Flux Leadership: Real-Time Inquiry for Humanizing Educational Change

In these times of rapid change, including a global pandemic, educational leaders need tools and frameworks that can adapt to evolving shifts in real time. What might happen if a leadership framework could make sense of this complexity in ways that are humane, ethical, culturally responsive, and multifaceted? This book examines how a flux leadership mindset and corresponding tools promote the conditions for educational change that uplift stakeholders and generate contextualized data during emergency situations. The educational leaders at the heart of this book employed a flux leadership tool through a process called “rapid-cycle inquiry,” which allows for collaborative inquiries to take place in real time to answer tough questions and surface stories that are often silenced in times of sudden change. Featuring narratives of what happened to schools during COVID-19, Flux Leadership introduces a generative framework for agile, responsive, anti-racist, trauma-informed, healing-centered leadership for times of crisis and beyond.

Book Features:

• Provides a framework and set of real-time strategies for leaders to engage in critical leadership practice and crisis leadership with attention to equity.
• Addresses vital school and district-based leadership issues in various contexts, including reflexivity, identity, positionality, racial literacy, brave space leadership, equity-focused professional development, and critical collaboration.
• Covers a range of vantage points and intersectional social identities in succinct, accessible, and pragmatic ways.
• Creates a new approach for leaders to get at context and drive homegrown metrics that speak back to and challenge top-down metrics in schools and districts.

Sharon M. Ravitch is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education where she teaches courses on leadership, applied research, and racial literacy. Chloe Alexandra Kannan, former middle-grades language arts teacher, is a doctoral candidate in the Literacy, Culture, and International Education Division of Penn GSE.