In my view, as a former school leader and now as an international consultant to school leaders, there is no such thing as ‘best’ practice that can be generalised to all contexts and all purposes…..
Search for the Holy Grail
Around the world there appears to be a search for the ‘holy grail’, of ‘best practice’. My attribution is that the technocrats, who seem to dominate educational policy, want to create lists of ‘best practices’ and use this list as a benchmark for the recruitment and assessment of future leaders. Since technocrats emphasise the technical conception of a problem or activity to the detriment of the human and the social consequences, the technocratic answer to the world-wide educational leadership crisis, therefore, is to search for a leadership template of ‘best’ practices. The lists that do exist around the world seem to require people of heroic abilities to lead schools. Since most of us are merely mortal, such lists merely promote guilt (at not being able to achieve everything on the list), martyrs (from trying to do everything) or compliant messengers (’I'm just doing what they tell us to do’- the Albert Speer defence).
How did we get in this mess? I think site-based management is part of the problem. In the name of local decision-making, school leaders must now make sure the school is clean, the urinals repaired, the buses running on time, and that the cafeteria is making a profit. These tasks are easy to put into lists of ‘best’ practices and easy for inspectors to assess. I don’t deny that each of these is an important and necessary job to ensure the effective operation of a school, but do high priced and highly skilled educator have to do them?
The second part of the problem, as I see it, results from government’s placing the big educational questions of what students are to learn, when they are to learn it, how we know that they have learned it, and how teachers should teach it in the hands of bureaucrats and their academic advisors, who may be well meaning but haven’t been in a real classroom in years (see Fink, 2001). Many leaders in schools, however, have bought into this paradox of decentralised management decision-making and centralised educational decision-making. It is easier to arrange to have the roof repaired than to work to improve that mediocre teacher who is too good to get rid of but not good enough to inspire real learning for students. At least the roof is a tangible legacy of one’s leadership.
Well then, if a list of best practices isn’t the answer to leadership development, and a leadership template is a ‘technocrat’s dream’, what is the answer? This may sound heretical, but others can do most of the ’stuff’ that presently consume school leaders’ time and these ‘others’ can probably do it better. When one sees the kinds of tasks governments have downloaded to schools in the name of local decision-making, it is no wonder that government officials in some countries, such as Britain and the United States, are now considering non-educators to be quite suitable to be school principals. If all that the advocates of this policy want are ‘number crunchers’, ‘paper pushers’ and ‘intellectual accountants’ then they are on the right track. If, however, they are serious about students’ learning, I believe this policy is misguided. At the same time, unless school heads see themselves as educators and find ways to reinvent themselves as ‘leaders of learning’, then I suspect the new breed envisaged by some government officials will conduct the business of schooling more efficiently, if not more effectively.
Leaders of Learning
The only rationale for educational leadership, as far as I am concerned, is to attend to those things that enhance students’ learning. This means finding other ways to cover managerial functions. At the same time, I would suggest that governments (national and local) develop a coordinated approach to leadership succession planning that combines the recruitment, development, induction, and ongoing support of educational leaders based on the ‘learnings’ that ‘leaders of learning’ will require in various contexts over time. In a recent book, ‘It’s About Learning (and It’s About Time)’, my colleagues Louise Stoll, Lorna Earl, and I (2002) argued that:
‘Leadership for learning is not a destination with fixed co-ordinates on a compass, but a journey with plenty of detours and even some dead ends. Effective educational leaders are continuously open to new learning because the journey keeps changing. Their maps are complex and can be confusing. What leaders require for this journey is a set of interrelated learnings looking at school leadership in a holistic rather than reductionist way. These learnings can be deepened, elaborated, nurtured, abandoned, and connected and related to other learnings as the journey progresses.’
We suggested seven sets of ‘learnings’ for leaders of learning that we think go across time and space and apply to all educational leaders. These learning are:
*understand learning;
*critical thinking;
*contextual understanding;
*political acumen;
*emotional understanding;
*making connections; and,
*futures thinking.
These learning provide the connections that join the stages of the ‘leadership pipeline’ (Charran et al., 2001). In other words, I would argue that schools and school systems need to identify, recruit, train, select and in-service leaders, based on their ability to acquire and sophisticate these ‘learnings’.
General Shineski, Chief of Staff of the United States Army, in his challenge to his army colleagues, declared that: ‘If you don’t like change you’re going to like irrelevance even less’. Just as 9/11 and the terrorist attacks in Iraq and elsewhere have forced the American military to question long-held traditions and practices, so then educators must examine traditional shibboleths and reinvent itself for a new age. Systems of ‘hire and hope’ and ‘list and insist’ are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
Educators can no longer look in the rear view mirror of ‘best’ practice to prepare our leader to create schools that will help our students to adapt to a very different society from the one in which most of us came of age. We must look to a more creative, imaginative and forward looking view of leadership based on what leaders will have to learn to function successfully in a world in which the old rules don’t apply.
challenging stuff …. but oh how true!
Entries (RSS)