The title of this book attempts to capture my lifeâs work as an educator. Summaries of âoneâs life workâ are, however, inescapably autobiographical interpretations of the authorâs better moments in a journey also marked, as well, by less than heroic mistakes and self-serving rationalizations. Leadership is a complex process, often enlightened by early failures and imperfect successes. Leading a learning process in the setting of a school is particularly challenging, due to the multipleâstudent, parent, teacher, school committee, and state authorityâunderstandings/opinions of what constitutes genuine learning and the pedagogical process that promotes the integrity of learning.
The process of leading learning involved, at least in my case, a gradual unfolding of a more focused understanding of what learning involves, and how oneâs leadership, often indirectly mediated by multiple, other supportive variablesâstudent personal motivation, parental constant encouragement, teachersâ creative pedagogical initiatives, school district generous budgetary funding, etc., that promote quality learning of both teachers and students. The composing of a summary of âoneâs life workâ as an educator is fraught with the temptation to self-promotion and appropriation of credit for the success of school improvement initiatives, with hardly a mention of the hard work of so many engaged members of the school internal and external community.
The leadership of learning will always be negotiated, as well, within a larger context of random historical variables, such as the variable potential for political mobilization of supportive human and financial resources; shifts in available technology; emerging policy initiatives concerning the rights of various underserved student populations; shifts in attitudes concerning environmental challengesâto mention some recent historical changes that currently require new leadership responses to long neglected challenges to the education of generations of citizens.
With these cautionary observations about the limited power of individual school leaders in their efforts to promote the integrity of quality learning in schools, I will nonetheless stress throughout the chapters of this book the potential to make an enormous difference in the lives of teachers and students at the individual school level. In selecting exemplary chapters in this book, I have chosen those that reflect this strong belief in the leadership potential of school principals as they collaborate with other educational professionals in the school to effect an environment of significant learning for the human development of the learners in their charge.
The gradual articulation of my ideas about leading learning has been fed by an expansive reading agenda of the works of many scholarly giants, as well as by experiential learning opportunities derived from practical involvements as a teacher, school principal, university professor, and a variety of consulting opportunities. In other words, my writing in education reflects a life-long learning trajectory that continues, fortunately, into the present.
At the outset, it is important for me to remember that I am composing this retrospective, not so much to have readers agree with what I have to say, but in the hope that some or all of the chapters will speak to readers about their own core beliefs and values as educators, and engage them in a dialogue between the text and the realities of their work as educators. The goal of the book is insightful dialogue about the possibilities of oneâs leadership, not discipleship.
Iâve chosen to begin the retrospective with a brief recounting of four periods in my journey to the present. The recounting will reveal at least some of the more obvious contextual and specific influences on my work as an educator. Those four periods refer to 1) roughly the first 25 years of my life; 2) the 1960s; 3) the early 1970s into the later 1980s; 4) from the late 1980s into the present. Within each period, the reader may find some clues to what and why I have written what I have.
The first twenty-five years: Learning how to âbecome educatedâ without a mind
I was born in 1935 into the world as the youngest of five children in a financially challenged, but humanly rich home environment. America was emerging from the depths of the Great Depression and was soon to be drawn into the Second World War. My early life-worldâthe affective, interpersonal world of family and relatives, of friends and enemiesâmirrored the self-centered focus of most children around forging oneâs own way of becoming a somebody (Becker, 1971). Mine was a working-class world supported and constrained by parents, siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, as well as school teachers and school chums and neighborhood life. That life-world was my intimate personal world that formed the base of my identity. Fortunately, our parents patiently negotiated the daily pulls and pushes of each one of the five of us in our individual efforts to assert those identities. Nevertheless, I was gradually socialized into the world of white, Anglo-Saxon, masculine, competitive, capitalistic culture and Roman Catholic religiosity during my childhood and adolescence. Looking back now, I might characterize my life-world then as a relatively conventional, Norman Rockwell kind of world.
I attended the parish grammar school from kindergarten through eighth grade. Those grammar school years were fairly mindless years. The happiest hours of my day were those hours after the last class ended. The happiest day of the year was the day we began our summer holiday. I do recall fondly our occasional class visits to the town library across the street from our school where the librarian would read us stories about the adventures of youngsters our own age. Another positive thing I remember was the various exercises of diagramming sentences in the eighth grade, when I began to understand, through the classroom exercises, the âparts of speechââhow adverbs went with verbs, and adjectives went with nouns, how an independent clause differed from a dependent clause, what an active-voice verb looked like and what a passive-voice verb looked like. The subjunctive verb usage gave me some initial trouble, but I finally crossed that threshold of intelligibility. The major negative thing I learned in grammar school was that, outside of diagramming sentences, school was something to be endured. It had next to no connection with my life outside of the school day.
