Significance of educational leadership: Case for Singapore schools today

Abstract

In this chapter, we share our findings on an emergent type of leadership that we term as ecological leadership that will sustain educational innovations leading to purposeful learning in schools and facilitate the scaling of the innovations to other schools. This ecological leadership seeks a bi-directional alignment of ecological subsystems that comprise aligning leadership at a school to leadership across schools and up to leadership at the Ministry of Education (MOE) headquarters. We achieve this bi-directional alignment through leveraging multi-level networks, norms of practice and trust to achieve outcomes that move towards life- long, life-wide, life-deep and life-wise learning in schools. We begin our discussion on ecological leadership with an introduction on what makes a good leader.