School Leadership for the 21st Century: A Conceptual Overview

This paper puts forth that leadership for the 21st century should be inclusive and distributive, and at the same time, promoting leadership capacity building. It underlies the belief that leadership occurs at all levels, a school is a learning organization, and that all personnel has the potential to learn and be developed, and that school leadership should be looked at holistically, and one that is distributive. Effective leadership in this paper is devoted to the process and function – a joint and holistic perspective that encompasses all the personnel in the school, the principals and the teachers – that is the world of teachers and classrooms, and leadership of the whole school system which should give the support and environment for the schools to flourish. Hence, school leadership is to facilitate learning or leadership for learning not merely student learning, but learning for all, towards making the school a place to learn, albeit not undermining the importance of the principal in promoting a learning environment. The gist of this paper is to promote distributive leadership, as the future of school leadership and management, towards school effectiveness and improvement. It offers the perspective of what could be effective school leadership in the third millennium – not because it is the beginning of the unknown that we all will have to face and be ready for.