This book examines the evolution of schooling from bureaucracy and hierarchy to post-industrial schools, and places teachers' leadership on center stage at the same time. That is, it asks teachers to deepen leadership in their classrooms and with other teachers. The book carries education and schooling from formal control to a social influence process and addresses the deeply rooted difficulty of focusing too much energy on content. It reveals the strong power of internal and external context and helps educators implant the idea of the school not as a fixed, immutable home, but as a relatively deep social process. It shows how co-leadership comes alive in schools. Communities of schooling is one of the three most critical developments in education in the last 140 years. When it is linked with the two other fundamental reorientations in schooling - "dispersed ownership" and "constructivist work" - it becomes the most powerful force in education since the 1700s. This book shows how communities of schooling replace the earlier pillars of "learning as telling," "hierarchy of control," and "non-democratic influence." The work also explains the meaning and understanding of school work as a social influence process where all school-based educators exert power, but at different levels. The idea of enhancing individual and collective capacity through interdependency, shared work, and collective responsibility is unpacked.

Joseph Murphy is an Emeritus Professor at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. In the public schools he taught first grade. He also served as an administrator at the school, district, and state levels. He was the Founding President of the Ohio Principals Academy and a past Vice President of the American Educational Research Association. He works in the areas of school improvement, leadership, and policy. He has authored 31 books and 243 articles and his work has been cited over 32,000 times. He was the Founding Chair of the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC). He led colleagues who crafted (1996) and updated (2008, 2015) the national standards for school leaders.