20 Strategies for Collaborative School Leaders

Jane Clark Lindle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317929864
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

This book is for school leaders who handle the conflicts and commotions which arise from human nature issues in schools and the shortage of school resources. It offers 20 strategies which demonstrate how to support teaching and learning in your school.

Chapter 1

Why Schools Need Collaborative Leaders

Strategies 1 through 5 for Collaborative School Leaders

1. Collaborative School Leaders Know What They Stand For

2. Collaborative School Leaders Find Out What Other People Stand For

3. Collaborative School Leaders Seek Conflict, Find Problems, and Make Connections

4. Collaborative School Leaders Think Creatively, Stimulate Humor, and Inspire Generosity

5. Collaborative School Leaders Teach Hope

Schools need collaborative leaders because education is as pervasive an activity as breathing, everyone has a stake in schools and students, and almost anyone has an opinion about what a good education ought to be and what teachers, parents, and students ought to do. Opinions provide options, but choosing among the options requires knowledge and wisdom, in other words—leadership.

Some of the writing and griping about school administrators reflects badly on individuals who managed rather than led teachers and students to a good education. That kind of distinction between management and leadership may be harsh. Previous generations of school administrators fulfilled their communities’ expectations for keeping schools. Today, communities hold the higher expectation that every student receive the benefits of a good education. These communities want more than a well-kept school; they expect teachers and school leaders to teach school. However, what these communities mean by a good education differs not only from one community to the next, but also within a single school’s community.

The clamor of demands, wants, and expectations surrounding schools requires leaders who can sort through the abundance of opinions, solutions, and options. Schools and students need leaders who focus every conversation on how that conversation increases good education for every student. Schools need leaders who can negotiate progress rather than mediate a paralyzing truce. Paralyzing truces result from so-called leaders who take the safer path for themselves, who avoid risks and conflicts without regard to the potential results for students. Paralysis prevents school improvement and student achievement.

Children grow up so fast that many adults cannot adjust to their changes. School leaders have to overcome the inertia of an adult-intensive enterprise to respond to students’ needs. School leaders must infuse urgency at the same time that they preside over all of the human and humane elements of schools such as rituals, routines, ceremonies, and stages of growth and development. School leaders head a constant search for balance among the competing needs and interests of students, families, and communities. The source of that elusive equilibrium resides among those applying the pressure, and school leaders must enlist the active participation of every stakeholder in achieving the ends of a good education.

Schools need collaborative school leaders because schools harbor conflict and contests in every moment and act of teaching and learning. Unlike stakeholders, school leaders hold a unique overview of the variety and glut of conflicts and contests. School leaders can explain, demonstrate, inspire, mediate, and leverage from a vantage point unlike any other in schools or any other enterprise.

On the other hand, if school leaders act unilaterally, then competition and conflicts become more intense and petrified. Authoritative leaders fossilize schools. Schools lose the fluidity necessary to meet ever-changing student needs when the school leader alienates or marginalizes any member of the school community. Schools represent a significant hub in the web of social networks for the larger community, and school leaders who ignore the interconnectedness of schools and communities sever ties that bind. Independent, authoritative action polarizes and estranges.

Schools need collaborative school leaders because no school ever has enough resources to address all of the needs of every student. A school’s only and greatest wealth is the student body. Students provide the primary source of human capital that schools use to obtain other material resources. Schools need leaders who can tighten the social links among the student body to the larger community. Using these links, school leaders must beg, leverage, borrow, and arouse others to provide the means necessary for a good education.

School leaders can use five strategies for establishing collaborative leadership in a way that legitimately addresses a good education for each and every student. The five strategies in this chapter supply a foundation for the practice of collaborative leadership in the remaining 15 strategies. The foundation rests on the collaborative leader’s self-awareness. From a stance of self-awareness, a collaborative school leader can encourage the entire school community to offer every student opportunities and choices, and the wisdom to deal with both.

Strategy 1

Collaborative School Leaders Know What They Stand For

Collaborative school leaders remain clear about the primary goal of their work. They sustain that clarity by consistently focusing on the people for whom they work—the students. They have a laser-straight and laser-intense sense of purpose in providing a good education to every student.

Schools roil with competing interests and contradictory aims. Collaboration requires clear statements about all of the opportunities and choices represented by the school stakeholders in their competition to achieve their particular goals. School leaders achieve clarity by stating their principles openly and confidently.

Collaborative school leaders operate from the premise that every act associated with schooling must lead to better opportunities and accomplishments for each student. That premise means that every conversation, each moment, and every activity leads to benefits for every pupil. The school leader asks one consistent, principled, and clarifying question of everyone involved in schools: How does this benefit students? The question can be formed in various ways, but it applies to any situation:

♦ How does this curricular program benefit students?

♦ How does this extra- or co-curricular activity benefit students?

♦ How does this discussion benefit students?

♦ How does this purchase benefit students?

♦ How does this school dance benefit students?

♦ How does this parent’s complaint expose something that benefits or harms students?

