Podcast 389, Karen Edge on Generation X Leaders in Education (12-2-20)

Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.

On this week's podcast I speak to Dr. Karen Edge who is a Reader in Educational Leadership at the University College London Institute of Education. Karen Edge was a keynote speaker at the 2020 annual conference of the Irish Primary Principals' Network, the IPPN. Among the topics we discussed were the following:

• Helping principals make their job meaningful
• Constraints on principals working on teaching and learning and working with students and teachers include: to be accountable, to share information, manage data, manage external relations
• How principals can live a full life outside of work and be a leader in their work
• Helping principals align their professional priorities with what students, teachers and parents expect of them
• Supporting a new generation of principals from Generation X (born from 1965 to 1980) in schools designed for Baby Boomer principals who have now retired or who are retiring (those born from 1946 to 1964)
• Collaborative decision making and Generation X leaders
• How leadership in education differs across countries and continents and how this is influenced by being an adult in the wider society (and why borrowing policies from other countries may not work in the same way here).
• Rewards of being principal
• Why “being busy” is not a badge of honour
• How schools can productively partner with schools in other countries

Among the people she mentioned on the podcast were the following:

• Dan Freedman- book series Jamie Johnson
• Judy Goldberg and Wondershift
• Viv Grant