A Case Study Approach to Educational Leadership

Sharon D. Kruse, Julie A. Gray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351609654
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

A Case Study Approach to Educational Leadership takes on six core areas of school leadership—organizational vision; curriculum, instruction, and assessment; school and external community; school climate and culture; equity; and improvement, innovation, and reform. Using a case learning approach, this volume introduces salient theoretical and empirical literature in each core area and provides illustrative cases designed for individual and group analysis. Written for aspiring educational leaders, this book facilitates the discussion and reflection of individual and collective professional judgment and helps developing leaders make sense of the challenges school leaders face today.

Special Features:

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• Featured Cases direct readers toward the issues of practice embedded within the theoretical content area

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• Linkage to relevant Professional Standards for Educational Leaders (PSEL) standards ground each chapter in the latest guidelines for the field

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• Discussion Questions foster reflection of content and practical applications

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• Leadership Activities and Web-Based Resources support leaders in making further connections to practice

Chapter 1
Learning via the Case Method

On any given day, in any given school or school district, hundreds, if not thousands, of large and small events occur. These events include people—students, teachers, parents, and support staff. They occur in specific places—classrooms, playgrounds, meetings, and within grade levels, departments, and schools. At other times the setting includes the district, the community, and perhaps the region or state. Plots unfold. He did what? Who knew? When did it occur? And then what happened? Eventually, resolution is achieved. Often those involved question the results, the process by which issues were resolved, the rewards conferred, and the consequences dealt. Adding to the complexity of a given event is the truism that each event is unavoidably experienced from multiple and differing viewpoints. Sometimes a practical lesson is learned. Often new issues arise because of unaddressed factors or unintended consequences.

Leadership choices and decisions impact those directly involved with the issue and others in the school who are aware of the incident. Each time an event occurs, no matter how small, it offers an opportunity to lead and to learn. Often, our responses become stories that are told and retold as part of the narrative of who we are. These stories help to shape the culture of our schools as well as the subcultures within them. Stories with positive endings contribute to healthy workplaces. Stories that surface conflict and disagreement, or betrayal and duplicity undermine our work.

Case learning is the purposeful study of these organizational stories—narratives, accounts, vignettes, explanations, tall tales, and rumors all contribute to case learning. By breaking our stories down, by studying the events, the people, their choices, and considering what knowledge and skills might be brought to bear on the situation, we can learn how to better lead our own schools.

Key Learnings

In this chapter, you will learn how to:

• apply the educational leadership knowledge-base and practical skill-set to real world problems of practice as presented in cases;
• frame primary and secondary issues, surfacing the complexity of leadership; and
• make practical and theory-based recommendations for leadership practice and examine those recommendations for utility in the world of leadership work.

Hilltop Public Schools

As will be true in each chapter, we begin by offering a brief case to illustrate these important learning outcomes. A small suburban district located in the Midwest, the Hilltop Public Schools serve just over 5,000 students in grades K-12. Home to three elementary schools, two middle schools, and one comprehensive high school, Hilltop is located within a well-known tornado corridor. Generally speaking, the threat of a tornado varies by season and the presence of warm, humid air. In Hilltop, the risk seems greatest in the early spring.

So, when one March evening a storm warning went out, no one was surprised or alarmed. In the next few hours, gusting winds, heavy rains, and hail battered the community. Yet, the storm passed quickly and it appeared damage would be limited to downed trees and localized power outages. As district policy recommended, the superintendent’s first call was to the police chief inquiring about potential damage to area schools and property. Expecting minor issues, Superintendent Nick Allyn jokingly began the call asking, “So you’ll have us cleaned up and ready to go by morning, right?” The response, “Ah, no. I’ll have a cruiser by in a bit.”

Within the hour, Allyn learned that a middle school had lost over 65 percent of its roof structure and that the high school athletic fields, including the newly installed football field, had sustained significant damage. Schools were immediately cancelled for the next day. The administrative team was called to report to the district office first thing in the morning. When the team of principals, assistant superintendents, and support staff assembled, the boardroom had been transformed. A series of questions were displayed on poster boards. Each posed a question focused on a different stakeholder group: If I were a parent, what would I want to know? What would I care about? How is the best way to get information to this group? If I were a teacher, what would be important to me? If I were a bus driver, and so on. Over two dozen boards were ready for team problem solving.

The magnitude of the work facing the team was evident. What sobered the group even further was Allyn’s announcement that the priority of this first day was to provide as much information to parents, teachers, and community members as they could within the first three hours. They would follow the initial announcement with hourly updates providing the community with additional information the administrative team believed would be accurate, reassuring, and explanatory. As we will see in the coming discussion, employing this inclusive and outward facing frame, set the stage for successful school reopening and rebuilding. Before looking into how Hilltop Schools resolved this dilemma, we will discuss how case learning is best used to enhance leadership learning.