As graduation from St. Maryâs grammar school approached, I was convinced that if I went to the public high school where many of my friends were going, I would probably end up in jail. I had heard from an older fellow from the neighborhood that the Jesuit high school about twenty miles or so up the roadâthe one he was attendingâwas a good school, so I pestered my mother to let me try for a scholarship to go there. I took the test for a scholarship butâgiven my elementary school experienceâdid not do well enough for the scholarship. Undeterred, I asked my mother to make an appointment with the principal to see whether I could get a work-scholarship that would cover the one hundred dollar yearly tuition that my parents could not afford. Somehow, Father Kennedy, the Jesuit principal was impressed with my eagerness to attend the school, so he took a chance and offered me a work scholarshipâworking with the maintenance crew for an hour after school, and working in the school cafeteria to cover my lunch expenses. This was to be the first experience of a lifetime series of gratuitous occasions that set my life on a path I never would have predicted. I took advantage of the opportunity, despite the challenges involved. Fortunately, I found an upper classman at the Jesuit school who was driving to the school from my neighborhood and arranged for the morning transportation to the school. For the afternoon return, I hitch-hiked my way back home. In the ensuing summers of odd jobs, I was able to earn enough money to pay for my own tuition at the school, and to cover the cost of a student-commuter train ticket to and from the school.
However, I found the school curriculum at the Jesuit school as similarly divorced from my out-of-school world as I had at St. Maryâs. Because my mother told me I could not play sports at school unless I earned at least Second Honors (a grade average in the eighties), I did my best to comply. I managed to memorize enough of the textbook material to pass the quizzes and tests with at least a grade of eighty. As had been the case at St. Maryâs, I learned to give enough right answers, though I rarely, if ever, understood why they were the right answers.
In the spring semester of my ninth grade, I joined the school track team, thus beginning a four-year participation in that sport and a lifetime addiction to running. The following year I also joined the football team. Athletics became the most important thing in my life. I still treasure the many happy memories from those years with my team mates. Also, I now have the arthritic condition of cranky knees to thank for that addiction to sports.
In the summer of 1953, after graduating from high school with a superficial acquaintance with the academic curriculum and with a vague adolescent idealism, I said goodbye to my buddies and girlfriends and entered the religious community known as the Jesuits. Though now separated from my family, I entered a larger family that continued to provide the security of that life world, even though the monastic life style of the seminary seemed awkwardly obsolete and wedded to a medieval vision of how the world functioned.
Involvement in the academic program of the first seven seminary years was, for me, relatively inconsequential. However, midway through my third seminary year, I had a teacher who rescued me from my drifting indifference to formal studies. He regularly assigned a weekend essay on any topic we wanted to write about. In the following week he would select one of the essays for a dramatic reading. One day in class he chose to read my essay and to comment favorably on it. After class he took me aside and told me that I had a gift for writing, and that he looked forward to reading more of my essays. I was thunderstruck. No teacher before had ever complimented me for any academic achievement. His encouragement communicated to me that I had a mind and creative potential and that I should put it to good use. Most of my classmates in the seminary had been honor students in high school, and had developed an appetite for reading good literature. Some even enjoyed conversing in Latin and French. I was a captive of the contrary attitude of those classmates of mine who excelled in various athletic endeavors, namely, that success in academics was a sign of effeminacy. But now I began to work on my writing. I began to read Shakespeare on the sly and got hooked on his language and the depth of feeling his characters evoked in me. I realized I was miles behind most of my classmates in my intellectual development. That realization motivated me to initially embrace the journey into good literature and historical studies.
However, much of this involvement was on my own. During the subsequent three years of studying philosophy, I spent more time developing my jump shot in basketball than in any serious engagement with the regimen of scholastic philosophy. The lecture-driven pedagogy and the prepackaged curriculum of scholastic philosophyâresuscitated in post-war Europe and presented in seminary textbooks composed in Latin, whose orthodoxy was guaranteed by an Imprimatur granted by a Vatican officialâexpected more or less memorized responses to exams in Latin. We seminarians organized informal study groups that passed around semester exams from recent years and prepared answers to the exam questions taken from our lecture notes. It was a closed system inherited from the scholastic synthesis of the late middle ages that rewarded memorization of someone elseâs answers to someone elseâs questions.
Only once during those seven years did I become genuinely intellectually involved throughout one course, and that was in a survey course in existential philosophy in the last semester of the last year of my philosophy studies. Those philosophers spoke to me about issues that impinged on how I was deciding to live my life. Due to that course, I ended up reading most of the works of Albert Camus, who became a kind of âpatron saintâ in my personal community of saints. There were also occasional controversial books pirated and passed around among classmates. One of my favorites was The Divine Milieu by Teilhard de Chardin, a French anthropologist and a Jesuit priest who had been âsilencedâ by Rome for his writings about evolution and cosmology. I struggled with his earlier work, The Phenomenon of Man, but kept on reading it over the next several years until I was able to connect the depth of that book with other scientific authors on evolution and cosmology. During those years occasional elective courses in English and American literature opened up a reading agenda that began in curiosity but matured into a lasting influence on my own writing.
