Leading for Effective Learning: Part I

If you are a frequent visitor to this site, you may have noticed that THIS blog is not a daily or even weekly ‘journal’ of teaching and learning activities. (There are many of those…some of which you may find in the ‘top 100 Education Blogs’ under Links to Visit on the left side of this page.) Yes, that was the focus of this site from 2003 through the spring of 2006. In June of 2006 all archival files were deleted and this blog took on a rather different purpose…that being to provoke professional thought relative to current educational theory, research, and practice. Continuing with that purpose, a “new year” often energizes initial or renewed focus of initiative. So too, it is with this blog!

This offering is the first of a five part series on leadership that is being posted throughout January 2007. (An extensive list of references will follow the posting of Part V.) In Part I you will find an overview of thought, theory, history, and a brief examination of school culture that research suggests promotes substantive and meaningful student outcomes. Parts II will examine leadership and its impact on curriculum. Part III looks at the components of leadership development. Part IV considers leadership and its relationship to student learning. And finally, Part V offers some concluding thoughts and provocative questions. Enjoy!

Part I:
Introduction

The re-culturing of our current education system to achieve a learner centered education needs proactive, dynamic, competent, thoughtful, knowledgeable leaders to play a primary role in the development of a student focused, learning oriented environment. How and when leadership in schools affects classroom practice and learning for children is an area constantly in need of examination. This five part monograph intends to weave data and concepts of researchers and theorists in education along with some stories of current school leaders practicing their craft, by using the lenses of curriculum, development, learning, and instruction/teacher beliefs, to view a tapestry which vividly displays a learning centered education. Throughout this offering some examination will occur. However, it may be that upon conclusion many more questions will be raised than answered. Leading for Effective Learning will consider the school leader’s involvement in creating and sustaining a student focus, establishing clear goals and high expectations, and promoting a culture that expresses performance excellence.

We all feel that leaders can make a difference in the effectiveness of a school. Yet, an examination of the skills that are necessary to appropriately fulfill the leadership role may be a meaningful and useful activity that is often overlooked. The art of leadership includes people with ideas, values, beliefs, and the ability to articulate those ideas, values, and beliefs. How are those leaders identified? What contributions do they offer to build a collaborative culture in our education systems that will have lasting impact for our schools and our children? And how does this happen systematically? Leadership seems to be a quality noticeable and common in our exemplary schools yet it is often the “high powered, charismatic principal”, as Michael Fullan characterizes a successful school leader, who transforms our schools to be high quality, high performing, and high profile educational oasis in a desert of learning mediocrity. Who the school leader is and what she or he does has direct implication for the growth and improvement of any school. So, the quest of addressing the re-culturing of schools through leadership and the examination of what a twenty-first century school leader embodies continues.

Background:

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century over five hundred studies were conducted about the nature of leadership with many focusing on education. Most of these investigations looked at traits common to the individual leader. By the 1950’s this avenue was recognized as not providing substantive information about what was really going on with the concept of leadership. Instead, this research pointed out that traits exhibited by a leader in one situation were not necessarily even similar in another situation.

The school principal role began to take shape as a“middle manager” with responsibilities that included meeting the expectations and demands of a superintendent of the school district, teachers, students, parents, and community members. The administrative-managerial aspect of the role extended through the nineteen hundred seventies. The characteristics of the position supported the efficient operation of the school. Maintaining records, preparing reports, developing budgets, scheduling, ordering and monitoring supplies, managing attendance records, enforcing student behavior codes, and administering personnel and buildings characterized the principal as being very uninvolved in teaching and learning; he or she was not an educational leader! Numerous surveys conducted nationally to analyze the principal’s role clearly identified managerial characteristics predominating. These administrative-managerial duties of school leaders made it virtually impossible for the principal to assume an instructional leadership presence in the school. (Consider reading the “classic” ethnography by Harry F. Walcott, The Man in the Principal’s Office, [1973] to gain extensive insight on this topic).

Recognizing that education in general and the school in particular needed educational-instructional, as well as administrative-managerial leadership, emphasis began to be placed on the development of this leadership component. The duties of the principal as instructional leader were being shaped and encouraged in reports, by government agencies, and throughout the literature prepared by professional organizations. Instructional leadership concerned itself with purposes and processes, development and implementation, and the initiation of new ideas. Many researchers, while recognizing that students, teachers, and parents shared in this school leadership process, began to enumerate specific functions of a school principal whose role is one of instructional leader. Some of these accreted components included: working with students and staff to identify goals, helping to create a positive school climate, stimulating and motivating all toward high performance while addressing instructional standards, cooperatively developing assessment and evaluation processes and procedures, and sharing in the formulation of in-service and professional development opportunities for staff.

The reshaping and restructuring of the principal’s responsibilities during the nineteen hundred eighties and nineties caused overload and ambiguity in this leadership role. It became a “middle management” nightmare! It was the building principal who was responsible to the vast array of education stakeholders: students, staff, parents, community members, district leadership, the local board of education, state/federal agencies and their requirements. This diverse education advocacy requires that school leadership, to have any measure of success, must itself be redefined and even re-cultured to fit in the twenty-first century, high expectation, assessment driven schools of today’s education environment. Higher education intuitions, regional groups, independent organizations, and national agencies clearly understand this need and have begun to formulate structures that will accommodate and foster a culture of leadership development. In subsequent sections of Leading for Effective Learning, Parts II through IV we will explore some of the specific components that are the focus of current leadership development.