Learner-Centered Leadership

Research, Policy, and Practice

Arnold B. Danzig, Kathryn M. Borman, Bruce A. Jones, William F. Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351560610
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Many new approaches to school improvement are being proposed in the current climate of assessment and school accountability. This book explores one of these approaches, a new model of leadership training known as Learner-Centered Leadership (LCL). It is built around the fundamental idea that learning and learning communities are natural processes that, when properly harnessed, can lead to the highest levels of professional engagement and problem solving. Key features of this exciting new approach to school leadership include the following:

Broad-based and Generative—The book's narratives vividly illustrate the extraordinary ability of LCL to generate new approaches to leadership development. For example, encouraging and assisting school leaders to reflect on their own leadership attributes relative to the implementation of the school mission to ensure high teacher efficacy and student learning. In this respect the volume contributes significantly to the field of school leadership and professional development by extending above and beyond a narrow focus on instructional leadership.
Practice Oriented—By creating communities that encourage conversation and analysis the new data-driven models of school improvement are more likely to be successfully implemented. Without analytical discourse, the process of interpreting school data and transforming it into practice would be largely lost.
Conceptually Appropriate—The realization that everyone within a school (students, teachers, administrators) belongs to the same learning community minimizes status differences and encourages teamwork. The LCL administrator is much less likely to be authoritarian and power-oriented and much more likely to be transformative and student outcome focused. This book is appropriate for master's level courses and certification seminars, and for inservice workshops dealing with school leadership.

PART
I

INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW OF LEARNER-CENTERED LEADERSHIP

CHAPTER
1

LEARNER-CENTERED LEADERSHIP: NEW DIRECTIONS FOR SCHOOL LEADERSHIP AN A NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

Arnold B. Danzig

Arizona State University

Kathryn M. Borman
Bruce A. Jones

University of South Florida

William F. Wright

Northern Arizona University

This book explores the concept Learner-Centered Leadership (LCL) relative to the professional development needs of school leaders. In this professional development context, the concept includes new knowledge and skills for aspiring and practicing school leaders. LCL implies a belief in democracy, and places responsibility for learning and development with multiple participants in educational settings: students, staff, teachers, and administrators. In this sense, LCL stands in opposition to the forces promoting organizational efficiency and standardization because establishing and maintaining a learner-centered atmosphere or climate in schools requires time and commitment.

The concept of LCL is especially relevant today because expectations for school leaders held by constituents and stakeholders invested in schools are quite different. The professional knowledge that teachers and administrators bring to bear, the community knowledge housed with children and families, and the political expectations of politicians and stakeholders send contradictory or conflicting messages to school leaders. At the same time, the demands of leading a complex organization and conducting the day-to-day operations of running a school undertaking fundamental change in how it does business easily result in school leaders expressing their frustration and exhaustion (Borman, Carter, Aladjem, & Le Floch, 2004). Current debates over the future of teacher and administrator leadership training and professional development recognize these disharmonies. The difficulty of finding high-quality candidates to enter and remain in leadership positions in schools indicates a continuing erosion of the quality of the work. Professional journals are filled with descriptions of new approaches to school leadership: distributed leadership and site-based management, data-driven decision-making and high-stakes accountability, curricular and instructional leadership, and cultural and organizational learning. The approach to school leadership is often determined by whether priority is given to (a) maintaining order and stability, (b) advancing technical approaches to skill development and career aspirations, or (c) promoting school betterment, a term Jeannie Oakes and her colleagues use to reference “the educative, socially just, caring, and democratic conditions that educators hope to create for their students” (Oakes, Quartz, Ryan, & Lipton, 2000, p. 316). One goal for this book is to help school leaders think about what is important about their work. The chapters that follow provide examples of learner-centered approaches for accomplishing this work.

LCL begins with a shift in the personal dispositions and professional norms of school leaders. For this shift to occur, learner-centered leaders need to be better educated in general, drawing on social science knowledge as well as ethical, critical, and legal reasoning (Bellamy, Fulmer, Murphy, & Muth, 2003; Murphy, 2002). LCL also recognizes the importance of craft knowledge that is part of leadership and decision making, as well as a tacit dimension to leadership that draws on prior experience in complex organizational settings, that is, schools. The co-editors hope that the themes raised in this book provide rich examples of leadership and leadership development for practitioners at different levels along the continuum from preparation to expert practice.

LCL: SOMEKEY ELEMENTS

A key element discussed in all of the chapters included in this volume is the priority placed on learning. It is taken for granted that the managers and leaders of today’s businesses understand the underlying principles of their products or services. For school leaders, this knowledge requires understanding of the basic and deeper principles related to learning in diverse educational settings. The knowledge and application of learning principles are frequently based on years of experience in the classroom, along with study of and reflection on principles of teaching and learning.

