Prof Andy Hargreaves

Andy Hargreaves is the Thomas More Brennan Chair of Education in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. Before this he was the founder and co-director of the International Centre for Educational Change at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (University of Toronto), and has held visiting professorships and fellowships in England, Australia, Sweden, Spain, the United States, Hong Kong and Japan. He is the holder of the Canadian Education Association/Whitworth 2000 Award for outstanding contributions to educational research in Canada.

Hargreaves has written numerous books on culture, change and leadership in education. His book, Teaching In The Knowledge Society: Education In The Age Of Insecurity (Teachers' College, 2003) received outstanding writing awards from the American Educational Research Association and the American Libraries Association. In his latest book Sustainable Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2005), co-authored with Dean Fink, Hargreaves set out a compelling original framework of seven principles for sustainable leadership. His work and several of his books have been translated extensively into more than a dozen languages.

Hargreaves' current research interests include the emotions of teaching and leading and the sustainability of change and leadership in education, business, sport, and health.

The Fourth Way

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This presentation deals with Professor Hargreaves new book with Dennis Shirley on The Fourth Way. The First Way of Educational Change gave professionals the money and let them get on with the job. This created inspiration and innovation but also brought a lot of inconsistency. The Second Way imposed consistency through increasing standardization of content and testing and introduced growing market competition in meeting these standards. This increased consistency and developed some sense of urgency, but at great cost to professional motivation and classroom creativity.

We are now in a Third Way Orthodoxy of more professional involvement through learning communities and sponsorship of school networks but this is within a context of arbitrary and autocratically imposed narrow targets in literacy and numeracy, obsessions with data and spreadsheets over knowledge of staff and students, and professional distractions with getting short term lifts in performance results.

We need a new way, a Fourth Way of inspiration, innovation and sustainability in which the curriculum is broad, targets are shared rather than imposed, the public is engaged as partners and not just consumers, and accountability is by sample and not by census. In the wake of the greatest economic upheaval for half a century, society is heading away from control by markets and bureaucracy to revitalized professionalism and public democracy. It is time our schools and school systems did too. Indeed, the presentation will show, a number are increasingly and inspirationally already moving in this very direction.