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J Educ Change (2006) 7:109111
DOI 10.1007/s10833-006-0023-2
BOOK REVIEW
Andy Hargreaves and Dean Fink, Sustainable Leadership
Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2006.
Amanda Datnow
Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2006
Andy Hargreaves and Dean Finks new volume, Sustainable Leadership, is both about sustainable leadership and sustainable school improvement. In essence, it is a book about what leaders can do to create the conditions for better schooling for all students. The book is organized around seven principles for sustainable leadership: Depth of learning and real achievement rather than supercially tested performance; Length of impact over the long haul; Breadth of inuence, or distributed leadership; Justice in ensuring the good of the whole; Diversity and cohesion; Resourcefulness in order to conserve the energy of individuals, and; Conservation, building on the past to create a better future.
Even though at rst glance this would appear to be a dense and lengthy book, it is actually extremely easy to read. The text and the lessons within it ow quickly and clearly in part because of the effective way in which the authors present the material. Each chapter includes text boxes with vignettes about the schools that Hargreaves and Fink have studied in their Change Over Time project. These text boxes help to bring the principles to life and give us an eye into the world of schools and the struggles of real educational leaders. Each chapter also includes a set of action points for leaders, which are offset by bullets throughout the text. The principles that Hargreaves and Fink discuss are also very straightforward, and they are careful to explicitly dene the terms and concepts within the book. Take for example, their denition of sustainable leadership:
Sustainable educational leadership and improvement preserves and develops deep learning for all that spreads and lasts, in ways that do no harm to and indeed create positive benet for others around us, now and in the future (p. 17).
As someone who has also tried to bring greater complexity to our...