Rethinking School Leadership

"The role of the school principal in Canada is increasingly multifaceted and complex. Beyond the foundational administrative and managerial roles they are expected to master, principals are also expected to be innovators and agents of change -- all of this in a culture that increasingly challenges traditional conceptions of leadership."

~ J-C Couture

In June I wrote a post on 5 ways teachers can demonstrate leadership in the classroom.

Here are 5 ways school administrators can exhibit and inspire leadership in their schools and school districts.

1. Good leaders stick around. We know that high principal turnover often leads to greater teacher turnover and initiative fatigue. Sometimes these moves are made by the choices of senior administrators from the school district, however, Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan reminds us that "regularized rotation of principals by their districts every 3-5 years has more a negative than positive effect on improvement efforts". Other times these moves are initiated by principals who "use schools with many poor or low-achieving students as stepping stones to what they view as more desirable assignments". When leaders come and go in search of their own self-promotion, it's hard to see them as allies with the community. This is no more evident than in New Orleans, a city that is 65 percent black, where the corporate education reform movement is almost entirely white led. In the US, average tenure for urban superintendents is just three years, while education secretaries in England and France tend to turnover after only two years. Albertans have had 4 Ministers of Education since 2011, and we know that Canadian principals are, "at risk of burnout in an increasingly ramped up culture of performativity".

This shouldn't be our society or our schools.

2. Good leaders distribute leadership without stepping on others. Most education systems, school districts and schools are built on hierarchal systems where well intentioned fidelity too often becomes code for do as you are told. Andy Hargreaves reminds us that the best leaders "uplift those they serve by uplifting those who serve them". The best leaders know that they don't know everything, so they reject cultures of compliance built on confirmation bias and instead seek dissent to liberate the conversation. The best leaders reject comforting lies and embrace unpleasant truths. The best leaders reject the seductiveness of efficiency via fear and conformity through standardization and fatalism. Good leaders don't merely accumulate and exercise power while reminding their inferiors to follow along. Good leaders share power to grow leadership among all.

The worst leaders are Decepticons.

3. Leaders don't enslave -- they support. Some leaders empower and inspire teachers to work with children in ways that leave life long impressions while others create instruments of control to separate the powerful from the powerless that makes compliance the gold standard. Teaching is a highly relational and complex job that cannot be reduced to a one-size-fits-all standardized approach. If teachers are to have any hope in accomplishing what many people admit to be an undesirable and impossible job, they require servant leadership that puts "the needs of others first and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible."

4. School leaders are teachers. In his book Finnish Lessons 2.0, Pasi Sahlberg reminds us that, "Some countries allow their schools to be led by non-educators, hoping that business-style management will raise efficiency and improve performance." Most Canadians wouldn't understand how an non-teacher could possibly lead a school or school district while our American neighbours have already embraced this as common practice.

@HargreavesBC @joe_bower Also unsustainable for teachers to provide effective feedback for improvement but receive none themselves

— Ruth Sutton (@ruthsutton) June 21, 2015

 If you haven't taught, you can't give teachers the feedback they need to improve. If you haven't taught, you can't lead teachers. Period.

I found this written on my whiteboard
on the last day of school. 

5. The best leaders don't value what they measure -- they measure what they value. In their book Professional Capital: Transforming teaching in every school, Andy Hargreaves and Micheal Fullen layout how, "great schools are made up of three kinds of capital: human capital (the talent of individuals); social capital (the collaborative power of the group); and decisional capital (the wisdom and expertise to make sound judgements about learners that are cultivated over many years".

At the end of this school year, my grade 6 students wrote Provincial Achievement Tests. Their multiple choice scantrons were promptly shipped off to our provincial capital to be counted.

At the end of this school year, I found this message on my whiteboard that counted formally and officially for nothing -- but meant everything to me and to that student. Good leaders would care about this emotionally intelligent piece of data at least as much, if not more, than spreadsheet-friendly test scores. Albert Einstein said it all, " Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts".

Such a nuanced approach requires us to temper, if not abandon, our mania for reducing learning and teaching to numbers. While so many forces work to sterilize and standardize our schools, Hargreaves and Fullen lead the way to humanize education.

School is not like chess

School is not like chess.

It's a bad analogy.

It's a bad analogy because if we equate school to chess, we will be led to believe that the role of school leadership is to merely manipulate the pieces in the game. In chess, it makes sense to move your pawns around like pawns.

But education's stakeholders are not pawns.

Students are not pawns.

Teachers are not pawns.

Parents are not pawns.

Change by decree is wrong regardless of the quality of the change, and leadership is sometimes about following the rules only so you can change them. But the rules in chess haven't changed forever, and if we resign ourselves to making school like chess, we might forget that the rules of school are mortal and can be changed.

Transferring Teachers

Imagine this:

• You are a progressive and innovative teacher who engages students.

• You have worked hard to become very knowledgeable about how children learn and in order to meet all of their needs, you understand that you can't pretend that all students have the same needs.

• You have shifted away from believing that curriculum is something that is designed, laminated and mailed to the school by distant authorities to believing that curriculum is something that is co-constructed and negotiated between teachers and students in the classroom.

• Rather than doing things to students to get short-term compliance, you work with them to nurture long term engagement. 

• Your classroom is grounded in a culture of learning -- not a culture of testsandgrades.

• You understand that real learning can not be reduced to numbers, so you have substituted grades with informative feedback that allows the students to see what they've done well and what they can do to improve. Even though the most important things may not be quantifiable, they can always be observed and described.

• You understand that sixty years of research tells us that we don't internalize knowledge by simply being told to do so. Real learning is constructed from the inside while interacting with others, and that's why your students spend most of their class time on project-based-learning and performance assessments that are collected in learning portfolios.

