Advocacy organizations and collective action

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Author: search.filters.author.Haim ShakedStart date: 2020

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    Systems Thinking for School Leaders Holistic Leadership for Excellence in Education
    (Springer, 2027-08-03) Haim Shaked; Chen Schechte
    Haim Shaked and Chen Schechter have done what no one else has been able to do, namely make ‘systems thinking’ clear and practical while retaining its depth and comprehensiveness. In Holistic School Leadership, the authors provide us with a clear, accessible and (given its breadth) amazingly complete treatment of ‘systems thinking for educational leaders’. I am a great fan of systems thinking, and indeed use it in our ‘whole system’ improvement work, but I always thought that systems doing combined with systems thinking was crucial both for understanding the theory as well as getting deeper improvement in practice. Shaked and Schechter unpack the ins and outs of systems thinking and show us how to use it in a variety of situations. Their starting defi nition is simple: “seeing the whole beyond the parts, and seeing the parts in the context of the whole.” In Part I the researchers unpack the history and meaning of systems thinking, as well as giving us a clear, succinct account of the research on the topic. We learn about the methodologies used in systems-thinking research, and related fields like complexity theory, and about their direct applications for school leadership. But Part I—containing the first four of the ten chapters in the book—for all its clear account of what has happened in the past, and its recent applications to applied school leadership, leaves us short. Tantalizingly, the reader gets a feel for holistic leadership, senses that it has great potential, but by the end of Part I, still is not in a position to appreciate its use in deep change. I suspect that this is the intent of the authors—to leave us wanting more, much more as we head into Part II—The Holistic School Leadership Approach and its Implementation. The six chapters in Part II deliver on this promise.