Eye
on Leadership
Working with eight Springfield principals who have started meeting as a network after each Focus Group, I have become re-energized about delving deeper into what characterizes the “enabling role” of school leadership. These principals have had excellent leadership development in the district and a walk through the schools affirms it. Listen to children at Indian Orchard and Kensington and you know that Deb Beglane and Margaret Thompson make instruction a priority. Sit in on a leadership team meeting with Gwen Page or Diane Gagnon and it is obvious that they understand what it means to develop and share leadership. Mention a journal article or book and Tara Clark at Lynch has either read it or will have it read by the next visit. Mary Ellen Petruccelli asks the important questions and flexes her schedule so that she can search for answers with colleagues during the 90 minutes principals carve out for collaboration about once a month. Talk to any of these principals and it is unlikely you will finish a conversation without some mention of the support they get from Deb Lantaigne and Gloria Williams (Springfield Foundation School principals), Dr. Southworth, or others at the district level. But do these principals lead the top performing schools in the world? No. They struggle like most schools to make AYP each year and to persevere when excellent classroom practice is not reflected in their test scores. So, what else should good principals be doing to get great results for every student every year? This is not a question I can answer alone but I hope my colleagues and I can find answers together by studying the work of principals in the world’s best performing school systems. I have been fascinated by the two studies cited in this article because they suggest we look at principal work the way we look at teacher impact on learning through lesson study. What if in addition to observing classrooms to know what good instruction looks like, we devoted more time to looking at principal practice to get a better sense of what good leadership looks like? What if we could clearly define personal traits and effective strategies within the leadership “black box,” recruit new principals from the pool of teacher leaders who demonstrate them, develop and coach existing principals so that they get better at using these strategies every year, and help them sustain a culture of shared leadership that continues after principals retire or move on to other positions? What if principals not only monitored literacy content development of staff, but also the dispositions that ensure commitment and ownership for any promising initiative? The two studies I refer to are The McKinsey Report, How the World’s Best Performing School Systems Come Out on Top, and a 2006 study, Seven Strong Claims about Successful School Leadership (see claims list below). A link for the McKinsey Report follows this article because I know you will be curious about who made the list of the world’s best performing systems. None are from the United States, but American systems (and our colleagues from England) are among those listed as rapidly improving. For this article, however, our focus is on what the studies say about leadership in the world’s best performing school systems. Getting the Right Teachers to Become Principals According to the Seven Claims study, much research has been done to affirm these traits among leaders in the private sector. Less research has been done in schools, but the study does show that the traits are also evident in the dispositions of successful school principals: “The most successful school leaders are open-minded and ready to learn from others. They are also flexible rather than dogmatic in their thinking within a system of core values, persistent (e.g. in pursuit of high expectations of staff motivation, commitment, learning and achievement for all), resilient, and optimistic.” (Seven Claims, p. 14.) Given this list, which personal traits describe you and the leaders with whom you work? If each of us had to write a self-review of our personal leadership traits, what evidence and artifacts could we produce for each trait? How are these traits currently being used and developed among school leaders? How can Cornerstone help? Developing Instructional Leadership Skills Building Vision and Setting Direction---Districts and schools typically have vision statements that leaders adopt in support of the district or in respect for what has been established at the school to which they are appointed. A school leader’s vision should be more than a carefully crafted paragraph to adorn the entrance hall or a colorful brochure. A vision is a statement of shared purpose that sets direction, stimulates work, and reflects high performance expectations. In the initial stages of a new initiative, effective school leaders create a sense of urgency for full implementation to accomplish the vision (Seven Claims, p. 8) . Daily demonstrations of the vision in action contribute to a culture that sustains the vision over time. How well can you articulate your vision? To what extent can teachers and the larger school community describe your vision based on how you focus the work of the school? Understanding and Developing People---“The central task for leadership is to help improve employee performance, and such performance is a function of employees’ beliefs, values, motivations, skills and knowledge and the conditions in which they work. Successful school leadership, therefore, will include practices helpful in addressing each of these inner and observable dimensions of performance—particularly in relation to teachers, whose performance is central to what pupils learn.” (Seven Claims, p.6) Understanding and developing people is a key element of leadership work often absent in the descriptions of content and processes for school reform. Principals must take responsibility for developing not only the knowledge and skills that teachers and other staff need to accomplish school goals, but also the dispositions (commitment, capacity, and resilience) to persist in applying the knowledge and skills (Seven Claims, p. 6). External partners can help, but principals in the world’s best performing systems develop their teachers and teacher leaders. School based coaches most often take the lead in developing literacy content and