Developing Expert Leadership For Future Schools

Kenneth Leithwood, Paul T. Begley, J. Bradley Cousins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135720100
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Based on the authors' research on the behaviour and thinking of school leaders, this volume presents arguments about the natue of expert school leadership. It parallels developments in the field from the early 1980s when the emphasis was on identifying the behaviours of effective principals, to the early 1990s, when the focus shifted to understanding the thinking underlying those behaviours. The ideas contained in this book should be useful in helping practising educationalists develop the skills involved in school leadership.

Part 1: A Perspective on Developing Expert Leadership for Future Schools

Chapter 1: A Conception of Expert Leadership for Future Schools

Of all the hazy and confounding areas in social psychology, leadership theory undoubtedly contends for top nomination. Probably more has been written and less is known about leadership than any other topic in the behavioral sciences. (Bennis, 1959, p. 259)

Adding a future’s twist to the leadership story, as we do in this book, would hardly make Bennis more confident about what we write. But we are fearless. We possess the kind of self-confidence that Klemp and McClelland (1986) labeled a ‘generic’ leadership skill—which seems fitting (the Greeks called it ‘hubris’¹— but no matter).

Schools of the past, present and future needed, and will continue to need, competent management. They need people who can establish and maintain the daily routines that make individual people in the organization dispensable—that allow the basic purposes of the school to be achieved even though members of the school inevitably change. Schools also need to change. And for change to result in improvement, schools require expert leadership. This book is primarily about leadership, but it is also about how to carry out managerial work in a way that contributes to leadership.

This chapter is intended to clarify the purposes of the book. It is also an opportunity to share with you some of the assumptions and perspectives we hold, insofar as they have shaped our thinking about future schools and leadership. Five assertions provide a framework for doing this:

• schools are durable institutions
• schools are instruments of social change
• school-leaders are key artisans
• the leadership problem has three parts
• the leadership process is usefully viewed as problem-solving

Schools are Durable Institutions

Potential readers, we suspect, will quickly judge us to be either hopelessly trapped in a mind-set shaped by current institutions or conservatively optimistic. And the judgment may well be rendered even while reading the title of this book. If you believe that schools are brittle, bureaucratic anachronisms incapable of meaningful adaptation to the brave new world of the twenty-first century, this book is not for you. After all, we use the term ‘future schools’ in our title, whereas for you, the term (like ‘airplane) food’ or ‘pleasant nightmare’) is an oxymoron. Give your old Ivan Illich (Illich, 1971) another read instead.

Conservatively optimistic is our own self-concept. We believe schools are imperfect but enduring and improvable institutions that society will not be prepared to do without, for longer than any of us are likely to be around. After all, schools in western societies have borne the brunt of a more or less bad press, in cycles, throughout at least this century. In the face of a constant barrage of both constructive criticism and hopelessly uninformed carping, many schools have responded with continuous, adaptive changes while still preserving their essential form and function. That is a formula for successful evolution whether the organism be biological or social. Our general purpose in this book is to make a modest and indirect contribution toward the subsequent evolution of schools by influencing the development of those who will be their leaders.

Schools are Instruments of Social Change

Concerns about what the future holds for schools are everywhere; they may be found, for example, in the successive ‘waves of reform’ initiated by states in the United States (e.g., Bacharach, 1988), in the dramatic efforts to refocus the locus of control over schools in Australia (e.g., Marsh, 1988) and the United Kingdom (e.g., Walford, 1990), and in the comprehensive curricular reforms now being introduced in some parts of Canada (e.g., Province of British Columbia, 1989). The strength of these concerns and their undeniable impact on schools is largely explained by a renewed belief in the link between education and the achievement of fundamentally important social goals for the future. Some view this link as economic salvation through educational excellence. As Drucker (1989) asserts: ‘in a world where knowledge has become the true capital and the premier wealth-producing resource, the process of education is the ultimate supplier of power’. While rejecting the values of perpetual growth and materialism on which the economy-education link is forged, others also look to education as a key to their preferred image of the future. One such image, developed by Ornstein and Ehrlich (1989), concerns itself with the long-term, collective well-being of the species, a well-being dependent upon appreciating the fragile nature of the planet and upon a set of values and lifestyles in harmony with its fragile nature. And, in Ornstein and Ehrlich’s view, with such an image in mind, ‘refashioning how people are educated could have enormous import for the future of the species’ (cited in Mitchell, 1990, p. 29).

School-Leaders are Key Artisans

If education, in general, and schools, in particular, are seen as tools for social change, educational leaders are assumed to be among the most critical artisans. This assumption is widely held by the public-at-large, as well as by education professionals (e.g., Schlecty, 1990). It is also an assumption warranted by relevant evidence (e.g., Immegart, 1988). Indeed the ‘leadership effect’ becomes increasingly prominent the more one focuses attention on schools as opposed to other types of organizations. Research on effective schools (e.g., Wilson and Corcoran, 1988) is especially clear on this point. Developing school-leaders, therefore, is one of the most promising avenues available for successfully addressing the changes which will challenge future schools. A more specific purpose of this book is providing insights from research about the development of leaders capable of facilitating the changes which will be required of schools in the future.

