Leading Professional Conversations: Adaptive expertise for schools

School leaders face complex challenges, that typically have multiple causes and often persist despite everyone's best attempts to address them. Addressing complex challenges requires juggling both the big picture, and the specific parts of the challenge. Without a roadmap, this process is fraught and unlikely to succeed in improving outcomes. In order to make a difference, schools need adaptive expertise; a skill which can be learnt through professional conversations and inquiry.

In Leading professional conversations, Emeritus Professor Helen Timperley deftly outlines the key enablers for effective professional conversations - relationships, resources, processes, knowledge and culture - which support teachers to be independent learners and result in positive impact on educational, social and emotional outcomes for students.

Featuring examples from real conversations between school leaders and educators, and practical templates which can be adapted to suit the contexts of your school, Leading professional conversations is the school leader's guide to thinking and acting evaluatively, knowledgeably, metacognitively, collaboratively, responsively and systematically, to engage in deep professional learning and genuine improvements in practice.

Dr Helen Timperley is Professor Emeritus of Education at The University of Auckland. Her extensive research experience has focused on how to promote professional and leadership learning in schools in ways that make a difference to outcomes for those student learners who are currently underserved by the system. She has numerous research articles in both these areas published in international journals, has spoken at a range of invited seminars and undertaken consultancies in Europe, Canada and Australia. She has written six books on her specialty research areas with many translated into a range of languages. Most of her published and consultancy work has focused on school and system change through professional learning, professional conversations with impact and evaluative thinking in educational innovation.