Читать книгу Stories of Caring School Leadership - Mark A. Smylie - Страница 6

In the many years that the three of us have worked in educational leadership and school improvement, we have come to believe that caring lies at the heart of schooling and promoting the learning and development of children. We have also come to believe that caring is an essential quality of school leadership. We are not alone in our thinking. Abundant evidence from research shows the importance of caring and support, along with high expectations and intellectual rigor, to the academic success of students. Educators know how essential it is for students’ learning and well-being that they are in strong, trusting, caring relationships with adults and peers in and beyond school.

In 2020, we wrote a book exploring the concept of caring and its application to school leadership. That book, Caring School Leadership (Corwin), surveys writing and research from education, related academic fields and disciplines, and the human service professions. It identifies practices that school leaders might use to be caring in their relationships with students, cultivate their schools as caring communities, and foster caring in families and communities beyond the school. This book of stories is a companion to Caring School Leadership. On the pages that follow, we present stories that illustrate concretely many of the practices of caring school leadership discussed in that book.