Ng, David Foo Seong

Educational leadership for the 21st century calls for a new and different working relationship between educators. In addition to well-known approaches to educational leadership such as transformational, strategic, educative and organizational styles, the notion of parallel leadership is receiving much attention with growing evidence from Australian schools that this leadership style facilitates school improvement. Parallel leadership challenges teachers and members of the school management to establish a more collaborative working relationship. Such leadership entails mutualism between administrator leaders and teacher leaders, a sense of shared purpose and an allowance of individual expression and action by respective leaders (Andrews & Crowther, 2002). Nurturing parallel leadership involves a change in the roles and responsibilities of principals – to lead in metastrategic development – and of teachers – to lead in pedagogical development. Such leadership is an impetus for essential processes of schoolwide professional learning, culture building and approach to pedagogy which will enhance and sustain school outcomes, thus giving IDEAS schools a cutting edge. This enables the knowledge-generating capacity of schools to be enhanced and sustained. Based on data obtained from interviews and fieldwork observations we introduce an elaborated version of the’ black box’ (Crowther, Hann & Andrews, 2002) and provide a discussion on how three principals in Singapore schools, as part of the IDEAS project, embrace the role of ‘strategic leaders’ in the context of parallel leadership. As these principals progress with developing parallel leadership, we expect valuable insight to emerge as to how parallel leadership is functioning in these schools, thus enabling us to provide at a later stage, a more conclusive answer as to what a parallel relationship between teachers and principals looks like in the Singapore context.

Learning becomes meaningful when learning comes from the process of working towards the understanding of a problem. This paper shows all educators how computer simulations can provide the context for students to learn declarative and procedural knowledge through the resolution of a problem. Underpinning the design are principles of problem-based learning that are essential to helping our students become reflective and independent problem solvers in the 21st Century. Suggestions of how these principles can be transferred into designing computer simulations for schools are also discussed.

In programme delivery, while the international trend in education has seen a shift from teacher-centred to student-centred learning and from transmission to reflective approaches, most leadership programmes have remained heavily teacher-centred. A key feature of teacher-centred learning relies on practices of course-driven programmes. This feature has been remarkably resilient over the years in the face of efforts to effect change in programme delivery and a new understanding of complexity in the world of education. The complexity theoretical framework provides us the advantage of an alternative design for leadership development programmes that is able to meet current and future challenges. Yearly, billions of dollars are spent on training and development. It is important to ensure that the outcome of training, learning and development must yield practical outcomes that are relevant, innovative and implementable solutions.

This study examined distributed leadership in Information Communication Technology reform in a government school in Singapore. The study adopted a naturalistic inquiry approach, involving the case study of a school. The study found that leadership for ICT reform is distributed according to functions of transformational, instructional, emotional and strategic management of resources. The key enabling factors are an official leadership position, access to expertise, support by senior management, and interpersonal synergies amongst the leaders. Transformational leadership is performed mainly by senior management. Instructional leadership is performed mainly by middle management. Both senior and middle management provided emotional leadership.