The first International Handbook of Educational Leadership and Administration (Leithwood et al.) was published in 1996 and quickly became something of a best seller for reference works within education. Such success, we suggest, was at least partly due to the unprecedented global waves of concern for improving schools launched in the mid 1980's, combined with a widespread belief in leadership as the single most powerful contribution to such improvement. The roots of this belief can be found in evidence produced by the early "effective schools" research, although there is a "romance" with...

The change in paradigm in our field is away from the great man or woman theory of leadership and the teacher in his or her own classroom to the development of learning communities which value differences and support critical reflection and encourage members to question, challenge, and debate teaching and learning issues.
How to achieve such learning communities is far from clear, but we believe the areas of problem-based learning (PBL) and organizational learning (OL) offer valuable clues. The indications are that the successful educational restructuring agenda depends on teams of...