Connecting Leadership and Learning

Principles for Practice

John MacBeath, Neil Dempster, John MacBeath, Neil Dempster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134054497
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

Leading schools is becoming almost daily a more complex and demanding job. Connecting Leadership and Learning reassesses the purpose of schools, the nature of learning and the qualities of leadership that make schools authentic places of learning.

Starting with a review of what we can claim to know – and not know – about learning, leadership and their inter-relationship, this book explores what it means to lead schools that place learning at the centre. Drawing on research from seven different country projects - including the United States, Australia and five European countries – the authors offer five key principles for practice:

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• a focus of learning
• an environment for learning
• a learning dialogue
• shared leadership
• accountability; internal and external.

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These key principles have been tested by teachers, senior leaders and school students and found to be applicable across cultural and linguistic boundaries. The challenges faced by in inner city schools, whether in London or New Jersey, prove a stern test for the five principles yet, as these schools testify, they bring a new sense of hope and resolve that learning is for everyone.

Based on rigorous research yet thoroughly grounded in practice, this book aims to challenge the reader with big ideas about learning and leadership, and to break new ground in thinking about where leadership and learning meet so that practitioners can see how it works in school and classroom practice. It should be of interest to all school leaders and those aspiring to the role.

1 What do we know about learning?

John MacBeath

Schools are places for learning. Such a statement appears, on the face it, both trite and uncontentious. Yet beneath its surface appeal there are widely differing opinions as to its validity, plus a substantive body of research taking issue with the assumptions on which such a statement rests. The educational literature suggests seven differing kinds of challenge to the simplicity of the relationship between learning and schooling.

The first challenge comes from deschooolers and radical critics who contend that schooling is by nature anti-learning. Its very structures and conventions thwart learning, its institutional constraints limiting spontaneity and curiosity and what the father of the deschooling movement, Ivan Illich (1971), termed ‘conviviality’. This view has a longer history going back to the idyll of the ‘noble savage’, epitomised by Rousseau who portrayed in the person of his character Émile, the unfettered learner following a path of his own inclination. In modern guise this view of institutions as oppressive and demotivating was particularly prevalent in the 1970s when numerous books and articles were published with titles such as Alan Graubard’s Free the Children (and Other Political Prisoners).

A second argument sees the deschooling movement as too overstated but concedes that the engagement with learning in school settings is highly variable. It points to a wide and substantive gap between those for whom school is a place for success and those for whom school represents a repetitive and demoralising experience of failure to learn. The arguments are developed in a stream of sociological studies which illuminated the interplay of class, race and gender in separating the winners and losers. Willis’s seminal study in 1977, Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, depicted the role of class structures as disenfranchising a large minority, in which what was learned in school was, above all, one’s place in society.

This leads in turn to a third body of critique, more overtly politicised in character and resting on assumptions as to the place of school in the political economy. The argument is rooted less at school level than at the level of the state which is depicted as legislating and authenticating certain kinds of learning as more or less valued currencies in terms of their economic return. To use government language, learning is ‘delivered’ through recognised agencies of the state, through an assessment and certification system which validates lower- and higher-order knowledge, primarily for its perceived instrumental value. Assessment thus becomes an instrument of government, driving the school’s agenda, its priorities, its focus, its strategic direction, its accountability and the ways in which it represents to an external audience its quality and effectiveness. Schools, by this argument, find themselves caught between the twin agendas of high status ‘academic’ knowledge and low status vocational skills, having to exercise a delicate and problematic selection process. So learning itself is seen as having less and less intrinsic value but assumes greater proxy value, that is, as a form of benchmark for the efficiency of teachers, of school leaders and return on investment. In her book Does Education Matter? (2002), Alison Wolf explores the mythic relationship between school learning and the economy, arguing that the government’s pursuit of the economic agenda has shrunk ‘narrowly’ and ‘abysmally’ the pursuit of learning.

A fourth and related critique locates the issues more centrally in the nature of curriculum. Patrick Lewis in his book How We Think, But Not in School (2007) describes the ‘Hydra curriculum’, as each head is lopped off another appears to take its place. Yet there is little wiggle room to accommodate new ‘subjects’ as the traditional core of the curriculum remains firmly in place. So, it is argued, teachers are pressed into covering content while what they are required to assess and account for less and less reflects what is important or relevant to the lives of children and young people growing up in the twenty-first century. Due to the nature of a standardised, sequential, age-related curriculum there is always a process of compromise between the learning needs and interests of the child and the demands of a bureaucratic system.

Teachers may suggest a connection between learners’ interests and experience and the school curriculum, but that is more of a ploy to motivate learners to absorb the meat and potatoes of the academic curriculum. Tests rarely ask for personal connections or commentaries; they want the curriculum rendered back in its pure academic form, untainted by personal associations.