After earning a Bachelor and Masters degree in Philosophy, granted through the seminaryâs academic links with Boston College, I was eager to enter the world of teaching, despite the fact that I would be called upon to teach subjects that I was woefully unprepared forâninth grade Algebra and twelfth grade English Literature. After my first year of teaching, I came to appreciate the wisdom of the adage: âIf you want to really learn a subject, try teaching it.â
A life narrative: The 1960s
The tumultuous decade of the 1960s occasioned an awakening to the dramatic challenges and adventures of the larger world of national and global realities. During that decade, I taught for two idyllic years in a Jesuit boarding school in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachussetts. During the course of two years there, I began to explore what was educationally possible even in a dysfunctional school environment. During the ensuing years of the 1960s, I completed a Masters degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a seminary Masters in Theology, and a Doctorate in Educational Administration at the University of Illinois.
Needless to say, the larger world of that decade forcefully disrupted the relative complacency of my life up till then. I, as many of my contemporaries, had to evaluate the shortcomings of our own prior education, as well as the new ideas and trends in education. The election of John Kennedy as President; the founding of the Peace Corps; the confrontation between the US and Russia in Cuba; the rebellion against the Vietnam War; the energy behind the Civil Rights struggle; the continuing emergence of the Womenâs Rights struggle; the War on Poverty; the opening of the Catholic Church to the modern world in the Second Vatican Council, and its more radical expression in the emergence of liberation theology; the landing of humans on the moon; the emergence of the youth rebellion in music, art, life styles, and politicsâall this called for reassessing our certainties during a decade when I was actively a student in three universities that were themselves caught up in responding to these controversial interruptions in the staid universe they traditionally occupied. Needless to say, the 1960s were a time of intense intellectual growth for me. That growth was stimulated by my exposure, for most of that decade, to graduate studies during this time of social and intellectual ferment. Much of that growth, however, involved questioning the disconnect between the curriculum of the academy and the curriculum of living an authentic life.
The Sergiovanni connection
My career as a scholar of educational practice began and continued under the collaborative relationship with an outstanding scholar and human being, Tom Sergiovanni. When I started my full-time studies in the doctoral program at the University of Illinois in the summer of 1967, Tom had just arrived as a novice professor from the University of Rochester. I had enrolled that summer in his course in instructional supervision, after which he invited me to serve as his research assistant. He was just at the beginning of his career as a prolific scholar and writer in education, so I was kept busy assisting in his research projects, hauling boxes of surveys, for example, on the job-satisfaction of teachers, to the computing center on campus and returning with boxes of printout pages of statistical analysis. He also had me busy reading journals in the Universityâs huge library collection to search for other pertinent research on organizational effectiveness.
Since we were close enough in age, we developed a mutually supportive relationship that enabled an easy flow of ideas. Toward the end of the fall semester, Tom invited me to work with him on a textbook dealing with instructional supervision. He had become aware of my interest in curriculum theory and pedagogy, and suggested that I could write the chapters that would deal with supervisory issues in those areas, and he would focus more on the organizational dynamics of schools that promoted more effective supervision of teachers. The title of the book was: Emerging Patterns of Supervision: Human Perspectives. Tomâs rich background in the research on the dynamics of organizations enabled him to apply that research to the way administrators and teachers might work more collaboratively in the many ways the schools organized and structured the work of the school, especially in the supervision of instruction. Tom focused on the supervisorsâ ability to surface and support the human talent and professional inventiveness of teachers within a positive school culture that valued the dignity and potential of everyone in the school. He wanted to encourage supervisors to emphasize that their work was involved with a human development of teachersâ talent, rather than fixation on the impersonal, bureaucratic rating sheets of teachersâ behaviors. My contribution to the book would be chapters that dealt with foundational issues such as the supervisorâs educational platform (something like an abbreviated educational philosophy), the teacher and supervisorâs work on curriculum concerns, the who, what, and why of teacher evaluation, the supervisorâs leadership style, supervisory activity as moral activity, and so forth. Given my dissatisfaction with my earlier education, my chapters tended to exhibit a more critical edge toward the status quo of the schooling process. McGraw Hill publishing company responded positively to our book prospectus and thus began a publication in 1971 that has gone through nine editions, the latest published in 2013, a few months after Tom departed to teach supervision to the angels.
Electing to take that first course with Tom was another one of those chance decisions that was to deeply affect my life and career as an educator. It led to a forty-four year collaborative agenda that deeply influenced my scholarly writing in education and, due to the demands of keeping the book current, sustained it over all the editions of those years. That attention to the human exchange in the educational and learning process was to remain a core focus embedded in both Tomâs and my other writings over the years. Looking back, I am extremely grateful for Tomâs support and encouragement. We continued over the years to find deep connections across our particular research interests. The initial theme of the human dimension in the complex work of supervision continued to be a central focus of the various revisions and editions of the book. My focus on human development has matured under the inspiration of the writings of Erik Erikson, and received its fullest expression in one of my most recent books, Refocusing School Leadership: Foregrounding Human Development Throughout the Work of the School (Routledge, 2011).
Knowing at the level of sympathy: The dissertation
The choice of a dissertation study involved a major turning point in my lifeâs work. I had been âgoing to schoolâ for approximately thirty years. During those years I had learned how to survive as a student by studying how to give correct answers to be found in textbooks and curriculum units and expressed in response to teachersâ questions in class and in quizzes, and in other assessments of my âlearning.â I then learne...