Because school environments are chaotic and filled with distractions, collaborative school leaders can relieve that profuse confusion by keeping the central focus on students. Many accounts and research studies note the logistical pressures of too many students and too little time to serve their needs adequately. Daily life in schools reels from time compression and scarce resources. As a result, most messages, memos, conversations, and meetings float on the minutia of how to get things done. By attending to the trivial steps of getting things done, school personnel lose their perspective on the purposes of schooling. When school leaders reshape all conversations to the singular question, “How does this benefit students?” the school’s primary purpose re-emerges. Collaborative principals reshape the conflicts about schools by placing students at the center of attention.

Schools have served multiple agendas, but their core purpose is student achievement. Collaborative school leaders realize the core of their work is students’ learning: teaching school. Repeated reports state that many teachers obtain certification for the principalship for reasons other than serving students.¹ Collaborative principals hold their work with students as a sacred trust. They believe that providing every student a good education drives their work with students, parents, guardians, teachers, staff, and the community.

People in positions of power, principals included, suffer a variety of projections about their motives for attaining such a position. People may assume that the principal’s ambitions included a desire to give orders, get a large paycheck, or fulfill a hunger for power over students, teachers, parents, and other community members. Collaborative leaders blunt the speculations by openly discussing their reasons for taking on a leadership role. They explain their motives and ambitions. They recognize that unanswered speculations engender damaging suppositions and distracting gossip. To thwart gossip, collaborative leaders provide straightforward answers about themselves and their ambitions.

When school leaders expose their motives openly, they inspire others to reveal their positions. School leaders who refrain from revealing their positions may believe that they have left room for other people to share their dreams, but usually a reticent school leader impedes opportunities for others. People open up their agenda when a school leader is open. When a school leader models an appropriate manner to express an educational goal, the reaction from others can be one of two responses: (1) an equally clear and open contradiction to the leader’s position or (2) an agreement with the leader’s stated agenda. Either response is more desirable than the confusing dance of political machinations generated from each stakeholder’s guarded probes about meaning and purposes.

The following example demonstrates the debilitating effects of a leader’s lack of candor. It represents a familiar sampling of the kinds of interactions that drive people to headaches and avoidance of meetings.

Example of a Political Dance

A school faculty meeting started at its regularly scheduled time on Tuesday afternoon after the dismissal of students. The principal and twenty-three teachers assembled in the school library. Canned soft drinks and a plate of cookies sat on a table next to a sign-in sheet. The school librarian trolled the tables making sure that everyone was using a paper napkin for a coaster on the wooden tables. The following exchange occurred in the initial 20 minutes of the faculty meeting.

Principal: The district office says we need to write a mission statement for our school.

Teacher 1: What’s wrong with the one we have?

Principal: It’s too long.

Teacher 2: We have a mission statement?

Principal: We wrote it about two years before you came.

Teacher 1: That took forever. I don’t want to go through that again.

Teacher 3: I thought the discussions were very eye opening.

Teacher 4: I was here two years ago and I don’t remember anything about this.

Teacher 5: Think it through. That was two years before she came, not two years ago.

Teacher 4: Oh, well, I’ve been here longer, and I don’t remember anything about a mission statement.

Principal: Well, we need to write something now. Does anyone want to start? What do we believe about the mission of our school?

Teacher 5: Give me your tired, your cranky, your disrespectful, and your wanna-be rock stars and jocks yearning for discovery.

Most of the faculty laughs. The principal’s head nods as his face forms a bemused expression.

Teacher 2: I wish I knew what the current mission statement says.

Teacher 6: It’s on the school calendar. I was on the committee that said it should be there.

Teacher 2: Does anyone have a school calendar?

Principal: We can get one for everyone.

Teacher 1: Well, when? I don’t think we should start writing anything new until we’ve all had a chance to look at the old mission statement and start from there.

Other teachers nod their heads or call out “yes.”

Principal: You know, like everything else, this is due yesterday. We need to start now.

Teacher 5: What do you think we’re supposed to say if our old one is too long?

Principal: What I think isn’t that important. This is supposed to represent what the school community thinks.

Teacher 1: I think we need to look over the original mission statement before we open this can of worms.

Teacher 4: Sounds like we should have some parents write this too.

Teacher 3: Yeah, and students should have some say in it.

Principal: Could we start with some criteria that we believe so that we can figure out if the old mission statement fits and for these other groups to have something to use to evaluate it?

Teacher 2: Can you give me an example of what you mean by criteria?

Principal: If I give you an example, then I’m afraid that it might color your answers. Just finish this sentence, ‘We believe . . .’

Teacher 5 [singing]: We believe with every drop of paint that falls, asbestos grows . . .

Several teachers laugh. Then the room settles to an awkward silence. The principal sighs audibly with tightened lips.

Teacher 1: Maybe you could send the original mission statement to everyone, and then underneath it we all could write two or three endings to the ‘We believe . . .’ beginning.

Many teachers nod, and a few “yeses” are voiced.

Principal: Well, ok, but I think we’ll need an extra faculty meeting or two to meet the district’s deadline with that kind of circulation.

The room erupts in groans.

Teacher 5: Does the district have something we could read so we know what they want?

Principal: Not really. It’s just somet...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Meet the Author
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1—Why Schools Need Collaborative Leaders
• Chapter 2—Student Achievement and Discipline
• Chapter 3—School Culture and Community
• Chapter 4—Administrivia
• Chapter 5—Attending to the Health and Welfare of Collaborative Leaders