3.2 Balance the negatives re. school leadership with positive proactive initiatives encouraging young teachers to become principals; 3.3 Start focusing energy on cultivating greater involvement of deputy principals and assistant principals in IPPN; 3.4 Build relationships with the academic community in the teacher colleges and universities; 3.5 Look to international best practice for good ideas and best positioning of the principalship; 3.6 Be courageous – championing the new school leadership role will be unpopular with some. Push the future with those who most fear change.
Recommendation for Individual Principals Ever since our series What’s Worth Fighting For trilogy, I have been an advocate of individuals and small groups taking action in new directions in addition to whatever the system may or may not be doing. Peter Block (1987) captured this powerfully in his phrase, ‘Cultures get changed in a thousand small ways, not by dramatic announcements emanating from the boardroom’. (p. 98) This advice seems especially appropriate for all those educators in Ireland who wish to team up so as to achieve and to sustain major improvements from the classroom to the policy level. Official policy is often a consequence of good practice that already exists and, thus, can spur additional activities in new and promising directions. Finally, the advice by Abrahamson (2004) in Change without pain (actually, change without as much pain as usual) seems especially appropriate for the Irish situation. Abrahamson says that too many systems attempt ‘creative destruction’ in order to radically transform the system by attempting to replace the old culture with the new one. Such approaches, he notes, rarely work and cause severe disruption and further decline. Instead, for most situations he recommends ‘creative recombination’, which entails building on and surfacing valuable latent cultural norms and using them to craft needed change.
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