The Leadership Problem Has Three Parts

There are many people who are able to get out in front of the band who have nothing to do with what song the band is playing. (Corbett, Wilson and Aducci, 1990, p. 1)

Having a vision of what they would like their schools to be in the future is critical for school-leaders; it may even put them in front of the band. But it is (among other things) the creation of a shared vision among those playing the instruments that determines what song is being played, and whether it is one or many. With this as a critical task, it is reasonable to ask whether the front of the band is the best place for the leader to be. Our conception of the leadership required for future schools suggests that the rear of the band and the midst of the band will offer opportunities that are at least equally as important as opportunities available at the front.

George Terry (1960) defined the leadership problem as ‘how to influence people to strive willingly for group goals’, which pretty much sums up the message contained in our band metaphor. Two components of the leadership problem are evident in this definition: one focuses on how to influence people (the process of leadership); the other focuses on determining the goals toward which influence is exercised (the intended product of leadership). Leaders need to be able to assist individuals, often working in groups, to identify agreed-upon goals, the framework for which ought to be a vision of a future school. Leaders also need to be able to influence the same individuals and groups to strive willingly for the achievement of these goals. This is what Sergiovanni (1987, p. 121) refers to as ‘leadership by purpose’. As he points out:

Purposing is a powerful force because of our needs for some sense of what is important and some signal of what is of value.… The object of purposing is the stirring of human consciousness, the enhancement of meaning, the spelling out of key cultural strands that provide both excitement and significance to our work.

Exercising influence, the process component of leadership, involves the exercise of power. It is useful, for present purposes, to distinguish among four sources of power. Two of these include: (a) the power that comes from the authority vested in the position (jurisdictional powers) held by the leader (e.g., principal, superintendent), and (b) the power from support provided by those who are pursuing their own interests (e.g., political power). Leaders relying on these sources of power usually spend most of their time at the front of the band. However, these two sources of power are less and less available, at least for school-leaders now and in the future. Not many principals, for example, attribute much vested authority to their position for a variety of reasons: for example, the growing strength of teacher unions, and the trend toward decentralizing educational decisions (school-based management, school-based curriculum development), which seems to have as its primary goal the empowerment of teachers, not school-leaders. These obvious, pragmatic reasons for school-leaders to reduce their reliance on traditional sources of power are consistent in their effect with efforts to build teacher leadership into a more powerful force in future schools (Smylie and Brownlee-Conyers, 1990). These reasons are also consistent with efforts to reconceptualize leadership from a feminist perspective. Reflecting on her own intellectual voyage as a school-leader, Regan (1990, p. 568) for example, speaks of the need to give much greater attention to those aspects of leadership which involve ‘caring and nurturing relationship, and community building’ or the ‘soft’ side of leadership. Similarly, studies of district leadership are beginning to suggest that:

a strong superintendent in future years is less likely to be a ‘take charge’ boss than an ‘unheroic’ and more consultative leader…working with others…facilitating, finding common ground, listening and persuading. (Crowson and Morris, 1990, p. 41)

These are what Crowson and Morris refer to as ‘considerative qualities of culture and choice’.

Such views of leadership in the future will be based on two other sources of power for influencing people. One of these is the power that is awarded by virtue of one’s content or technical expertise (e.g., knowledge about schooling and skill in performing valued functions). To be used effectively, this source of power is best exercised in the midst of the band, in concert with those considerative qualities alluded to above. The purpose for exercising such power is to assist directly members of the school community to overcome the obstacles they face in striving for their vision of the school. In Leiberman and Miller’s (1990) terms, this is what it means to be a leader of leaders, a person whose power of expertise is used to achieve ends rather than control people. Management and leadership are intertwined in the midst of the band. Given a vision of what it means to do the right things, content or technical expertise focuses on doing those things right.

A final source of power comes through the ability to empower others, something often best accomplished from the rear of the band. Leadership based on this source of power is often referred to as ‘transformational’ (e.g., Burns, 1978, Bass, 1985, Sergiovanni, 1990) or developmental (Schlecty, 1990). The term ‘transform’ implies major changes in the form, nature, function and/or potential of some phenomenon; applied to leadership, it specifies general ends to be pursued although it is largely mute with respect to means. From this beginning, we consider the central purpose of transformational leadership to be the enhancement of individual and collective problem-solving capacities of organizational members; such capacities are exercised in the identification of goals to be achieved and practices to be used in their achievement. As Bennis and Nanus (1985, p. 217) clarify, leaders are transformative when they are able to ‘shape and elevate the motives and goals of followers’. Such leadership:

is collective, there is a symbolic relationship between leaders and followers and what makes it collective is the subtle interplay between the followers’ needs and wants and the leader’s capacity to understand… these collective aspirations.

