John MacBeath
John is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Cambridge where his main commitment is to the Centre for Commonwealth Education, working with countries of the Commonwealth on leadership for learning, teaching and professional development. Prior to his Cambridge appointment in 2000 he was Director of the Quality in Education Centre at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow where he worked closely with the Scottish Inspectorate on self evaluation, leadership and school improvement, paralleling self evaluation initiatives with the National Union of Teachers in England. Since 1997 John has been working with the Hong Kong Education Bureau on the development, evaluation and embedding of self evaluation in primary, secondary and special schools. From 1997 to 2001 he was a member of Tony Blair’s Task Force on Standards and from 1997 to 1999 Scotland’s Action Group Standards. In 1997 John received the OBE for services to education and in June 2008 an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh. In 2006 he was elected President of the International Congress on School Effectiveness and Improvement. .
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Routledge have published many of John MacBeath books:
Connecting Leadership and Learning
Principles for Practice
Leading schools is becoming almost daily a more complex and demanding job. Connecting Leadership and Learning reassesses the purpose of schools, the nature of learning…
read more2008 | Hardback: 978-0-415-45292-2 (Routledge)
Connecting Leadership and Learning
Principles for Practice
Leading schools is becoming almost daily a more complex and demanding job. Connecting Leadership and Learning reassesses the purpose of schools, the nature of learning…
read more2008 | Paperback: 978-0-415-45295-3 (Routledge)
School Inspection & Self-Evaluation
Working with the New Relationship
Written for heads and teachers, this forward-thinking book examines exactly what the relationship between inspection and self-evaluation means for schools and explores some of the…
read more2006 | Hardback: 978-0-415-39970-8 (Routledge)
School Inspection & Self-Evaluation
Working with the New Relationship
Written for heads and teachers, this forward-thinking book examines exactly what the relationship between inspection and self-evaluation means for schools and explores some of the…
read more2006 | Paperback: 978-0-415-39971-5 (Routledge)
Self-Evaluation in the Global Classroom
Self-evaluation is going global. This book describes what happened when teams of school students from across the world embarked on the trip of a lifetime… read more2002 | Hardback: 978-0-415-25825-8 (Routledge)
more information about Self-Evaluation in the Global Classroom
Self-Evaluation in the Global Classroom
Self-evaluation is going global. This book describes what happened when teams of school students from across the world embarked on the trip of a lifetime… read more2002 | Paperback: 978-0-415-25826-5 (Routledge)
more information about Self-Evaluation in the Global Classroom
Self-Evaluation
What's In It For Schools?
Self-evaluation in schools sits at the top of the national agenda in response to an awareness that performance tables and inspector's reports can only tell…
read more2002 | Hardback: 978-0-415-27741-9 (Routledge)
Self-Evaluation
What's In It For Schools?
Self-evaluation in schools sits at the top of the national agenda in response to an awareness that performance tables and inspector's reports can only tell…
read more2002 | Paperback: 978-0-415-27742-6 (Routledge)
Self-Evaluation in European Schools
A Story of Change
In a political and economic climate in which school performance is made public, performance tables and inspectors' reports can only tell a partial story.This… read more
2000 | Paperback: 978-0-415-23014-8 (Routledge)
Schools Must Speak for Themselves
The Case for School Self-Evaluation
This best-selling book illustrates how schools can tell their own story. It draws on ground-breaking work with the National Union of Teachers to demonstrate a… read more1999 | Paperback: 978-0-415-20580-1 (Routledge)
Leadership for Learning has become something of a cliché in the last few years. Much effort has been expended in measuring correlations using proxies such as student attainment and head teacher/principal characteristics. Connecting Leadership and Learning: Principles for Practice is concerned to go deeper into the three key ideas contained the title, each of them open to widely differing interpretation. They argue that we can only understand ‘connecting’ when we have a firm grasp of learning (‘in the wild’ and ‘in captivity’) and an understanding of leadership as both an individual and a shared activity.
Exploring the connections was a three year project with schools in seven countries from the U.S. through Europe to Australia. As teachers, heads and board members from these seven countries came together in Cambridge, Copenhagen, Innsbruck and Athens the authors began to construct principles for practice which travel, which have been tested in classrooms from Seattle to Brisbane and London to Oslo. Each of the five principles and prompts to action are examined in turn. The book is co-edited with John’s Australian colleague Neil Dempster with chapters from his Cambridge colleagues (David Frost, Sue Swaffield and Joanne Waterhouse), Jorunn Moller from Oslo and Goerge Bagakis from Greece.
Publications:
John’s has written several books on school self evaluation, including: School Inspection and Self Evaluation: Working with the New Relationship, (Routledge, 2006), Self-evaluation: What’s in it for Schools? (Routledge, 2002), Self-evaluation in the Global Classroom(Routledge, 2002), Self-Evaluation in European Schools: a Story of Change (Routledge, 2000) and Schools Must Speak for Themselves, (Routledge, 1999).
Among the five Routledge books on self evaluation, that John has written, the one of which he is most proud was written entirely by school students and lightly edited by himself and his Japanese colleague Hidenori Sugimine. Self-Evaluation in the Global Classroom tells the story of what must be the most exciting project in student voice ever undertaken - a group of students from seven countries traveling the globe for a year evaluating classroom practice from the Shetland Islands to Japan and Korea via three other European countries. Living in the townships in South Africa, spending a night in prison, providing critical feedback to teachers and policy makers in Japan tells a compelling story
A companion volume Self-Evaluation in European Schools: a Story of Change tells the story of 101 European schools through the eyes of a student, a parent, a teacher, a head teacher. Now published in nine European languages, this story of change has had a significant impacted on policy development in those countries.
Publications in academic journals include special editions of the Leadership for Learning Project in School Leadership and Management, International Journal of Leadership in Education (forthcoming) and Leading and Learning. With Lejf Moos he is co-editor of a new international journal Evaluation, Assessment and Accountability in Education which will be launched in January 2009.
John’s other titles include Leadership for Learning: International Perspectives, (Sense Publishers 2008), Teachers Under Pressure (Sage 2008), Schools on the Edge: Responding to Challenging Circumstances (Sage 2006) and Improving School Effectiveness (Open University Press, 2001).
