Everyday Teacher Leadership

Taking Action Where You Are

Michelle Collay

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780470648292
• eBook ISBN: 9781118023099
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

The essential guidelines for leading effective change in your school

From an education expert comes a much-needed resource that gives teacher leaders the strategies and tools they need to improve their practice and assume new leadership roles in their schools. The author outlines the everyday acts of teacher leadership and shows how to lead effectively through collaboration. The book also contains suggestions for leading change beyond the classroom.

• Discusses what works when taking on the role of teacher leader in a school
• Contains proven strategies and tools for implementing school change
• Includes activities in each chapter that are teacher-tested and can be used by individuals, teams, or larger groups

This important resource offers school leaders a much-needed guide for learning how to lead and implement school change.

Chapter 1

A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF SCHOOL LEADERSHIP

History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.

—Robert Penn Warren

Volumes have been written about the history of North American schooling, and it is certainly beyond the scope of this book to revisit our history in any depth. I provide a brief sketch here of how school management has evolved over the past 150 years, intending to offer a fuller understanding of teachers who lead. I consider historical and cultural influences on educational roles in schools, rather than defining what teacher leadership is and who teachers are as educational leaders. The organization we call school was created in response to culture-specific ideas about how formal education should be structured. Most, if not all, of these concepts have been challenged and revised over time, yet the very foundation of nineteenth-century European Judeo-Christian values lies firmly beneath our feet. Those structures and organizing features have been rendered invisible over time and, like dusty worn rugs, need a good airing, if not disposal. Like many other observers, I believe modern schools were never designed for learning and their potential to serve modern society grows more limited by the day. Meanwhile, teachers lead the work of educating young people and each other in schools. I hope the briefest sketch will illuminate some unexamined premises of teaching as leading and allow us to better face the future.

Leading Learning Past and Present

The physical organization of contemporary schools in North America may seem timeless to those who are second-generation or higher North Americans, yet the model is only one hundred and some years old. “Modern” schools’ emergence parallels the twentieth century’s evolution from more rural to more urban—from family-centered businesses and cottage industries to industrialization. Skilled work done by both genders was learned through apprenticeship with a craftsperson. Literacy development for European-Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries typically occurred through religious education for both genders, and formal academic study was reserved for the middle class. Whether individuals were immigrants or members of established communities, reading and ciphering were learned in homes and churches. Schooling in the early United States reflected attempts to establish common schools in the Thirteen Colonies, but individual communities held tightly to cultural and religious values and their right to inculcate their children with those values. New York City fathers established “free schools” in the early 1800s, seeking to provide basic education and moral values to children from homes where parents were uneducated (and presumed to be immoral). In the largest urban areas, tenement-dwelling children attended factory-like warehouse schools. In rural communities both North and South, one-room schoolhouses represented another path to formal schooling. In both cases, only rudimentary study was the norm. Until the mid-twentieth century, only middle- and upper-class children received a formal education that could prepare them for university admission. Working-class youth trained in the trades—which required formal but often nonliterate apprenticeships—or in unskilled jobs that required little or no formal training. “College prep” coursework was then, as it is now, reserved for the privileged class.

“Educational leadership” in homes, religious settings, and one-room schoolhouses was provided by parents, clergy, teachers of both genders, and other community members. Teaching throughout the nineteenth century was a transient occupation in which young men might hold a position as teacher for a few years before moving on to other lines of work. After the mid-1800s, young women followed the same pattern. They taught younger children in short stints, usually until they became established with their own homes and families. In Southern black communities during Reconstruction, small, formerly clandestine schools continued to serve freedmen, both adults and children. Teachers were not professionals and did not organize themselves in large settings. Notions of the “principal teacher” followed the need to organize or manage many teachers under one roof and were established mainly in large, urban schools.

Organizational structures of the largest Northern schools reflected industrial practices established in the nineteenth century, thus creating the school structures we know today. In this structure one principal (with or without assistants) manages many teachers, and that principal is charged to carry out the dictates of governments that finance the school. Suburban and the few remaining rural schools followed the lead of the largest schools, emulating graded classrooms, subject-centered scheduling, emphasis on start- and end-times, bells, and the need to stay at one’s desk for the duration of instruction. Such standardization was seen as a natural by-product of modernization. Large, factory-like schools were designed to prepare the masses with vocational training to work in similar settings when they came of age, not to prepare members of a democratic society. Therefore, schools needed managers, not instructional leaders.

Different Leaders for Different Schools

Throughout the twentieth century, some educational leaders challenged the industrial model of schooling, but their ranks were small. The schools they established were often idiosyncratic and elite, barely touching the masses in production-line schools. Examples of progressive education that repudiated industrial model schools include John Dewey’s lab school at the University of Chicago, the Waldorf School, Froebel’s kindergartens, and schools based on Adler’s Paideia philosophy or Maria Montessori’s methods. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the Coalition of Essential Schools, a network of progressive educators and parents, continued the traditions of developing critical thinking, collaborative, project-based learning, and community partnerships. These few schools were only available to families of privilege, however, and their individualized, constructivist, and student-centered approaches to teaching and learning have had little influence on the greater schooling enterprise.1 The purpose of Progressive schooling was to create an educated citizenry that could fully participate in the democratic process. This foundational understanding runs counter to the capitalism-based belief that schooling is preparation for factory work. Progressive schools were often established and led by charismatic leaders who had strong beliefs about school as a place to develop the human mind and spirit. To quote Montessori, “The greatest sign of success for a teacher . . . is to be able to say, ‘The children are now working as if I did not exist.’” Societal beliefs that youngsters should be self-directed learners remain controversial, even as most citizens agree that industrial-era schooling is not adequate to modern societal demands.

Schools Reflect Society

After World War II, more children were attending the growing numbers of schools, but they were still in racially segregated classrooms. As the era of race-based civil rights took root in the mid-1950s, schools became more than a reflection of the multifaceted society in which they sat. Race- and gender-based discrimination was challenged in the courts, and schools became the locus of systematic attempts to integrate communities. Because of civil rights case law, schooling for all was established as a legal right, not a privilege. The stated goal in federal policy was equal education for all, and schools became the primary container in which societal inequities might be measured and rectified.

One outcome of court-ordered school racial integration was an acknowledgement that even though laws permitting schools to be “separate but equal” had been overturned, American schooling continued to reflect and perpetuate social and economic disparities. Most school systems were theoretically desegregated through edict and policy, but in reality remained separate and unequal. Large urban schools continued to serve low-income and immigrant newcomers, while white working-class families with some mobility moved to the suburbs. Affluent families continued to enroll their children in private schools. Public school leaders’ management tasks now included formal requirements to educate all students, whether majority or minority, regardless of race, gender, or disability. Educators in public schools are therefore now required to lead broader societal reforms, whatever their roles and responsibilities, however large or small the institution. Educational leaders face the same dilemmas prevalent in the larger society: role, experience, race, gender, class, sexuality—our own as well as those of our constituents—dictate opportunity and shape the educational process.

A small but persistent progressive movement continued throughout the second half of the twentieth century and into the new century. In the 1970s, progressive educators established “schools within schools,” such as academies, magnets, and other approaches to individualizing education. These more personalized approaches are evident in contemporary reform efforts—for example, the creation of smaller schools within large high schools and theme-based schools led by community partnerships. While John Dewey’s efforts to disrupt the worst practices of systematic, routinized factory schooling failed on a large scale, these progressive glimpses into more humane and culturally responsive learning environments offer hope to many underserved communities. These schools are also incubators for innovative leadership structures.

The Evolution of Leading and Managing in Schools

Leadership of formal schooling evolved throughout the twentieth century, reflecting societal changes and evolving perspectives on the purposes of schooling.2 Activities associated with leadership moved from the province of individual teachers working with small groups of students to formal management of small, medium, and large organizations. The “leader” of the school was the principal-manager, and teachers, however formally educated or experienced, reported to that principal. When schools grew large and required management, the issues were primarily facilities, budget, staffing, and students. A retired principal told me his job in a rural elementary school required him to “Keep the boiler lighted and chase the dogs off the playground!” In Alaska, where he lived, keeping the boiler lighted was a serious matter. In rural schools, the superintendent might also drive the bus, coach the football team, and teach social studies. In large urban schools, formal leadership is usually distributed across a management team, in which the principal works with one or more assistants to manage the facilities, budget, staffing, discipline, and student mental and physical health.

Who Becomes a Principal?

For most of the twentieth century, school leaders were male and white, with a few exceptions. Women headed some small rural schools and some urban schools in the early part of the century. Southern African American communities were segregated from white communities, and the leaders of African American schools were black, as were the ministers of African American congregations and others in the professional classes. After laws were passed in the 1960s that rendered formal desegregation illegal, black principals were often displaced by white men, although the school staff and students remained largely segregated. Women’s removal from and re-entrance into the principalship paralleled their engagement in the workforce in other fields before and after World War II. Ironically, in a “women’s profession” such as teaching, the number of women principals does not yet reflect the gender ratio of the teaching workforce. The evolution of schools into larger consolidated centers actually reduced the number of women principals from a higher number in the 1920s to lower numbers later in the century.

School leadership patterns reflect race, gender, and class status in the larger society. Consider the following: in 2007–2008, the majority of public school teachers were women (about 84 percent at elementary schools, 59 percent at secondary schools), but only 59 percent of elementary principals and 29 percent of secondary principals were women. Demographic data from NCES for 2008–2009 indicate that 84 percent of principals were white, 10 percent were African American, 4.5 percent were Hispanic, 0.4 percent were Asian, and 0.6 percent were American Indian.3 All things being equal, the ranks of principals should reflect teacher demographics, if not student demographics.

Certainly, greater societal influences on professional access and selection of majority and minority individuals for any role prevail in schools as well. Our “semiprofession” has long debated whether teachers are born or made, and there is a parallel debate about whether leaders are born or made. Most of us agree that while teachers and principals are required to have a credential, preparation is a minimum requirement. All professionals strive to move beyond basic preparation to good practice, so if teachers can develop their craft, the same should be true for administrators. Yet so-called “trait theory” pervades our thinking about leadership. Traits associated with effective leaders have included personal characteristics and temperament as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 : A Very Brief History of School Leadership
• Chapter 2 : The Personal Dimensions of Leadership
• Chapter 3 : Teaching Is Leading
• Chapter 4 : Collaboration Is Leading
• Chapter 5 : Inquiry Is Leading
• Chapter 6 : Partnership Is Leading
• Index