Record Detail

Driven by the impetus for the school system asa whole to actualize deep twenty-first century learning,innovation diffusion has become increasingly an importantvehicle for isolated pockets of successes to proliferatebeyond the locale of the individual schools to form con-nected clusters of improvement at a greater scale. Thispaper articulates an ecological leadership model forenabling such system-wide innovation diffusion in thecontext of Singapore. Through the explication of leadershippractices demonstrated by two exemplar schools that havesuccessfully levelled up their school-based innovation, weargue that ecological leaders have to go beyond systemleadership to think and act in a more encompassing way.Specifically, ecological leaders have to embody systemsthinking and East-Asian collectivist beliefs to benefit otherschools, converge and contextualize the kernel of innova-tion, align efforts by mitigating tensions and paradoxeswithin and across the subsystems in the ecology, leverageon resources in the ecology and manage the emergentdynamics engendered through interactions with multi-levelactors. These five thrusts cut across the five dimensions ofecology: microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macro-system and chronosystem. With the favourable socio-political climate that encourages collaboration rather thancompetition, we posit that leaders can endeavour to forgeecological coherence. This can be achieved by establishingsynergistic structural and socio-cultural connections withinand across the five subsystems of influences underpinningthe hub school and networks of innovation-adoptingschools, thus bringing forth transformative changes in the system.