Written by I remember walking into the bookstore at Teachers College, Columbia U. as a new doc. student and thinking, “what value am I going to add to the ed. research enterprise? A book has been written on everything; all the answers to all of the problems in education are right here in these books.” I still have those feelings when attending major research conferences.
Today, I was looking through one of the many catalogues I receive from publishers of educational texts. This one is from Corwin Press, one of the biggies. There are over 130 pages in the catalogue with 5 or 6 books described on each page. The range of topics and title is incredible, and this is only one of the many publishers of educational texts. I was amused when browsing through just the sections on Leadership and Principals I found the following titles:
Can you imagine the permutations? If as a school leader, I could/should take on 12 roles, develop 8 habits, use 36 tools and take 124 actions, that should do it, right? No problem.
And then in spare time we can: communicate with our parent organization, repair friendship issues on the playground, act as a counselor, be a nurse, and figure out what new teaching tool I should give my teachers.
Very interesting post.
Yes, I only got to page 20 of the 130+ pages. I just randomly flipped to page 62 and found “Shouting Won’t Grow Dendrites: 20 Techniques for Managing a Brain-Compatible Classroom.” See if you can get your teachers to learn 20 new techniques today; that’ll go over well I bet.
Yeah, great post Jon. I got that Corwin Press brochure the other day too and I thought the same thing as I flipped through the education leadership pages. These books may have some value, so I don’t want to say they are useless, but as far as advancing educational research? – yeah … not so much. I especially love how they all make it seem so easy, like you said 8 of this 12 of that, when really being a school leader is one of the most complex jobs in the United States.