Andrew (Andy) Hargreaves, Dennis Shirley - The Fourth Way_ The Inspiring Future for Educational Change-Corwin (2009)

xiv
The Fourth Way
and report on the relationship between leadership and school improvement
in Finland—the world’s leading nation on many international indicators
of educational and economic performance. Beatrice Pont and Gábor
Halász—the other members of this team—worked with tireless effort and
exercised incisive judgment from before dawn and beyond dusk every day
to make critical sense of the extensive data we were collecting. 7
In one or two places, we draw on an ongoing project funded by
England’s National College for School Leadership and the Specialist
Schools and Academies Trust on organizations that perform beyond
expectations in education, health, business, and sport. Alma Harris is
codirecting this cross-national project involving research teams from the
United States and England with one of us. Alan Boyle has worked most
directly on the two examples discussed here of a high-performing local
authority and a professional sports team that uses performance data to
advance improvement.
A key part of our argument is about the importance of engaging parents
and communities in educational change. Wendy Puriefoy, Marion
Orr, and John Rogers with the Scholars Forum of the Public Education
Network in the United States have informed and inspired us through rich
conversations that have made clear the necessity and the nature of community
organizing. 8 President Barack Obama may have brought community
organizing into the public eye, but the everyday community organizers
with whom one of us has been privileged to work have lifted up the educational
and social contributions and achievements of some of America’s
most challenged and politically neglected communities for decades.
Elizabeth MacDonald and the Boston Public School teachers in the
Mindful Teacher Project funded by the Boston Collaborative Fellows
have kept us grounded in and inspired by the everyday lives as well as the
vocational commitments of classroom teachers and especially those who
choose to teach in urban schools. 9 They have reminded us repeatedly why
this work must be done; through their positive examples, they have motivated
us to keep going.
As we have written this book and undertaken the research behind it, we
have become good colleagues and good friends. We have worked through
the ideas, evidence, and frustrations in our offices and homes and at a
number of conference venues, but two places retain special importance
for us. The staff of the Busy Bee Diner in Brookline, Massachusetts, have
served us many fine breakfasts over the past two years and often endured
our professorial absentmindedness in forgetting what we want to order or
even how to pay the bill! The creators and maintainers of the Appalachian
Trail have provided us and many others with a truly inspiring and sustainable