The Challenges for New Principals in the 21st Century

A volume in International Research on School Leadership
Series Editors Alan R. Shoho and Bruce Barnett, University of Texas at San Antonio
and Autumn Tooms, University of Tennessee
This book series, International Research on School Leadership focuses on how present-day issues affect the
theory and practice of school leadership. For the inaugural book, we focused on the challenges facing new
principals and headteachers. Because the professional lives of school leaders have increasingly impinged on
their personal well-being and resources have continued to shrink, it is important to understand how new
principals or headteachers share and divide their energy, ideas, and time within the school day. It is also
important to discover ways to provide professional development and support for new principals and headteachers as they strive to lead their schools in
the twenty-first century. For these reasons, The Challenges for New Principals in the Twenty-First Century: Developing Leadership Capabilities
Through Professional Support is dedicated to exploring the rarely-examined experiences of those who enter the role as new principals or headteachers.
By giving voice to new principals and headteachers, we are able to determine what aspects of leadership preparation ring true and what aspects prove
to be of little or no utility. Unlike leadership texts that focus on conceptual considerations and personal narratives from the field, this book highlights a
collection of empirical efforts centered on the challenges and issues that new principals and headteachers experience during their initial and crucial
years of induction. We solicited and accepted manuscripts that explore the multi-faceted dimensions of being a new principal or headteacher in the
twenty-first century. Our goal was to create an edited book that examines the commonalities and differences that new principals and headteachers
experience from an international perspective. This edited book is comprised of six chapters, each of
which contributes an unique perspective on the responsibilities that new principals and headteachers are
experiencing at the dawn of the twenty-first century.