Case Learning

Case learning is an effective, but underutilized, pedagogical tool that allows learners to both apply theoretical understandings and transfer experiential knowledge to a problem of practice (Anderson & Schiano, 2014). In case learning, students are presented with a carefully crafted narrative that focuses attention on one or more organizational issues. As we do in this book, cases are often accompanied by salient research and theory to aid the learner in making sense of the issue or issues a case presents. Then learners are able to apply their new knowledge, in concert with their prior professional and personal experience, to the case at hand. The tandem application of theory and research, to practical problems derived from authentic settings and concerns, underscores case learning. Best known as a model of teaching in business and law schools across the nation, case learning makes the development of professional knowledge a collaborative and collegial venture (Ellet, 2007).

The educational leadership literature has long suggested that the days of a single, heroic, school leader are long past, and that effective leadership incorporates the knowledge and skills of teachers (Kruse & Louis, 2009; Stoll & Louis, 2007), parents (Bolivar & Chrispeels, 2011; Hamlin & Flessa, 2016), and the community (Ishimaru, 2012; Lopez, Kreider, & Coffman, 2005). High quality educational leadership must be intentionally and purposefully intensified and collaborative. Intensifying leadership acknowledges that there are already multiple leaders in any school setting, including formal leaders—elected union representatives, grade level and department chairs, assistant and associate principals, deans of students, club advisors, and athletic directors—and informal leaders—well-regarded teachers, influential parents, and longstanding veterans of the faculty. To intensify leadership suggests that teachers, parents, and influential members of the school community must work together to coordinate their efforts. Doing so creates an environment that fosters attention on the work that matters for school success. Not doing so creates disharmony and confusion.

Case learning is supported by research across a variety of fields. As is highlighted by the work of Green (2005), Hargreaves and Fink (2006), and Vogus and Sutcliffe (2012), the practice of leadership in schools and businesses alike capitalizes on the talents, skills, and knowledge of others to produce effective, high-quality results. In the classroom, learning is enhanced by discussion, reflection on one’s prior understandings, and the experiences and thinking of others. Like the work of school principals and other school leaders, case learning makes public the problem-solving process, requiring the contributions of many voices to create meaningful and shared understandings.

This approach is well aligned with recent research in educational leadership. As Bryk, Sebring, Allensworth, Luppescu, and Easton (2009), Leithwood, Louis, Anderson, and Wahlstrom (2004), and Ray, Baker, and Plowman (2011) suggest, understanding the problems facing school leaders today is less about the use of precise diagnostic tools, and more about recognizing and responding to the patterns of activity that occur day-to-day within the school organization. Recognizing patterns and linking them to explanatory theory takes practice. Pattern recognition requires multiple exposures to organizational situations, as well as numerous opportunities to consider and plan a response or responses (Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel, 2014). Case learning provides such an opportunity.

Additionally, working collegially does not come naturally. Case learning creates opportunities for prospective and current school leaders to bring their collective experience to the table allowing each to test, through reflection and discussion, their individual and collective professional judgment regarding how best to act. Developing professional judgment requires that leaders not only read theory, but that they apply it. Case learning poses questions for the learner to consider. What do I know? How do I know it? In what contexts do these actions and practices have the greatest potential for success? What is my guiding rationale? What is the purpose of and for my decision-making? Who is affected? What are the potential consequences of my actions and for whom are these consequences greatest? Exploring these questions, and others like them, enhances leadership learning and practice.

Hilltop Schools Revisited

In many ways, Hilltop Schools, under the leadership of Allyn, took a case learning approach to problem resolution. By focusing on the questions of importance to others, district leaders were able to frame the issues in multiple ways and through multiple lenses. Clearly, the primary problem facing Hilltop was assessing the damage and determining when and how school can resume. Superintendent Allyn recognized he had options regarding how to frame this core issue. As Allyn shared,

We had two choices—we could talk about this as an issue of reopening school or we could talk about it as an issue of finding a way to provide a quality learning environment for students. We chose the second. I think, in the long run we did it because it fit with our mission and vision around student learning. I also think we chose the second because, oddly, it was easier. When we started, we didn’t know much about the building structures but we could talk about kids and learning. We knew how to do that. It made that first day less strange.

The leadership team proceeded from the assumption that the middle school building would be unusable for the foreseeable future. However, the district was already pressed for space, so simply moving classes to another site was not a possibility. Briefly, the team considered rescheduling options. Could the high school schedule be shifted to accommodate the middle school? Could the second middle school double shift? Could a split shift option be developed? Would co-teaching offer relief? One by on...