Harvard Graduate School of Education - Leadership: an Evolving Vision 2007

Today one of the delegates described this summer school as a united nations of school principals and it certainly fees like that with delegates from many countries across the globe as well as the United States. Understandably the audience is predominantly American as are the speakers. Their work is based on some of the excellent research being undertaken in this country. Despite this, many of the issues raised so far have proven to be common across the world. This has been a unifying factor realising that it doesn’t matter whether you are Head teacher of a small primary school in Scotland, Principal of a large international school in India or Principal of an American high school of 4000 pupils we all face the same leadership challenges. However at times for the international delegates where some difficulties have arisen is in understanding the American school system and the culture within which American schools operate. For some international delegates there has been a feeling that not enough cognisance has been taken of the fact that we may not all have a complete understanding of the American system.

With this in mind I was delighted yesterday afternoon when we went into our discussion groups (mine has 4 international delegates out of 11) and our group leader, Marilynne Smith Quarco a School Principal from Massachusetts acknowledged the international delegates and raised the issue that we may not fully understand some of the issues raised with out having greater information on American school systems. She had handouts for us all on specific American issues and we spent some time discussing these. She then invited the international delegates (1 Scot, 1 Indian and 2 Australians) to share something of the education systems in our countries, the cultures within which we operate and the major issues we are facing.

By doing so we were better able as a group to understand each other, to get a greater understanding of each others perspectives and to look at education in a truly international context. From this discussion came a greater openness and realisation that we can all learn from each other and can all make significant contributions to educational debate. Marilynne truly made us feel valued and gave us all that sense of belonging Norman Kunc spoke of on Saturday.