• You understand that the real purpose of a Professional Learning Community should be about learning and not about standardization.

Now imagine this:

• You are approached by your grade-level or subject department head or a teaching colleague and they are concerned that you are not giving the same worksheets, textbook assignments, quizzes and multiple choice tests on the same days in the same manner as the rest of the school or school division.

• You are "asked" to meet with your administration and they are concerned that you are not a "team player" and that you are not "collaborating" with your Professional Learning Committee. 

• You explain in detail how and why you are doing things differently. You show how your teaching is grounded in evidence and research, and that you are getting results via student engagement.

• You are told by your principal that your teaching assignment is changing next year. Instead of teaching courses that match your expertise and passion, you are teaching something that you have little to no expertise or passion. 

• A year later, your administration observes that for some reason you appear unhappy so they suggest you transfer. When you hesitate at the "offer", your administration reminds you that you really don't have a say in a transfer.

Are there good and bad teachers? Yes. But let's not pretend we can agree on who is good and who is bad. There is no agreement on what constitutes good teaching.

Some people complain that it's nearly impossible to get rid of bad teachers, and there might be some truth to it -- but I find it sadly ironic that too often we treat good teachers so poorly that they leave. If we talked about making good teachers even half as much as we talk about firing bad ones, we would probably get somewhere.

Keep in mind that the tactics used in the example above by administration can be used on any teacher regardless of their quality. Transferring a teacher like this can have two goals:

1. This is an effective way of getting rid of lazy, incompetent teachers who refuse to engage competently and professionally with students, parents, colleagues and administrators (of course, it doesn't actually get rid of them, it just makes them someone else's problem) -- but it can also be an effective way of getting rid of outspoken teachers who refuse to mindlessly comply with every top-down, drive-by directive dispensed by distant authorities who are as geographically distanced from the classroom as they are pedagogically.

2. By making an example of these teachers, administration can keep other teachers compliant.

Sometimes transfers are a breath of fresh air that allows a teacher to re-energize. But sometimes the threat of a transfer can be an instrument of control between the powerful and powerless -- that's why sometimes teacher transfers have less to do with learning and teaching and more to do with compliance, punishment and power.

Innovation can be intimidating because it often involves ambiguity and change -- but ambiguity and change can often challenge competence which is why some of the most competent people can sometimes be the largest obstacles to change.

It takes courageous leadership to empower teachers to engage students in progressive and alternative ways, but that means we have to stop using the threat of a transfer over teachers to merely get them to do whatever we want. Changing and improving school will only happen if the people most responsible for implementing changes are actively engaged in the process.

Giving teacher's permission to make school different and better is not the same as telling teachers to just do what they are told, and you can't expect teachers to be innovative and progressive as long as the threat of a transfer looms over them like a guillotine.

The problem with getting teachers used to simply doing what they are told is that they might get used to doing only what they are told.

If teachers resign themselves to being nothing more than agents of the state for delivering top-down mandated, prefabricated, content-bloated, scripted curriculums then it makes sense to do whatever it takes to manipulate, bribe, threaten, bully, harass kids into doing whatever it is we want them to do. If this is our perspective, then as long as the kids do what we want, even begrudgingly, we consider compliance our mandate. And if this is how we want to treat children, then I guess it makes sense to treat teachers this way too.

But...

...if teachers see their responsibility as engaging every learner in a personalized journey in discovering and constructing their passion, we come to see authentic engagement as infinitely more important than compliance. And if this is how we want to treat children, then I guess it makes sense to treat teachers this way, too.

Ultimately the best teachers come to see school not as something done to kids, but something done by them and with them. Likewise, the best administrators and even policy-makers see school reform not as something done to teachers, but something done by them and with them.

The best and worst administrators

On Maureen Downey's Get Schooled blog, she shared a piece written by Peter Smagorinsky on principals.

A bad principal destroys morale building-wide and makes it hard for teachers and students to want to go to school. I’ll next provide an inventory of bad principal types. If you’ve worked in schools, you’ll recognize them immediately.

The laissez-faire mediocrity (Motto: Anything to keep my job)

The my-way-or-the-highway martinet (Motto: Y’all are replaceable; I’m not)

The weasel (Motto: I’ll take credit for the good; the bad is all yours)

The finger-to-the-wind politician (Motto: Whatever you say, parents)

The career-climbing carpetbagger (Motto: Doing you harm so that I can do better)

The hey-y’all glad-hander (Motto: Appearances matter most)

The bully (Motto: Right or wrong, I’m right and you’re wrong—end of story)

The corporate number cruncher (Motto: If you can’t measure it, measure it anyway)

The good-old-boy ex-coach (Motto: It’s time to re-sod the football field, while teachers tape newspapers to the window as curtains)

I've experienced a variety of administrators through out my career. Here's a quick summary of my experiences.

The worst administrators do things to their teachers. The best administrators work with their teachers.

The worst administrators would rather shuffle paperwork. The best administrators would rather shred the paperwork.

The worst administrators can't wait to get in their office. The best administrators can't wait to get out of their office.

The worst administrators see staff meetings as their chance to talk. The best administrators see staff meetings as their chance to listen.

The worst administrators act as a conduit for the needs of those higher up. The best administrators act as a buffer to those higher up, to protect the needs of their teachers and students.

Ultimately, the worst administrators see others as a means to meet their own needs, while the best administrators see themselves as a means to help others meet their needs.

Interview with Mona Knudslien & Joe Bower

Here is a 12 minute interview featuring my past principal Mona Knudslien and me. Together, we discuss how a school can innovate and improve while focusing on progressive education.

I enjoyed reminiscing with Mona how both of us experienced our time together, and I will be forever thankful for her supportive, and nurturing leadership.

Thank you to Brian Mason and Tim Lee for putting this interview together!