Dancing in the Rain: Leading with Compassion, Vitality, and Mindfulness in Education (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781612509624)

A graduate of Columbia College and Columbia Teachers College and coming from a family of proud teachers, Murphy started his career with two rewarding years as a public school math teacher. He then unexpectedly got a job working for the federal government as part of the War on Poverty. He was part of a team that helped develop the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, and he later spent an unforgettable year as the Associate Director of the White House Fellows Program and the Associate Staff Director of the National Advisory Council on the Education of Disadvantaged Children. During these heady days in Washington, his eyes were opened to the nuances of leadership as he observed up close how political leaders and dedicated civil servants actually engage in principled politics in the pursuit of noble ends.

Shortly after Richard Nixon was elected president, Murphy moved on to become a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and has been there ever since, but for a delightful two years as a Visiting Professor at the Penn Graduate School of Education.

Drawing on his seven years in public schooling and government service, Murphy turned his attention to studying and writing about the everyday reality of how things actually work in education. He became a specialist in the politics of education, with a focus on government policy, program implementation and evaluation, organizational leadership, and qualitative methodology.

Murphy conducted some of the earliest studies of the implementation of the Great Society education programs and the role of the states in educational policy and governance; he contributed to novel data-collection techniques in educational evaluation. Along the way, he has written books and articles about these topics as well as about schools of education, about the lives of education leaders, and about the changing roles of school superintendents and chief state school officers. Murphy has also examined educational policy and practices in Australia, China, Colombia, England, Japan, and South Africa and has given presentations at research meetings in Denmark, Israel, Norway, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, and Thailand.

For almost twenty years, Murphy was a full-time administrator at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, first as Associate Dean from 1982 to 1991 and then as Dean from 1992 to 2001. As Dean, Murphy led the development of new initiatives in learning technologies, arts education, neuroscience, and school leadership. He also led a capital campaign, which almost doubled the hoped-for goal, and was honored at Harvard with an endowed chair named after him.

Throughout his career, Murphy has aspired to live up to a definition he once heard describing a professor--namely, someone who "thinks otherwise" and challenges prevailing views about what's important and what deserves attention. In his teaching, he urged students to think otherwise by being troublemakers, stirring things up and fighting for their values--just like Nelson Mandela, whose given name in his native language is "troublemaker." In his research, Murphy thought otherwise by writing about policy implementation when research focused mainly on policy development; about state government when researchers were preoccupied with the federal government; about qualitative methods as a complement to quantitative methods; about the unheroic side of leadership, when bigger-than-life leaders were lionized; and, most recently, about the inner lives of education leaders when their training programs and supporting research studies often overlook the inside-the-skin challenges of leadership.