Vol. 12 No. 5 (2014): Theory and Research on the Practice of Educational Leadership
Articles

Sustaining the Turnaround: What Capacity Means in Practice?

Published December 29, 2015

Keywords:

School improvement, Turnaround, Capacity building.
How to Cite
Day, C. (2015). Sustaining the Turnaround: What Capacity Means in Practice?. REICE. Ibero-American Journal on Quality, Effectiveness and Change in Education, 12(5). https://doi.org/10.15366/reice2014.12.5.001

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to show how successful, sustained school improvement in schools in urban settings which serve highly disadvantaged communities relies upon the qualities and skills of their principals to engage, simultaneously, in capacity building at individual, collective and community levels. Definitions of capacity building as, ‘the interplay between personal abilities, interpersonal relationships, and organisational structures’ (Mitchell and Sackney, 2000:11) are limited in their application for they often fail to acknowledge that over the course of the time needed to build stable and successful learning and achievement environments, principals are likely to have to move through a number of ‘layered’ development phases, each one of which will contain priorities; and that during this change process, principals will likely also need to maintain, articulate and communicate a clear set of values upon which their strategies will be based.

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