 2009)