Community, learning and leadership: reflections on the work of Karen Seashore Louis

Abstract

Purpose

Seashore Louis has enjoyed a long and productive career, contributing many key understandings to the field; among them, foundational theorizing regarding professional community, organizational learning and the role of principal leadership in organizational and student learning. In each, the role of organizational change and its bearing on school improvement has been a key focus of her research. Central to Seashore Louis' organizational change theorizing has been the contention that organizations are expected to produce outcomes (i.e. that they exist to do things), and in turn, those outcomes have consequences for the organization and its members. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the impact her work has had on the field of educational leadership research.

Design/methodology/approach

This article traces the development of Karen Seashore Louis' contribution to and work in organizational theory.

Findings

By focusing on Seashore Louis' contribution to our understanding of how professionals learn, both individually and together, and what they do with that information and knowledge, this article will synthesize Seashore Louis' contributions to understanding how change is established, enacted and experienced in schools, as well as how those understandings are informed by theorizing about the role of school culture, openness to new ideas and understandings, alternatives and multiple perspectives, and caring as it relates to leading schools.

Originality/value

The authors’ experience of learning from and with Karen Seashore Louis has deepened the authors’ own understandings of how schools work, how teachers and leaders learn, and the ways in which school organizations can thrive. Key to her influence is her ability to generate and use conceptual and theoretical lenses to explain why people act the ways they do, and how understanding those actions can help us all to improve. Her theorizing has provided the field clarity about what works, where it works and why it works while still problematizing our understandings and pushing for greater depth of understanding and analysis.

Citation

Kruse, S.D. and Walls, J. (2022), "Community, learning and leadership: reflections on the work of Karen Seashore Louis", Journal of Educational Administration, Vol. 60 No. 3, pp. 354-360. https://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-12-2020-0249