(Starrat, 1998: 5)

Reprising Herbert Spencer’s tract ‘What knowledge is of most worth’, John White has edited a series of books inviting critics from a range of subject backgrounds to make an argument for or against the inclusion of their own pet subject in the compulsory curriculum. The publication of Why Learn Maths? in particular, provoked a heated response primarily because of the historic, hallowed and unchallenged status of mathematics at the core of the curriculum. We have become so inured to traditional canons of the academic curriculum, it is argued, that it is hard to see learning in any other way than through the lenses bequeathed to us by the medieval quadrivium and trivium.

As the nature and appropriateness of the curriculum comes under greater scrutiny it becomes increasingly difficult to know how to accommodate educational priorities which sit uneasily within a tightly timetabled collection of subjects. So emerging areas of concern such as environmental education, health education, personal and social education, education for citizenship and democracy all have to fight for curricular space. A fifth body of critique takes a more radical view of school purpose, seeing the core values of citizenship and democracy as ill served by an approach which simply adds more and more content to the curricular diet. Citizenship and democracy may be squeezed into the curriculum but the way in which these ‘subjects’ are taught is fundamentally in conflict with hierarchical structures, with authoritarian cultures and with selective mechanisms which exclude some children and which stream and set children into different social and ability groups. It is argued that learning which matters and is most powerful in shaping attitudes comes through the ‘hidden curriculum’, the implicit rather than the explicit messages that a school conveys to its students. Making learning explicit for, and through, democracy is the subject of Hartman Von Hentig’s series of letters to a mythical nephew Tobias: in response to the question ‘Why should I have to go to school?’ in one letter he writes:

In school you meet people different from yourself from different backgrounds, children you can observe, talk to, ask questions, for example someone from Turkey or Vietnam, a devout Catholic or an out and out atheist, boys and girls, a mathematical whiz kid, a child in a wheelchair … I believe wholeheartedly that the open school is there first and foremost to bring young people together and to help them to learn to live in a way that our political society so badly needs.

(Von Hentig, 2001: 47)

A sixth perspective considers the wider purposes and contexts of learning, locating it less predominantly in classrooms, seeing it as crossing institutional boundaries. It charges schools with a failure to understand or build on the knowledge, skills and dispositions shaped by home, community, peer groups and agencies such as youth clubs and uniformed organisations. The nature of this complex weave is captured in Weiss and Fine’s book Construction Sites (2000) which illustrates how learning is engaged and deepened through parental and family discourse in ways that cannot be addressed in the less intimate and less flexible classroom context. This conception of learning as ‘constructed’ in multiple different sites gave impetus to the full service school in the United States and extended schools in the UK, many local authorities re-inventing themselves as child and family services. In policy terms this is reprised in the five outcomes of the Every Child Matters agenda in England, which not only broadens thinking about outcomes but no longer casts schools as the sole arbiters of learning. However, the very nature of school to which we are ‘locked in’ militates against a more fluid open inclusive approach to meeting differing learning needs.

A seventh perspective comes at these issues through a different lens, starting not from the assumption that school learning is simply for children. Proceeding with the question ‘Who is learning for?’, it argues that to focus solely on the children’s learning is to miss the point. Such a view, it is held, ignores the social interweave, not only of families, peer groups and communities but most pertinently the professionals who work and learn alongside their charges. Rather than as places for passing on knowledge to children, schools are portrayed as learning organisations, or learning communities – places in which pupil learning is inseparable from professional learning and the culture is one in which learning flows across boundaries of role and status. This seventh perspective owes much to corporate literature, for example Peter Senge, Chris Argyris and Donald Schon, their ideas transposed into a school context. The title of Senge’s book, Schools That Learn (2000), shifts the focus of our attention from the pupil as learner to the school as learner. If schools do not or cannot learn then Illich and other critics may legitimately claim that schools are in an essential respect anti-educational.

Learning in the wild

When we view school-based learning through each of these lenses it raises a question of signal importance for leadership. What do we know about learning ‘in captivity’ and what do we know about learning ‘in the wild’? The problem we confront is that we are never able to observe learning in a pure unadulterated form, as uncontaminated by the social structures we have created from cradle to grave. However, by studying learning as shaped and expressed in diverse contexts we find that we have still much to learn about learning and much to learn about how learning can be led, in and out of school.

Scientists eager to find the least socially constraining context for learning have celebrated the occasional discovery of wild children, often living with, or reared by animals. These are rare events but illustrate the importance of human socialisation and that uniquely human attribute, the power of language, which simply fails to develop without the simulation of human discourse. Without language these children have been deprived of the most essential of tools for giving shape to and extending experience, allowing thinking to abstract itself beyond the bounds of the present, and travel imaginatively among symbolic thoughtworlds.

Scientists have been afforded much wider scope for exploring asocial environments by studying what happens to children as yet unborn, the first nine months of their lives imprisoned in the viscous environment of the womb but with an awesome developmental task to perform. With sophisticated technology it has become possible to observe the beginning of learning close-up as the brain begins the intricate process of building highly sophisticated thinking and communication networks.