Learner-centered leaders understand themselves as learners. They recognize how motivation affects what is learned and how learning takes place. They are aware of how people learn and what facilitates the learning of children, youth, and adults. Learner-centered leaders reject sanctions as the basic approach for motivating others to learn, and instead view freedom and autonomy as primary sources of learning. Learner-centered leaders recognize that learners need control over their own learning.

Learner-centered leaders understand that learning is social. Learning is influenced by social interactions, interpersonal relations, and communication with others. Learning is enhanced when the learner has an opportunity to interact and to collaborate with others, on meaningful tasks. Settings that encourage learning allow for social interactions, respect diversity, and encourage flexible thinking and social competence. People learn as they participate with a community of learners, interacting with that community and understanding and participating in its history, assumptions, and cultural values and rules.

Learning Occurs at Multiple Levels

A second theme evident in each of this volume’s chapters relates to the multiple contexts in which people learn. Learning is defined, acquired, and used at the individual, organizational, and community levels. Each of the chapters reveals the complex nature of schools and accompanying challenges to improve learning. If the learning that occurs in schools is to go beyond individual learning, there must be organizational learning as well. By organizational learning, we mean to focus attention on how groups of people come together to share information, make decisions, and take actions related to individual and organizational goals (Schön, 1991; Senge et al., 1999; Weick, 1993; Weick & Roberts, 1993).

One component of organizational learning is a leader’s ability to understand and give meaning to how the day-to-day activities of participants contribute to educational purposes. LCL is invested in defining purposes that touch on student and community learning. Learner-centered leaders translate guiding ideas into educational practices that engage all members of the community. As Lieberman, Falk, and Alexander point out in their chapter, LCL requires school leaders to be educators, problem solvers, crisis managers, change agents, enablers, consensus builders, and networkers.

LCL assumes that leaders also serve community ideals while recognizing that the community is a work in progress. This image of the principal as community builder encourages others to be leaders in their own right and to see to it that leadership is deeply distributed in the organization. Many of the chapters refer to issues related to leadership and democratic community, social justice and social conscience in rural and border communities, and are indicators of the relevance of LCL to concepts related to community. Focusing on community also presses school leaders to ask questions about community values, particularly values concerned with educational equity and social justice. A community committed to learning requires a process of working through differences in beliefs and opinions. If the examples presented in this volume are indicative of trends across the United States, school leaders of the future will be even more heavily involved in defining the purposes, identifying vision, and giving meaning to actions than the current generation of practitioners (Bennis, 2003; Weick & Roberts, 1993). These commitments involve greater attention to the people that inhabit schools and communities, and to the knowledge and values of students, parents, families, and communities. LCL is anchored in the competence to understand, articulate, and communicate the knowledge and values of multiple constituents and stakeholders. Collaboration requires new learning to make sense of conflicting norms and information, consider new ideas, and model democratic participation, which embraces differences. These attributes are essential in the repertoire of learner-centered leaders.

Learner-Centered Leaders Recognize Dilemmas of Administrative Practice

One challenge to the concept of LCL is that, when things go wrong, individuals, not organizations, are identified and held responsible. In this view, school principals are held accountable for school-site stability and student achievement under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), whereas teachers are expected to be in control of their classrooms. One result is that the norm of reciprocity prevails with a quid pro quo of arrangements, between administrators and school board, between principals and teachers, and between teachers and students. Too often, this leads to territorialism, where defending turf instead of building community is the norm. As indicated in the chapter by Borman et al., new learning about the culture of schools, and the role of leadership in building school culture is required if learning is to be nurtured. Otherwise, stakeholders will resist collaborating; building community will take a backseat to preserving individual control over respective domains.

Another challenge to LCL is learning to balance individuality with community and collaboration. Autonomy, time, nonaccountability, control over one’s own clientele, a sense of personal accomplishment, discretionary decision making, and the control of space can all be rewards for individual performance. LCL recognizes the value of collaborative learning within and across organizational boundaries. The organization is not static and the source of social and environmental problems is not defined by the behaviors of individuals. Rather, the organization must adapt to the ever changing needs of individuals while individuals learn to adapt to their environments. LCL challenges leaders to better understand the assumptions and filters that inform their leadership and the tacit values that go into decision making (Vickers, 1995).

A related challenge of LCL is recognizing that the positional authority that comes from being a principal is not the same as the moral commitments and leadership skills required to create a learner-centered school. LCL gives priority to the autonomous learning that comes from professional networks and peers; it involves mentoring and coaching separate from the role of supervisor and evaluator. The traditional role expectation of the principal expects too much of one person—expert in content knowledge, authority on instructional pedagogy, and model for individual and organizational excellence. Learner-centered leaders open spaces and provide opportunities for others to empower themselves and to facilitate their own learning.

