Sharon Daloz Parks’ Leadership Can Be Taught is an examination and illumination of Ronald Heifetz’s teaching method at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
She not only gives the reader an in depth experience of being in Heifetz’s classroom, but she also translates his methodology into transferrable principles for leadership and teaching. She does this by dissecting the case-in-point approach that Heifetz uses. She also dismantles the notion that an individual is born a leader, and plots a way to develop presence – “the ability to intervene, to hold steady, inspire a group, and work in both verbal and nonverbal realms” (13).
In the second half of the book, Parks addresses the transferability of this approach to a variety of different situations, such as the workplace or different classroom settings. She then places herself in the shoes of a teacher, and examines the principles that teachers need to learn in order to teach with this methodology. The book closes with a critique on our culture’s myth of leadership and an evaluation of this method’s strengths and limits.
In a sense, Leadership Can Be Taught is a hybrid-workbook or pathway to help leaders, teachers, and organizations rethink leadership, teaching, and how to learn.
Parks presents an integrative framework where the theory of leadership and practice of teaching are woven together seamlessly (231). Through this new methodology, the traditional roles of teachers are reimagined, and students now have a different approach to learning.
Leadership is less about an individual’s talent and exercise of power, and more about empowering a group of individuals to work through, and learn from, their toughest issues. In this new model, “the teacher is a co-learner and at the same time a model, practicing authority and leadership in public so that others may eavesdrop, watch, contend with, and learn” (232).
Consequently, this book has expanded my understanding of teaching and leadership. Not only will I cease to run away from conflict, but I will prayerfully and carefully examine where I need to start conflict in my ministry, in order to bring about beneficial change and learning. In the training seminars I lead, I am now going to strive to use the case-in-point method, and learn how much more beneficial this could be, than the simple case-study method.
I give this book 4 out of 5.