The Thing About Shared Leadership...
 

Edna Varner
Associate,Leadership Development

 

"How we define leadership influences how people will participate." –Lambert

This article should resonate with our southern and western colleagues just returning from this year's regional meeting, and I hope it will provide food for thought for northern colleagues who will be joining us in less than two weeks. The thing about shared leadership is that we generally embrace the idea, we love it when it works in the schools we lead, we long for it in our professional relationships with those who lead us, and we struggle to embed it in our daily practice.

We are inviting each of you at our regional meetings to participate in an exercise on shared leadership, followed with some feedback from Cornerstone and NYU staff. We are hoping that this becomes not just an exercise for the regional meetings but also one you will use with your faculties as you pursue both your common definitions of shared leadership and the understandings that make it happen school by school.

The thing about shared leadership is that it requires a shared understanding of what we are about and what we want to become. Those vision and mission statements we agonize over, spend hours drafting, and then post where visitors can see them are our attempts at shared understanding. The problem is that when those vision and mission statements get published or posted, we're done with them. They are not understandings that light our way in daily practice. They do not represent shared commitments that help us stay on track and keep us from distraction. They don't fortify us against programs, events, or the introduction of initiatives inconsistent with what we believe about how children should be taught.

When we share an understanding, (and I don't mean we share an understanding of what the principal wants; think of "shared" as an adjective, not a verb), we share an understanding of what the principal, teachers, parents, and students want as we envision a school where all children are learning. We share an understanding because we have had opportunities for conversation, including debate, to clarify and focus. Once we have a collective focus, we share leadership for creating the picture we see with shared commitments embedded in the heart of the school rather than simply posted in the main hall.

The thing about shared leadership is that it makes us responsible for being absolutely clear about what is best for children. To know for sure, we must regularly feed our understanding with the collective wisdom of practitioners in our field and healthy discussions that align our thinking with the wisest thinking about teaching and learning. That is what those book studies and professional development are about, and that is what parent teachers meetings should be about as well. We are learning together so that we better understand what we should be working toward. Is our purpose to educate kids who sit quietly at their desks without touching others, do what they are told without question, complete their work without help from others, and turn in papers that look exactly like the teacher's example? Or is our purpose to educate kids who can read, write, think critically, reason, analyze and evaluate information, communicate effectively in a variety of forms, and inquire systematically into any important matter?

When we are truly sharing leadership, we are sharing responsibility for best practice school wide, and eventually district wide. What does it look like? We share responsibility for regularly asking ourselves, "Is this teaching, this coaching, this leading, this parental engagement true to our purpose?" We become comfortable as a team at auditing for strengths and weaknesses in teaching, learning, and leading without shame or blame. We share responsibility for knowing what strategies will work and how we can coach our colleagues to be highly skilled at using them. Ultimately, we share responsibility for building theoretical knowledge supporting both literacy practice and school change district wide so that we and our colleagues are confident, not simply compliant.

The thing about shared leadership is knowing what to avoid:

  • Sharing only the vision of the leader and expecting others to buy in. Others have ideas and hopes for the school that will create a more brilliant, robust picture than any one contribution. The principal's role is to convene the conversations, encourage others to make those contributions, and encourage each other to test our ideas against what we are learning about best practice.
  • Simply delegating, rather than distributing leadership responsibility among those with skills and knowledge equal to the problem they are trying to address. This starts with selecting coaches who are more than great teachers, but teachers equal to the responsibility of coaching and leading their colleagues.
  • Sharing leadership within a very small circle rather than building the capacity of others. The leadership team should include more than the principal and two coaches. The original core group should constantly be strengthened with focus teachers, team leaders, and others who have become highly skilled in understanding Cornerstone principles and strategies.
  • Being the "we can't because they won't" victims. The teachers won't. The principal won't. The district won't. The federal government won't. The parents won't. The most successful schools in our network (and in other places in the country) have all of the same constituents, yet they succeed. The leaders of those schools invest their energy in "finding a way" rather than finding someone to blame.
  • Fostering a culture of low expectations and no accountability. It is a good idea to praise small successes, but it is not leadership if that is all we expect-and all we hold each other accountable for. The leadership team must constantly interrogate reality, asking the familiar question, "Does this teaching, this learning, this leadership, this parent engagement reflect our highest expectations and collective accountability for student achievement?"

Linda Lambert said it in "A Framework for Shared Leadership," an article you have in your regional folder. She echoes Richard Elmore, Rick DuFour, Peter Senge, and countless others who write about leadership: "The days of the principal as the lone instructional leader are over." They also tell us something we already know, The thing about shared leadership is that if we are ever going to have it, we have to work at it.

References

Rick DuFour, Professional learning communities at work: Best practices for enhancing student achievement.
Richard Elmore, Building a new structure for school leadership.
Linda Lambert, Building leadership capacity in schools.
Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline