Collaborative School Leadership

A Critical Guide

Philip A Woods, Amanda Roberts, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781473980853, 9781473980846
• eBook ISBN: 9781526418791
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

This book takes the idea of distributing leadership in schools to a new level of understanding and practice. The authors address the complexities of leadership by putting forward two essential propositions. The first is the need to understand leadership as the outcome both of people's intentions and the complex flow of interactions in the daily life of schools. The second is the need to integrate values of social justice and democracy into our understanding of leadership. Building on this insight, the authors show how leadership can be truly collaborative. The book also combines practice, theory and research and draws on the authors' international experience.  

This book is an invaluable resource for reflection and change for everyone who contributes to and studies leadership – senior leaders, teachers, support staff, students and researchers.

1 Introduction

Chapter structure

• About this book
• Challenging prevailing leadership assumptions
• The promise of distributed leadership
• Our first proposition: Intentionality and emergence
• Our second proposition: Integrating a philosophy of co-development
• Structure of this book

About this book

This book is fundamentally about freedom as an essential part and goal of educational leadership. It is about how educators and learners can act with autonomy and play an active part in leadership as an emergent process arising out of people’s everyday actions and interactions. Education is not, of course, about providing the freedom for everyone to do exactly what they want. We are not referring to the hedonistic freedom of a completely unfettered, individualistic free will. We are referring instead to social or relational freedom, in which a person’s awareness and critical reasoning enable a significant degree of self-direction as an individual and as a social being who has a felt sense of connection with groups and organisations such as a school, professional community, family, class and friendship groups (Woods, 2017a). Relational freedom entails both the self and others growing towards autonomy. A fundamental purpose of an educational system and its leadership, in our view, is to nurture the capabilities that support such relational freedom.

In a world in which talk of state steering and domination of education proliferates, this may seem a provocative or potentially naive intent. But this starting point is also a recognition that relational freedom is essential to widely shared commitments to ideals of social justice.

Freedom is a necessary condition of justice. For what justice, including social justice, means and what we have to do in order to approximate it cannot be decreed in paternalistic fashion but can only be found through intensive democratic discussion. (Inaugural speech of Joachim Gauck, Federal President of Germany, 23 March 2012, quoted in Dallmayr, 2016: 136)

In addition, we argue that being guided by an ideal does not automatically mean that thinking and practice have to be unrealistic. Instead, it means fully understanding the underpinning values from which appropriate leadership intentions and actions can grow. It is this fundamental value-base that gives meaning to educational leadership and which we both advocate and seek to explore in this book. The term ‘critical’ in the book’s sub-title refers to the central importance we give to an explicit, value-based framework, essential for the kind of questioning integral to leadership committed to relational freedom. We offer the book as a guide, a resource to support the critical thinking about leadership necessary to develop collaborative leadership practice.

This introduction would be quite different if we conformed to the definition of education offered by the standards agenda. In this case, the horizon of our ambition would be to focus on identifying and exploring ways in which schools could be supported in ‘driving up’ standards of attainment. This book is instead a testament to a broader view of educational purpose, one which seeks to understand how to support young people to develop the totality of capabilities which enable human flourishing. Such flourishing, we would argue, can only be achieved in a context in which freedom is recognised, nourished and championed. The exercise of such freedom involves agency which is not unreflexive and oppressively confined, but is characterised by questioning and an informed degree of self-determination. So, recognising work examining leadership and agency, such as Frost (2006) and Raelin (2016a), we explore how we might better understand the kind of agency (pro-active agency) associated with leadership committed to freedom.

One of the most influential developments in recent understandings of leadership is the growing appreciation of its distributed character and its emergence from a host of actions and interactions across organisations. This is well documented in reviews and accounts within and beyond education (for example, Bennett et al., 2003; Bolden, 2011; Fitzgerald et al., 2013; Gronn, 2002; Tian et al., 2016; Woods and Roberts, 2013a). The concept of leadership refers to the influences, arising from human intentions and actions, that make a difference to what a group or organisation does – its direction, goals, culture, practice – and how it is seen and experienced by those who work in or relate to the group or organisation. Appreciating the distributed character of leadership, we use the term ‘leadership’ to mean the practice of all who contribute to leadership both through individual and collective actions. This includes not only positional leaders, such as senior and middle leaders, but also non-positional leaders – namely, all those who, without possessing formal authority as a leader, use their agency to influence others and the school (its direction, goals, culture, practice), such as students, teachers, support staff and parents.

Within this discourse, many different labels are given to alternative approaches to leadership – distributed, shared, democratic and so on. Where we append a single adjective to the term ‘leadership’, we use the term ‘collaborative’, although it is not an adjectival label that we seek to promote above others.

The book is based on our experience of developing and researching non-positional leadership, together with our critical reading of discourses of leadership within and outside education that view leadership as emergent and distributed (e.g. eco-leadership, complexity theory and leadership-as-practice), and reviews and critiques of distributed leadership. It draws on our research on democratic leadership and distributed leadership for equity and learning (e.g. Roberts, 2011; Roberts and Nash, 2009; Roberts and Woods, 2017; Woods, 2005, 2011, 2015a/b, 2016a/b, 2017a/b; Woods and Roberts, 2016; Woods [G.J.] and Woods, 2008, 2013; Woods and Woods [G.J.], 2013; Woods et al., 2016), including our work in international projects investigating cases of school leadership and collaborative teacher learning (Roberts and Woods, 2017; Woods, 2015a; Woods et al., 2016).

The EU-funded projects include the European Policy Network on School Leadership (EPNoSL) (www.schoolleadership.eu) and the European Methodological Framework for Facilitating Teachers’ Collaborative Learning (EFFeCT) project (http://oktataskepzes.tka.hu/en/effect-project).

Challenging prevailing leadership assumptions

The idea of leadership as a hierarchical phenomenon is a familiar one, most readily associated with people’s experience. Here, leadership is seen as linear and as the source of power flowing down a pyramidical organisational structure. As Fink (2005: 102) puts it: ‘instrumental leaders lead from the apex of a pyramid’. It envisages a top-down flow from policy formulation and decision-making to implementation, from the senior, positional leaders to the people who operationalise policy and decisions. From this perspective, leadership is what the boss or senior people in an organisation do. It is associated with decisions, instructions and guidance, cascading down a hierarchy of authority and power, with ‘one fixed power centre at the zenith of the hierarchy’ (Tian, 2015: 56).

Such a view not only offers a description of leadership in action but predicates this on a particular set of values. Hierarchy has a symbiotic relationship with the view that people are fundamentally dependent on being directed and provided with instructions and definitive guidance in order to know what to do. This viewpoint can be summarised as a philosophy of dependence (Woods, 2016a). Not everyone in rigidly hierarchical organisations embraces such a philosophy of dependence, although reliance on hierarchical leadership tends to cultivate it. At the centre of this philosophy lies a conviction that an elevated authority is necessary to show the majority the way to awareness, learning and right action. The task for followers is to make sure they are following the right leader who can make this choice of the right way. Reliance on a top-down, command-and-control type of leadership, where the ‘heroic’, charismatic leader is seen as the gold standard, is an unsurprising corollary of such a perspective.

Diverse ways of expressing and exploring the idea that leadership is not the exclusive province of the senior leader can be found in the discourse around shared leadership, eco-leadership and democratic leadership, in ideas such as leadership-as-practice and in work about the changing nature of organisations and leadership within them. ¹ As Donna Ladkin (2010: 5) puts it, there is an emerging post-positivist conversation ‘about ways of engaging rigorously with the leadership terrain’.

1. See Wang et al. (2014) on shared leadership, Western (2008, 2013) on eco-leadership, Woods (2005, 2015b) on democratic leadership, as well as Gratton (2004, 2007), and Raelin (2016b) on leadership-as-practice. Ulhøi and Müller (2014) map the ‘landscape’ of shared and distributed leadership.

Heroic leadership has a long history. In pre-modern times, people tended to see the world as fixed according to a necessary, and rightful, hierarchy of authority – such as God, then King, then nobility and, finally, people. The philosopher Charles Taylor (2007: Chapter 4) suggests that a fundamental shift has taken place in modern society, where the underlying way of thinking is to see all social arrangements as contingent on the benefit they are deemed to bring. By this token, whether to have hierarchy, and how it should be formed and who should be recruited to which levels in it are matters for decision in the light of circumstances, values and perceived benefits. Conceiving of leadership as an emergent process is in this modern spirit of questioning organisational arrangements in search of better ways of leadership practice. A key argument for seeing leadership as a distributed phenomenon is that it is a more valid representation of actual leadership practice in organisations. This does not mean that dependence on or predispositions in favour of hierarchy have gone away. Arguably, an assumption of a primeval need for it remains strong in the modern imagination, as we discuss in Chapter 3.

Complexity theory, distributed leadership and decentred agency feed the discourse of leadership as an emergent phenomenon, questioning reliance on a hierarchical view of leadership (Bates, 2016; Caldwell, 2006, 2007; Griffin, 2002; Harris and DeFlaminis, 2016; Stacey, 2012). From this viewpoint, numerous organisational actors initiate, influence and co-create change, the outcome of which forges the character and direction of the organisation. Complexity theory has introduced a new and keen appreciation of the uncertainty that characterises the complicated and ongoing interactions that make up organisations, including schools (Boulton et al., 2015; Hawkins and James, 2017). It has also explored the implications of such an organisational view for leadership (Bates, 2016; Flinn and Mowles, 2014; Griffin, 2002; Stacey, 2012). Individuals are unable to plan the actions of others and the myriad of interactions between the plans and actions of others, and so they cannot ‘plan and control population-wide “outcomes”’ (Stacey, 2012: 18). Decisions by a senior leader or a senior leadership team are mediated and interpreted by people across the organisation, who themselves may initiate changes as they go about their everyday practice. Viewing leadership as emergent is often associated with questioning the all-knowing character of single or elite, heroic leaders and the legitimacy of seeing them as the exclusive fount of good leadership.

This discourse of leadership as complex, emergent and distributed is having widespread influence in thinking about leadership and its development in many organisations and sectors, including public services such as education and health (West et al., 2015), and in numerous countries, such as the US and China, as well as the UK, Finland and other parts of Europe. ² Such attention to leadership as distributed and emergent has led to advances in understanding and practice. There remain, however, serious limitations in the current field, to which we make brief reference in the section which follows and in more detail in Chapter 3. A key purpose of this book is to maintain what is valuable in the idea of distributed leadership, to address its limitations and to give a boost to widening educational leadership’s horizon of ambition so that it embraces the fundamental educational aim of nurturing relational freedom.

2. In the UK examples of attention to the practice of distributed leadership are apparent in the work of the RSA (Hallgarten et al., 2016) and the National College for School Leadership (Woods and Roberts, 2013a). Examples in the US include DeFlaminis et al. (2016) and, in Finland and China, Tian (2015, 2016). Evidence of European interest is in Kollias and Hatzopoulos (2013) and Woods (2015a).

The promise of distributed leadership

Distributed leadership appears to promise an alternative to the unjust power differences and inequalities that condition effective participation in leadership. However, the field of distributed leadership has itself yet to convincingly address these issues. Even where it is believed that leadership is or should be distributed, in practice traditional hierarchies of formal authority, with people occupying senior leadership positions, endure in most organisations. Many studies recognise this of course, and there have been attempts to conceptually capture the practical co-mingling of senior leadership relations and distributed leadership, in the notion of hybrid leadership, for example. Some exploration of the different forms of authority has also been undertaken. ³ However, more needs to be done to integrate an understanding of asymmetrical relationships into a conceptualisation of leadership as distributed and emergent. An inadequate hybridisation is likely to fuel Jacky Lumby’s allegation that hybridisation is simply ‘a get-out clause for those needing to justify their adherence to [distributed leadership]’ (Lumby, 2016: 12).

3. See Day et al. (2009) and Gronn (2009) on hybrid leadership, and Woods (2016b) on authority, power and distributed leadership.

In some respects, Lumby is right: there are limitations in the way that distributed leadership is often understood and practised (Woods and Woods [G.J.], 2013), and it takes many forms (Gronn, 2002; Tian et al., 2016). However, we would argue that this ‘hybridisation’ (Lumby, 2016: 164) is not a clever device to deflect criticism but instead results from authentic attempts to understand leadership complexity in order to mine its potential to support school improvement and student learning. Peter Gronn concludes that distributed leadership ‘provides merely part of the story of what goes on in educational organisations’ (Gronn, 2016: 169). Our view is that the proper response to the impetus of criticism is therefore to ask: how do we better deploy and develop the concept of distributed leadership, and our understanding of the wider practice of leadership distribution (Chapter 2) within which it sits, so that its value in illuminating practice is realised? Our intention is to suggest how such a question may be addressed through offering two propositions about leadership. These are briefly introduced in the two sections which follow, before being discussed in more detail in Chapters 4 and 5.

Our first proposition: Intentionality and emergence

The first proposition is that we need to see leadership through two lens...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Benefits of Leadership Distribution
• 3 Critiques and Challenges
• 4 Intentionality and Emergence
• 5 Philosophy of Co-development
• 6 Leadership as a Reciprocal Learning Relationship
• 7 A Learning Model of Leadership Development
• 8 Developing Collaborative Leadership: Enabling Structures and Creative Spaces
• 9 Developing Collaborative Leadership: Change from across the Leadership Landscape
• 10 Developing Collaborative Leadership: Identity Change
• 11 Catalysts for Change
• References
• Index