The growing child is not alone, however, connected to the social world through an umbilical tube, highly sensitive to environmental influences, nourished or deprived of opportunity not simply by the habits, behaviour and diet of the mother but by the environment she inhabits and the influence of those around her. One of the most dramatic effects of intellectual deprivation is Foetal Alcohol Syndrome (FSA) which impacts powerfully on capacity for learning and reveals itself in a generally unsuccessful childhood struggle to cope with the social, emotional and academic demands of the classroom. While the debate continues as to the nature and extent of genetic factors in ability and personality we do know that congenital (inter-uterine) effects combine in complex and powerful ways with genetic infrastructures to switch on and switch off gene activity, laying down some of the key parameters of human capacity.

Despite the heated and sometimes ideological debate about nature and nurture there is common agreement that these two complementary accidents of circumstance interact in and beyond the womb, and most significantly in the plasticity of the early years when children begin to discover themselves, start to reflect on who they are and begin the long journey of deciding who they want to be. So, child development studies furnish us with a source of valuable insights into the nature of learning. Many of the findings are surprising and counter-intuitive while some remain contested. In sum they tell us that small children are capable of much more than we have credited them with and are very often limited by the scope that their anxious parents, child minders and preschool environments allow them.

Where the learning story begins

A large part of what we know about learning starts with the early years because this is one area in which there is complete consensus as to the vital influence of the formative period, up to and following conception. We arrive into the ‘booming buzzing confusion’ of the outside world, hard wired with a potential so vast that it makes a mockery of the school conceit of ‘pupils developing their full potential’. In those critical formative years after birth the metaphoric description is of windows opening and closing as the extra-uterine environment nurtures or inhibits acquisition of skills and breeds, or inhibits, confidence in the world and those who inhabit it. Some children spend the early years in an environment shielded from the hazardous terrain beyond while others enjoy a wide latitude to experiment, to discover and to learn some hard lessons for themselves. Some infants form deep attachment to, and dependency on, their mothers while for others the mother may not be a central or permanent figure. What we know from ‘stranger’ laboratory studies is that from a very early age children respond quite differently to maternal separation and that attachment relationships vary widely between cultural contexts as well as within them. Lessons as to power, authority and trust are learned early and indelibly, often leaving a deep and permanent residue.

The emergence and stimulation of language plays a critical role in helping children to structure and add emotional colour to what they experience around them. From the booming buzzing confusion language singles out salient objects and concepts, and builds the tools through which children move from being acted on by their environment to acting on their environment. The child who reduces a newspaper to a hundred small pieces has effected a hugely satisfying expression of agency, although one which will become progressively set around with sanction and disapproval, particularly as emotive language labels become attached to certain forms of behaviour.

While language provides the most powerfully proactive of tools, its acquisition is a relatively slow process. We know less about the nature of learning in this pre-linguistic stage during which children make meaning from their experience, through imitation and trial and error exploration of their surroundings. But we do know that activity such as crawling is not only a swift form of locomotion but a powerful exploratory medium for forming and testing hypotheses about the world, relationships, cause and effect. It is one denied to some children because anxious, stressed or busy parents and carers confine babies to cots, playpens, baby bouncers or other corralled environments. The exploratory nature of trial and error in infancy is not, however, learning by the blind bumping up against things like the paramecium but a progressive cognitive structuring of the world, making the way for the conceptual added value of language and literacy. As Piaget showed, even before locomotion, children begin to work out causality relationships, pulling a carpet toward them to reach a target object, for example, then generalising this ‘push–pull’ schema to papers, sheets, tablecloths. With access to emergent language, children begin to attach labels to salient objects in the environment, progressively extending the world beyond the immediate horizons of the physical. The gulf between the richness and paucity of differing language environments has been shown to be huge and significant for later literacy acquisition.

For some literacy comes easily. For others the challenge of literacy is to learn to detach words from their affective relationship as words come to assume a more distanced and symbolic character. Words come to stand for things rather than being things and, if you have access to them, ideas are extended and exchanged through words, spoken and written. However, literacy comes as both a liberating and a constraining force. Patrick Lewis writes about schools ‘drowning children in text’ (2007: 46), missing opportunities to enrich and utilize oracy. He reminds us of Plato’s warning that trust in written characters can silence the inner voice and undermine self-confidence and, more recently socio-cultural neuropsychologists who point to the essentially different mediating processes involved in the production of spoken and written text. Allowed to grow organically, and scaffolded by prescient parents and teachers, literacy adds to and enriches the repertoire or learning modalities. Constrained or force fed it may stunt and demotivate.

The boundaries of normality

Studies of child development whether in natural, laboratory or experimental settings have generated a plethora of theories as to what is ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, the latter a contentious label because the boundaries of ‘normality’ remain fuzzy and because the process of labelling itself creates a way of seeing, defining and creating intelligence. But the study of abnormality and extreme abnormality has also provided a rich field of scientific study, shedding light on the nature of learning difficulties while also opening our eyes to extraordinary intellectual powers of children with different kinds of ‘special needs’. The thankfully disused term ‘idiot savants’ is a telling descriptor of the combination of ‘subnormal’ and genius intellect. There are accomplishm...