best literacy practices. Principals develop the capacity of teacher leaders to think and act like leaders, and they are ultimately responsible for monitoring commitment, capacity and resilience school wide. When adult dispositions do not support the vision, effective principals are decisive and deliberate in communicating non-negotiables. In our most recent Springfield principals network meeting, we discussed an agenda for leadership team meetings designed to respond to the question, “Why meet?” but more importantly to respond to the unasked question, “How do we develop team capacity to wrestle with and effectively address problems and dilemmas, especially around teacher disposition?” Kati Haycock presented powerful data at the Winter Meeting to support what the McKinsey Report uncovered inside the black box of practices by the world’s best performing systems: “The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.” Disposition is a prerequisite for quality teaching. Becky McKay’s tool for coaches based on Carol Rodgers’ article Defining Reflection: Another Look at John Dewey and Reflective Thinking (see example in this issue) provides an excellent scenario and work plan for tackling the issues of teacher disposition. What if Cornerstone and colleagues explored what “monitoring dispositions like commitment, capacity and resilience” looks like in the daily work of leadership? What would be the indicators or “Look Fors” during leadership team meetings, during coach interactions with staff, during principal conferences with teachers, during district conferences with principals, in classroom practice? Redesigning the Organization---Much of what principals do at the beginning of an initiative is designed to set the stage for an improved working environment, an environment that allows teachers to make the most of their motivations, commitments, and capacities. Specific practices include building collaborative cultures, restructuring and reculturing the organization, building productive relations with parents, and connecting the school to the larger community. Some of the specific skills associated with this practice are team building, managing conflict, delegating, consulting, and networking. A meta-analysis of leadership research (McREL Balanced Leadership Framework--Marzano, part of Cornerstone principal development in 2005-2006) identified 21 leadership responsibilities and calculated an average correlation between each one and the measures of student achievement. The report concluded that a 10 percentile point increase in student test scores would result from the work of an average principal who improved demonstrated abilities in all 21 responsibilities. What would happen if district walk throughs included collecting evidence that the 21 leadership responsibilities are consistently practiced by the principal and the leadership team? Focusing
Each Principal’s Time on Instructional
Leadership The world’s best performing school systems structure roles, expectations, and incentives to ensure that principals focus on instructional leadership. Principals who spend most of their time on management responsibilities not directly related to improving instruction limit their capacity to effect real improvement in student outcomes. We know that, but to what extent do American systems (we are not among the top performers) insist on and make instructional leadership a priority? How often do principals communicate to staff and other constituencies (as did a now retired Cornerstone Foundation School principal) that large blocks of time during certain days of the week are for instructional leadership only? What if we charted the time each week we devote to instructional leadership, including developing staff, monitoring professional development in practice, and looking at student work? Enabling Teachers to Learn from Each Other All Cornerstone schools are familiar with Japanese lesson study (Japan is on the list of best performers). Japanese schools place a strong emphasis on sharing best practices throughout the school. “When a brilliant American teacher retires, almost all of the lesson plans and practices that she has developed also retire. When a Japanese teacher retires, she leaves a legacy” (McKinsey Report, p. 31) Closer to home, Boston teachers are scheduled so that grade levels have time together for jointly planning and analyzing teaching practice based on assessment data. The planning sessions are facilitated by the principal or one of the literacy coaches, and assessment data informs structured discussion. The aim of these sessions is to uncover differences between the instructional practices of various teachers and to understand how these differences impact results. In Finland, schools in the same municipality are encouraged to work together and share materials so that best practices spread quickly throughout the system. Springfield principals in the newest Cornerstone cohort have begun this kind of regular sharing. So what does all of this suggest for principal and teacher leadership in the Cornerstone network? The two reports referenced in this article offer a robust agenda for leadership development, and they suggest that we take advantage of opportunities similar to lesson study to observe and learn from the daily work of principals. What if we used the two reports as a road map and developed tools for assessing principals aspiring to lead best performing schools and districts aspiring to create systems of best performing schools? The McKinsey Report has much more to say about ensuring that school systems are able to deliver the best possible instruction for every child, so I encourage you to read the 53 page document. The executive summary concludes, as I will, with this call to action: “The world’s top performing school systems demonstrate that substantial improvement in outcomes is possible in a short period of time and that applying these best practices universally could have enormous impact in improving failing systems wherever they are.” What if Cornerstone and partner districts acted on these findings?
Sources How the World’s Best Performing School Systems Come Out on Top (McKinsey & Company, 2007) http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/socialsector/ resources/pdf/Worlds_School_Systems_Final.pdf Seven Strong Claims about Successful School Leadership (NCSL,
2006) |
