Parallelism: Creating Multiple Forms of Leadership

This paper reports on the emerging forms of parallelism in different cultural contexts. In particular, it explores the dynamics of leadership within school (principal and teachers; teachers and students); school and parent community; and school and broader community during a whole school improvement process. The paper explores how the emergence of multiple forms of leadership may be linked with the school’s cultural context. INTRODUCTION Frequent calls for schools to respond to needs of 21 century learners through the creation of Future Schools (Beare, 2001) or Re-imagination (Caldwell, 2005) require schools to engage in creative (Drucker,1994 )transforming processes which result in an organisation wide reimaging processes (Morgan, 2006). This paper reports a whole school revitalisation process IDEAS – Innovating Design for Enhancing Achievement in Schools(Andrews, et al. 2004) that engages school communities in a whole school commitment to developing a future orientation for their school community. 1 Schools engaging in whole school change processes encounter local contextual challenges that ensure that their change journey is unique to their context. This paper reports on schools experiences with the IDEAS Project, in particular, it explores the dynamics of leadership (Parallelism) within school (principal and teachers; teachers and students); school and parent community; and school and broader community during a whole school improvement process. The paper explores how the emergence of multiple forms of leadership may be linked with the school’s cultural context. WHOLE SCHOOL REVITALISATION IDEAS began in early 1977 as the result of dialogue between Department of Education and the Arts, Queensland, Australia and the University of Southern Queensland’s Leadership Research Institute (LRI), Toowoomba, Australia. The LRI research team based at the University in Toowoomba, have worked with over 180 schools in Queensland as well as State Schools in Victoria and Western Australia; Catholic Education schools in Canberra and Sydney; and three schools in Singapore. In 2003, at the invitation of the Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Technology, IDEAS was successfully trialled in schools in NSW, Canberra and Western Australia. The report provides case study evidence of school groups improving their local school communities in a sustainable way (Chesterton & Duignan, 2004). IDEAS is a whole school revitalisation project that provides schools with tools and processes that enable each school to build its own distinctiveness. The image of a preferred future is based on a Vision developed from a shared sense of purpose and a focus on the work of