APPLICATIONS TO THE POLITICAL AND POLICY CONTEXT

The learner-centered approach to educational leadership is complicated by the current political demands for greater accountability and the press for increased individual and school test scores. Learner-centered leaders advance learning, rather than ever higher test scores, as the core concept around which other school efforts are measured. They resist the trend toward targeting those children most likely to show immediate test score gain. This priority given to learning distinguishes LCL from political leadership.

The contributions of this volume share several themes about leadership reform and professional development. Collaboration, teamwork, an appreciation for ongoing learning, the need to develop instruction that focuses on the development of critical thinking skills in children as opposed to rote memorization and regurgitation instructional are approaches argued in this volume. Unfortunately, the press to focus almost exclusively on test preparation stands in contradiction to approaches to leadership and school reform advocated by a number of policymakers in the public and private sectors. Through regulatory, fiscal, and (at the state level) mandate authority, policymakers exert enormous influence on the implementation of school reform agendas and professional development priorities that are ultimately developed by school districts. For example, state policymakers at the agency-level who operate from traditional viewpoints of schooling may not value the need for supporting leadership development in schools. These policymakers may believe that there is a greater need to narrowly focus on teachers’ classroom instruction while viewing principal leadership as primarily as managing for results related to standards-based accountability systems and state assessments (Hess & Kelley, 2005). Budget allocations, state-sponsored workshops, and policy priorities may reflect this more traditional view in contrast to the broader focus on learner-centered approaches to schooling.

The private corporate and philanthropic sectors in recent years have placed a strong emphasis on the need for more student testing and teacher and administrator accountability sanctions for poor school academic performance. For example, the Ed Trust under Katie Haycock’s capable leadership has been in the forefront of those calling for change under the guidelines of NCLB. Such organizations are demanding school leaders to tighten up what may have been viewed as relatively democratic governing and leadership structures to hold the feet of teachers and school staff to the fire regarding school performance. With this phenomenon, the press is for school leaders to be increasingly transactional and authoritarian as opposed to transformative and democratic. Leaders must issue edicts in a hierarchal manner for teachers and school staff to follow obediently or suffer the punitive consequences. This is all in contradiction to the philosophical and practical leadership notions that are advocated in this volume.

According to Jones (in press), at least four phenomena or trends during the past 25 years have contributed to the policies and practices just described. Each potentially holds consequences for how school leadership under the rubric of a learner-centered model will be manifest and subsequently institutionalized in school settings: (a) the importance of formal education; (b) the bully pulpit function of the federal government in public education; (c) the intrusion of community elites in education at a national level and the affairs of public schooling at a local level; and (d) the significance of nationally driven school reform packages.

The Growing Importance of Formal Education

With each passing decade, the importance of education has grown exponentially. Much more is now at stake regarding the education of children and the success that they attain as productive citizens in adulthood. Increasingly, education has become the single most important mechanism for achieving success in the global society. Once thought of as the world’s premier education system, urban schools in the United States are now failing to help children achieve success (Cuban, 1990; Murphy & Beck, 1995). In the wake of this failure, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that average earnings progressively increase with each level of educational attainment. At the bottom of the income hierarchy are high school noncompleters, earning an average of $18,826. High school graduates earn an average of 45% more at $27,280, an overwhelming amount in comparison when compounded over a lifetime. The income discrepancy grows even wider for college graduates, who earn an average of $51,194—nearly double that of high school graduates and almost three times that of high school noncompleters.

The Growing Importance of the Federal Government’s Bully Pulpit

The 1983 National Commission on Excellence in Education’s Nation at Risk Report brought a level of federal involvement in education that is unprecedented in history. The report declared that “if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves” (p. 5). On the heels of the report, more than three fourths of the states feverishly began work on comprehensive state action plans for school improvement (Guthrie & Springer, 2004). At the national level, school reform efforts were driven by President G. H. W. Bush’s America 2000 initiative, President Clinton’s Goals 2000, initiative and the current President G. W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind initiative.

The NCLB initiative is viewed as the most activist involvement of the federal government in U.S. public education history (Emery & Ohanian, 2004; Sergiovanni et al., 2004). For the first time, the federal government garnered the authority to impose sanctions and penalties on school districts that fail to meet adequate yearly progress (AYP) as stipulated by the requirements of the NCLB legislation. These penalties include obligatory student transfer options at the district’s expense, forced reallocation of district federal funding, potential principal and teacher dismissal at underperforming sc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Editors
• Foreword
• Part I—Introduction and Overview of Learner-Centered Leadership
• Part II—Historical and Intellectual Underpinnings of Learner-Centered Leadership—Policy Shifts and Historical Shifts in Professional Development for Principals
• Part III—Professional Development, Context Knowledge, Curricular Reform, and Administrator Development
• Part IV—Research and Practice on School Leadership and Professional Development
• Part V—Social Justice and Urban Reform Issues in Professional Development for Learner-Centered School Leaders
• Author Index
• Subject Index