Study On Sustainable Leadershlp Theory And Action Strategies

As the new trend of contemporarily educational leadership, the theory of sustainable leadership derives from the idea of sustainable development effectively used and continually deepened by solving human’s survival crisis and promoting industrial and commercial organizations’sustainability. This theory conforms to various research transitions in educational leadership, and corresponds to the realistic requirements of schools’pursuits for sustainable development. At present, western scholars have already attached great importance to this theory and have made some achievements, while our scholars’acquaintances and researches seem relatively weak. Thus, author of this study mainly sorted out and read relevant literatures, particularly made analysis, comparison and summary of western scholars’findings regarding to sustainable leadership in educational field so as to grasp this theory deeply and systematically. Furthermore, the author made a short-term interview in a case school to enrich perceptual experience of schools’current state and integrate personal thought and comprehension.Through concept interpretation, model exploration and idea abstraction, the second part of this study expounds the theoretical connotation of sustainable leadership comprehensively. The author concludes sustainable leadership as a systematic leadership which is moral-driven and value-loaded. This leadership is aimed at promoting persons’, organizations’and the whole society’s sustainable development. Its core ideas include persisting in development, embodying inclusiveness, preserving justice and facing complexity. The third part of this study intensively focuses on the emergence background, ideological source and development trend of this theory. Sustainable leadership is mainly rooted in the following educational context covering the difficult extension of wide-scale educational reform, the redefinition of educational leaders and the crisis of the leaders’ recruitment and appointment. The generation of this theory is also based on rich theoretical foundations such as the enrichment of sustainable development, the evolution and motivation of organizational and managerial theories and the theoretical accumulation of educational leadership research. The fourth part of this study fully demonstrates the practical significance of sustainable leadership. Because sustainable leadership greatly emphasizes and powerfully deals with many actual difficulties of schools’ development such as the constraint of efficiency and standards, the breeding of students’tired of learning, the spread of job burnout and the prominent principal succession problem. Moreover, it demands to change schools’ traditional metaphor into "learning community" and creates trust and cooperative school culture to explore the new orientation of schools’ development. The final part is aimed at exploring action strategies of sustainable leadership systematically. As the "system thinkers in action", sustainable leadership depends on steadfastly collective actions to promote schools’ development including preserving students’ deep learning and caring faculty’s continuing professional development, implementing distributive leadership and building leading community, planning succession and facilitating heritage, stressing capacity building and deepening systematic reform. Consequently, sustainable leadership has both theoretical significance and practical values.