Leadership of international schools: Understanding and managing dualities

Leaders of international schools find themselves operating within a loosely defined, yet rapidly growing, specialty niche of education. The leadership context for these schools is often filled with ambiguity and complex tensions between opposing forces. This article proposes a two-stage framework for critically analyzing the dualities of international schools. The first stage, 'making sense of dualities', adapts Simkins' framework for sense-making in educational leadership. The second stage, 'leading dualities', utilizes Bolman and Deal's four frames of leadership. Two categories of dualities are proposed for initial consideration: spatial dualities (opening gateways across eras) and temporal dualities (bridging boundaries across cultures). Specific examples of spatial dualities are analyzed within the context of an international school in Turkey. The Roman god Janus, whose two faces see opposite perspectives, is utilized as a metaphor for the simultaneous composite nature of dualities. The article concludes that it is the challenge of leaders to make sense of opposite perspectives within their school and leading their school community to do the same.