Team Strategies for Success: Doing What Counts in Education

Citation

Gibbons, L. (2002), "Team Strategies for Success: Doing What Counts in Education", International Journal of Educational Management, Vol. 16 No. 5, pp. 257-258. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijem.2002.16.5.257.1

Within the Oxbridge structure those of us who do not hold exalted positions are required to produce book reviews for those in eminent positions as part of our apprenticeship. It is part of the regular “attendance in hall” and supporting college rowers on the Cam duties. As a person who believes in modernization, this indenture and especially the quality of the books that I am required to read sometimes makes me angry. Most of the books that are passed on to me are dry, often poorly thought works, and practical guides irrelevant to real working situations of actual people, filled with muddled behaviourist models.

Therefore this book was a pleasant surprise: it is both stimulating and engaging. This book will easily find its place as welcome reading for anyone interested in real workable management strategies; rather than the usual book that promises this, but then only provides reworked comments on the nature of teams from the classical management literature.

The strength of Smialek’s book is that it puts words and concepts around familiar but largely unarticulated problems concerning the effectiveness of teams. In this sense it offers the many individuals and institutions that find themselves bogged down in team building the satisfaction of knowing that it is not just them. I believe those teachers, school managers, parents and ancillary workers and others who have experience of working in school teams, will instinctively recognize the thoughts and feelings expressed by Smialek in this book as authentic and congruent with their own experience. The theoretical models and methodologies that Smialek employs are directly relevant to the contemporary school situation in the United Kingdom and other major European countries.

The educational book market is flooded with texts on “how to” make teams work effectively, most of which I seem to be required to review. I end up angry when I realize that I am reading a text that aspires to be a history‐cum‐psychology book that will be of no value to practitioners, who in the United Kingdom (and in other European countries) are under enormous pressure to achieve results. I found Mary Smialek’s book both inspirational and insightful, she understands the means by which teams develop and the strategies they need to adopt to achieve success. In addition, I have to say that for me the figures and schematic drawings that Smialek employs greatly facilitated my understanding.