Transformational leadership, thus, is culture changing (Coleman and LaRocque, 1989). Specific ways in which school-leaders effectively solve this part of the leadership problem are explored in Chapter 9.

Technical expertise exercised in a ‘considerative’ context and the ability to empower others are the two sources of power through which future school-leaders are most likely to influence others, and which they must be prepared to use. These are also the most defensible sources of power for leaders of organizations, dedicated to such fundamental values as respect for individual persons, representative democracy, and professionalism with its emphasis on client welfare.

The leadership problem, in sum, has three parts: developing a widely shared, defensible vision; in the short run, directly assisting members of the school community to overcome obstacles they encounter in striving for the vision; and, in the long run, increasing the capacity of members of the school community to overcome subsequent obstacles more successfully and with greater ease. Schools operate in a dynamic environment which exerts constant, often contradictory pressures for change: future schools are likely to experience even greater pressures of this sort. For this reason, future school-leaders will have to respond to these problems in what Vail (1989) refers to as ‘permanent white water’. Turbulence will be the norm not the exception.

The Leadership Process is Usefully Viewed as Problem-Solving

A recent review of studies of leadership and leader behavior in education, by Immegart (1988), concluded that research on educational leadership has actually declined over the past decade. This has been the case in spite of the increased challenges which have confronted schools during the 1980s and will continue and likely escalate throughout the 1990s. Furthermore, much greater attention needs to be given to the conceptualization of educational leadership, according to Immegart (1988), attention that acknowledges the multidimensional nature of leadership. Our response to this current state is to offer an initial conception of leadership as problem-solving, and to elaborate on the dimensions of that conception throughout the chapters of Part 2 of this book.

Problem-solving is a productive conception of leadership for two reasons. First, problem-solving is a generic human function, and as a result, capable of helping unearth the roots of otherwise puzzling human activity. As a conception of leadership, problem-solving competes with a host of more superficial conceptions as identified, for example, by Bass (1981): leadership as a focus of group processes, personality and its effects, a form of persuasion, a power relationship, the exercise of influence, and the initiation of structure (and some five others).

Problem-solving is also a productive conception of leadership because it represents a plausible next step along the path that has been trod by those actively engaged in leadership research and theory. According to Immegart (1988), this path began with efforts to uncover personal traits of leaders (e.g., intelligence, dominance, self-confidence, high energy level). Subsequent steps down the path focused on leader styles, and then, through efforts to operationalize styles, on specific leader behaviors (a step on which studies of leadership, emanating from the effective schools’ research, stalled). Current conceptions include efforts to understand the situational or contingent nature of leadership: that is, the extent to which a particular leader act and styles or behaviors depend for their effects on the context in which leadership is to be exercised. The central skill of situational leaders is to decide—to choose, from their repertoires, responses that are called for by the circumstances: ‘Given what I know of this teacher’s ability and disposition, and given the placement request being made by this parent, I am going to turn down the parent’s request without further consultation with anyone’. Decision-making, however, is only one form of problem-solving and among the simplest forms, at that. Faced with relatively simple and routine problems, what school-leaders do is captured reasonably well by the notion of decision-making. But a more comprehensive understanding of the full range of intellectual and emotional activity which constitutes problem-solving is required to appreciate the responses of leaders to complex and non-routine problems.

In education, the dominant conception of school leadership with which our problem-solving conception competes at present, is ‘instructional leadership’. This term symbolizes the importance, to school leadership, of an emphasis on student growth, and on much of the direct service provided by schools in fostering student growth. Such an emphasis was wholly appropriate and timely to bring to school leadership during the early 1980s, when the term gained a widespread following. But ‘instructional leadership’ conveys a meaning which encompasses only a portion of those activities now associated with effective school leadership. This is quite apparent, even in texts which explicitly adopt ‘instructional leadership’ as their thematic orientation: for example, Duke’s (1987) School Leadership and Instructional Improvement, and Smith and Andrew’s (1989) Instructional Leadership. These texts explore many issues of importance to school leadership (including visions of effective schools, for example) that fall outside the bounds of ‘instruction’ as it is normally conceived. Instructional leadership, as well, seems not to adequately encompass what has now been learned about the need for school-leaders to redesign professional work cultures to support teacher growth (e.g., Rosenholtz, 1989), as a context for instructional improvement, for example. Nor does this term (instructional leadership) acknowledge the contribution of non-instructional features of schools (e.g., informal, non-instructional relations between teacher and individual student) to their attractiveness to students typically considered at risk of dropping out (Rumberger, 1987, Lawton and Leithwood, 1988). Furthermore, schools of the future may well provide a significant portion of their services through means not readily associated with instruction as presently conceived (an image of the teacher as resource, rather than instructor, might be appropriate for future schools).

Summary and Conclusion

We began this chapter by affirming our assumptions about the durability of schools as future institutions, about their instrumental role in social change, and about the significant contribution of leadership to the functioning of schools, now and in the future. We then argued that the problem for leadership in the future had three parts: developing a ...