What to read after Collaborative Leadership?

This book is a practical exploration of what it takes to form and focus the collaborative relationships necessary to accomplish important public missions, particularly education. Its aim is to help practitioners improve their capacity and performance, and to begin a dialog involving practitioners, educators, and scholars that will generate more and better answers, models, and theories aimed at advancing the art of collaboration to the status of a science and a system that can be studied, taught, learned, and improved. Chapters 1 through 4 look at the context, reasons, and complexities of collaboration from a number of perspectives and pose a variety of arguments for doing collaboration. Chapters 5 through 9 attempt to respond to these arguments with explorations of how to do collaboration. Chapter 5 lays the groundwork for developing explanatory models of collaboration and connects collaboration to systems change. Chapter 6 introduces the 12 phases of collaboration's life cycle with a tool and framework to both assist practitioners and invite applied study. Chapter 7 introduces content skills and attributes that contribute to effective collaboration. Chapter 8 integrates practice and theory in a descriptive model of collaborative systems. Finally, chapter 9 provides a few items of advice for those readers looking for pithy guidance right away. (RT)