The Global Fourth Way: The Quest for Educational Excellence, Nov/2012

This book builds upon the authors’ recently published The Fourth Way by helping educators to focus on the nitty-gritty, boiler-room challenges of change leaders and the expected obstacles they must anticipate, engage, and overcome to enact fourth way strategies and values. It will be of interest to all educational leaders who seek to combine inspiring and visionary leadership with the practical skills and street-level political acumen to make the changes that have to happen to improve education today.

This book will operationalize fourth way ideas so that readers can use these new examples, vignettes and strategies to implement their own action plans to achieve positive and sustainable reform. Success stories from around the globe will illustrate how small and large systems are now working with fourth way premises to promote learning and achievement.

About The Authors:
Andy Hargreaves is the Thomas More Brennan Chair at the Lynch School of Education, Boston College, and the elected Visiting Professor at the Institute of Education, London. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Educational Change and serves as leading editor of the first and second International Handbook of Educational Change. Hargreaves is the cofounder and former director of the International Centre for Educational Change at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto.

Dennis Shirley is professor at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. Shirley's educational work spans from the nitty-gritty micro-level of assisting beginning teachers in complex school environments to the macro-level of designing and guiding large-scale research and intervention projects for school districts, states, and networks. Shirley was the first US scholar to document the rise of community organizing as an educational change strategy, and his activities in this arena have led to multiple long-term collaborations and a steady stream of speaking engagements and visiting professorships in the United States, Canada, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Japan.

Shirley publishes frequently in Educational Leadership, the Phi Delta Kappan, Teachers College Record, and Education Week. With colleague Andy Hargreaves, he recently conducted a study of over 300 secondary schools in the United Kingdom affiliated with the Raising Achievement Transforming Learning network of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust. In addition, Shirley and Hargreaves completed a study of the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement, a network sponsoring lateral learning within and across schools in the world’s second highest-achieving jurisdiction after Finland.

Fluent in German, Shirley recently has spoken at and advised the Free University of Berlin, the University of Vienna, the University of Hildesheim, and the University of Dortmund on topics ranging from community engagement in schools to the reform of teacher education. At home in Boston, MA, Shirley is in the fourth year of leading a teacher inquiry seminar along with teacher leader Elizabeth MacDonald that is described in their recently published Teachers College Press book, The Mindful Teacher.

Shirley has received numerous scholarly awards, including fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Bad Godesberg, Germany, and the Rockefeller Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy. He holds a doctoral degree from Harvard University.