Leading Professional Conversations: Adaptive expertise for schools

by Helen Timperley

School leaders face complex challenges, that typically have multiple causes and often persist despite everyone's best attempts to address them. Addressing complex challenges requires juggling both the big picture, and the specific parts of the challenge. Without a roadmap, this process is fraught and unlikely to succeed in improving outcomes. In order to make a difference, schools need adaptive expertise; a skill which can be learnt through professional conversations and inquiry.



In Leading professional conversations, Emeritus Professor Helen Timperley deftly outlines the key enablers for effective professional conversations - relationships, resources, processes, knowledge and culture - which support teachers to be independent learners and result in positive impact on educational, social and emotional outcomes for students.



Featuring examples from real conversations between school leaders and educators, and practical templates which can be adapted to suit the contexts of your school, Leading professional conversations is the school leader's guide to thinking and acting evaluatively, knowledgeably, metacognitively, collaboratively, responsively and systematically, to engage in deep professional learning and genuine improvements in practice.

155 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 18, 2025