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Chapter 48
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-6046-5.ch048
Leading and Learning
in the Digital Age:
Framing and Understanding
School Leader Challenges
ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how Heifetz’s (1994) model, applied to the work of school leaders, has led to
key insights. The framework helps practitioners and education leadership faculty who teach aspiring
and practicing school leaders better understand the nature of adaptive and technical challenges that
leaders encounter day-to-day and their approach to making sense of them, managing them, and helping
other adults to do the same. The authors employ the adaptive-technical analytic framework to examine a
case that is representative of real world problems that leaders have been wrestling with, based on their
prior research. Through Heifetz’s lens, the authors deconstruct the case to illustrate how framing the
problem as adaptive and/or technical directly informs the leader’s work. Embedded refective questions
create opportunities for readers to pause and apply this model to Principal Georgina’s case. The authors
encourage leaders to apply a framework and questions like this in their unique milieus.
INTRODUCTION
With the explosion of technology in the digital
age, access has eased work—in many ways—in
that educational leaders everywhere can instantly
connect to their stakeholders, tap resources from
around the globe with the click of a key board
and create learning communities without the
constraints of brick and mortar. This is what we
call the “light” side of technology. We want to
acknowledge that advances in technology have
enriched the work of leading and learning.
And yet, as much as life has changed in our
post-modern society, there are enduring issues,
Patricia Maslin-Ostrowski
Florida Atlantic University, USA
Eleanor Drago-Severson
Teachers College, Columbia University, USA