The increased focus on raising standards in education requires leaders to engage in complex decision making about teacher assessment, mandated accountability measures, and the collection and use of large amounts of data. Showcasing exemplary practices of school and district administrators, Decision Making in Educational Leadership covers issues concerning the role of emotion, ethical and legal ramifications, the use of data, and complexity in decision making. Chapter authors in this research-based volume explore what administrators and school leaders actually know about educational problems, how they draw upon and revise theories of action for responding to problems, and which theories are tenable in educational decision making. This important resource provides a broad and international perspective on effective models and methods of educational decision making and shares valuable knowledge about how theory can be translated into practice in a variety of school settings.
Table of Contents:
Preface, Stephanie Chitpin and Colin W. Evers
Part I: Data Driven Decision Making
Chapter 1: The Changing Dynamics of Educational Judgment and Decision Making in a Data Driven World, Andy Hargreaves, Alex Gurn, Beth Morgan and Henry Braun
Chapter 2: Principals’ Evidence-Based Decision Making: Its Nature and Impacts, Jingping Sun
Part II: Emotional and Epistemological Decision Making Structures
Chapter 3: Capturing Principals’ Decision Making Processes in an Online Professional Learning Community, Stephanie Chitpin
Chapter 4: Decision Making as Problem-solving Trajectories, Colin W. Evers
Chapter 5: Emotions, Emotional Intelligence, and Leadership: From Folkpsychology to Neuroscience, Gabriele Lakomski
Part III: Complexity and Decision Making
Chapter 6: On the Job Decision Making: Understanding and Evaluating how Leaders Solve Problems, Viviane Robinson and Rozanne Donald
Chapter 7: Re-Visioning Decision Making in Educational Leadership, Peter Grimmett
Chapter 8: Principals’ Perceptions about Resistance to the Implementation of Major Decisions, Karen Starr
Chapter 9: Trusting our Schools: The ‘Soft’ Side of Decision Making, Dean Fink
Part IV: Ethical and Legal Issues
Chapter 10: Ethical Decision Making in Leadership: A Moral Literacy Perspective, Patrick Jenlink
Chapter 11: Justice and Equity in Educational Provision: The Case of Ontario, Marvin. A. Zuker
Chapter 12: Educational Leadership and Decision Making: Making the Politics and Policy Visible, Howard Stevenson
