Refocusing School Leadership departs from the more traditional conceptualization of leadership, looking behind the daily routines of human resource leaders to highlight the assumptions and values and beliefs they bring to their work as well as the values and meanings embedded in the various contexts of school life. Starratt explores how educational leadership is grounded in one’s own humanity as well as in a deep appreciation of the richness, complexity, and enormous potential of ...

The author argues for much greater attention to ethical education and responds to sceptics who say that it can't be done in the face of a pluralistic secular society badly fragmented over values. Seeking always for themes and issues that unite rather than divide, the author provides a conceptual foundation for ethical education broad enough for building consensus among teachers and parents, yet focused enough to provide guidance for highly specific learning activities. The second half of t...

In this book, Starratt enters the national conversation among educational administration scholars and practitioners about what constitutes the core of their knowledge and practice. In Part I, he develops three main themes--cultivating meaning, community, and moral responsibility--which he then positions against national themes about the core of educational administration: school improvement, democratic community, and social justice. Rather than focusing on the routine managerial tasks norm...

Robert Starratt, a teacher of people in leadership positions, presents the foundations for the theory of leadership. Based on a framework divided into building blocks, various concepts of leadership such as values, change, power and structure are explained and analyzed, and ways of incorporating them into school management are addressed. He presents a picture of leadership as a variety of disciplines - history, philosophy, psychology, politics, sociology, theology - amongst others, and wit...

Often the school is left as an institution seemingly ethically neutral, leaving untouched questions about whether the school itself is a site of injustice toward both educators and children. Springing from his well-known Building an Ethical School, Robert J. Starratt now looks more closely at the educational leader’s responsibility to ensure that the whole fabric of the educational process reflects an ethical philosophy of education.Starratt argues that the work of educati...

Starratt’s highly original book offers fresh insights into the nature of teaching, learning, schooling as a multi-cultural, social enterprise, and the importance of vision for that leadership—by using the analogy of drama. Schooling is a preparation to participate in the social drama, both as an individual and as a community. Beyond participation, schooling can enable youngsters to maintain and restore the human purposes of the social drama. This unique book accommodates present critics of...

Examining the difficulties of conflict resolution, Transforming Conflict through Insight demonstrates how applying Bernard Lonergan's philosophy of insight to mediation can lead to more productive and constructive negotiations. Kenneth R. Melchin and Cheryl A. Picard provide both an overview of conflict research and an introduction to Lonergan's "insight theory," offering an outstanding piece of ethical philosophy and a useful method of mediation.Introducing readers to a m...

Eminent moral philosopher Michael Slote argues that care ethics presents an important challenge to other ethical traditions and that a philosophically developed care ethics should, and can, offer its own comprehensive view of the whole of morality. Taking inspiration from British moral sentimentalism and drawing on recent psychological literature on empathy, he shows that the use of that notion allows care ethics to develop its own sentimentalist account of respect, autonomy, social justic...

Making Sense of Social Theory opens by carefully exploring what it means to follow the scientific method in a field like sociology. The book goes on to analyze sociology as a genuine science with a body of explanatory insights. Sociological theory is applied in ways that make its relevance and power apparent so that theory no longer stands divorced from real world research or practice. Making Sense of Social Theory clearly establishes the pertinence of sociology's great t...

This popular text provides a clear, succinct explanation of how reflection is integral to teachers’ understandings of themselves, their practice, and their context, and elaborates how various conceptions of reflective teaching differ from one another. The emphasis on the importance of both self and context is embedded within distinct and varied educational traditions (conservative, progressive, radical, and spiritual). Throughout the text the reader is encouraged to examine his/her assumpt...

Focus Groups: From Structured Interviews to Collective Conversations is a conceptual and practical introduction to focus group. As the title indicates, focus groups traditionally encompass a wide range of discursive practices. These span from formal structured interviews with particular people assembled around clearly delimited topics to less forma

First published in 1999. Megan Boler combines cultural history with ethical and multicultural analyses to explore how emotions have been disciplined, suppressed, or ignored at all levels of education and in educational theory. FEELING POWER charts the philosophies and practices developed over the last century to control social conflicts arising from gender, class, and race. The book traces the development of progressive pedagogies from civil rights and feminist movements to Boler's own rec...