Leadership for Deeper Learning

Facilitating School Innovation and Transformation

Jayson W. Richardson, Justin Bathon, Scott McLeod

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000409536
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Amministrazione nella didattica

This exciting book explores how leaders have implemented, sustained, and pushed innovative, deeper learning opportunities in their school settings.

Across the United States and around the world, the concept of a school is growing more action-oriented, performance-focused, digitally relevant, and democratically infused. In this book, you'll hear from real schools and leaders about practices that are changing schools and leading to deeper learning experiences across seven categories of innovative practice—including vision, agency in learning, trust in teachers, openness to new ideas, over-communicating change, equity mindedness, and courage to live outside norms.

Leadership for Deeper Learning looks at how school leaders change the status quo and create different learning environments for students and teachers. Rich in stories and strategies, this book will provide you with the ideas and tools to rethink and reignite learning for the future.

Introduction

If you look across the United States and around the world, you might be surprised to discover that better models of schools are emerging. The concept of a “school” is becoming more personalized. It is growing more authentic. It is expanding to be more action-oriented, more performance-focused, more digitally relevant, and more democratically infused. Concerns about equity and access, future-readiness, student engagement, community connection, civic action, and social impact drive many of these shifts.

Although thousands of schools across the globe are entangled in the weighty process of rethinking and remaking the core structures of the school experience, these transformations in schooling are not yet widespread. The vast majority of these schools still exist in small pockets and are isolated islands of innovation floating within an expansive sea of tradition. However, these still-rare exceptions are beginning to break through their isolation and foster a broader movement. As Hargreaves and Fullan (2012) have noted:

Breakthroughs are generated by both bottom up and top down forces, albeit both in the minority at the start. In other words, at the beginning, it will be a broken front with a few brave souls from different quarters operating in semi-independent packs, widening and growing the appetite for the new order, and eventually coalescing in a majority force that carries the day.

(pp. 150–151)

Unfortunately, the standardized model of education has deep roots and sharp claws, which help it fend off its challengers. Through both active opposition to change and sheer historical inertia, it has stubbornly shriveled our collective expectations of the schooling experience. The flaws of a standardized approach are plentiful given the diversity of humanity that walks through school doors each day, which is why many practitioners, scholars, community leaders, and political voices have clamored for change. Even so, the experience of learners and educators within schools has remained mostly similar from generation to generation. Many families face the daily discontinuity of sending their children into school systems that they recognize quite clearly, yet find to be underwhelming and insufficient in the face of rapid societal changes and uncertain futures.

Parents and educators thus exhibit a simultaneous nostalgia and unease with the status quo, which can lead to complacency or paralysis that, at best, sustains educational mediocrity and, at worst, disenfranchises entire cohorts of young people. While there may be a generalized longing for a better school experience for our children, we lack a shared sense of what it could be instead. The current system, despite its widely acknowledged flaws, is at least recognizable and predictable. Right now, if we say the word school to people, a whole host of familiar images, feelings, and memories immediately come to mind. The biggest barriers to rethinking learning and teaching are our deeply embedded mindsets of what school looks and feels like.

The Importance of Leadership

Unsurprisingly, it requires a great deal of courage to lean into the maelstrom of educational reform and dare to believe that school cannot be just different but also better. The shepherds of much-needed change are the local educational and community leaders who are audacious enough to dream big, gather allies, and operationalize visions for learning and teaching that go beyond mere tweaks to the current system.

We know that leadership matters. The research on the importance of school leaders and their impact on students and school systems is both rich and deep. For example, Hallinger and Heck (1996a, 1996b, 1998) reviewed approximately four dozen studies and found both direct and indirect effects of school leadership on student outcomes. Creemers and Reezigt (1996) found that school leadership explains 3–5 percent of student learning variation, which is approximately one-fourth of the total variation in student learning (10–20 percent) explained by all school-level variables. A meta-analysis conducted by Waters et al. (2003) identified 21 leadership skills and found an average 10 percent increase in student test scores for those principals who improved by one standard deviation in all of these skills. In short, leadership is a critical factor in establishing the conditions necessary for successful student learning. In their landmark research review for the Wallace Foundation, Leithwood et al. (2004) found that school leadership is highly impactful, second only to classroom instruction, when it comes to student learning outcomes. They recognized that “there are virtually no documented instances of troubled schools being turned around without intervention by a powerful leader” (p. 5). They also noted that “in order to be successful, leaders need to respond flexibly to their contexts” (p. 22).

It is this adaptability to context and willingness to lead change that distinguish leaders from mere administrators. Transformational leaders, such as those who turn around failing schools or enact daring, future-ready initiatives, believe that individuals and organizational systems can shift and refocus in order to improve student learning. Transformational leaders have an inherent and unshakable belief that both “different” and “better” are achievable, and they then work tirelessly to alter the schooling experience for students and staff.

By utilizing a growth mindset, transformational leaders tap into the human, social, decisional, and professional capital of all school members. In a meta-analysis of 28 independent studies focused on transformational leadership, Chin (2007) found that transformational school leadership can positively impact school effectiveness, student learning outcomes, and educators’ job satisfaction. Leithwood et al. (2004) noted that transformational leaders have a keen understanding of their schools’ organizational, demographic, and policy contexts. These leaders focus on vision-setting, building people’s capacity, and organizational redesign.

Contemporary school innovators are proceeding along pathways that are simultaneously both new and familiar. As demands for standardization begin to recede and schools gradually recognize that the demands of a global innovation society are different from those of the previous century, they are beginning to embrace many of the progressive, constructivist, and personalized approaches long espoused by educational giants such as Jean Piaget, John Dewey, and Seymour Papert. While these well-known names serve as anchors for the shared philosophies that undergird the work, each school community iterates and implements in its own way. These contextual innovations and support structures lend local flavor and provide the details necessary to transform larger ideals into successful practices. Concurrent advances in communication and collaboration technologies also enhance school leaders’ ability to learn more quickly and easily from other innovators.

The details of these modern upgrades of schooling are not emerging by chance. They are purposeful responses to the incongruities that are inherent as we try to map a historical and analog model of learning and teaching to the challenges of today’s technology-suffused, global society. These school structures and leadership behaviors have emerged from thousands of community conversations and global dialogues about college- and career-readiness, enhanced life success, and more holistic understandings of desired learner outcomes. As schools shift toward new student and graduate profiles,¹ they challenge and reform core structures of the traditional, standardized school model. They allocate time differently, pilot model classrooms, offer new choices to families, adjust underlying policies, and engage in a multitude of other changes that substantially transform schools.

The book that you are holding is about the brave souls who are at the heart of this innovative work. At the root of every one of these transforming schools are courageous individuals who are leading the change. They are discontent with the status quo and are willing to rethink fundamental concepts of schooling. They are remarkable school leaders who are attempting to navigate massively complex challenges, implement more humanistic ideals of schooling, and chart a path out of the era of standardization. These leaders are working heroically to empower children and educators and to secure a brighter future for schools and communities.

Fulfilling a Legacy

The journey that accompanies this book began in New York City. After visiting a couple of schools, we boarded the Amtrak train under Madison Square Garden and headed north along the coastal tracks to Boston. We had a free day in the city before our next school appointment. After a long historical walk to Bunker Hill and visits with former doctoral students who are now leading their own educational organizations, we still had extra time on our hands. We wanted to sneak in another school visit and managed to connect with Colleen Meaney of the Francis Parker Charter Essential School in Devens, Massachusetts. We sheepishly asked to visit a couple of hours later, and, to our surprise, she agreed. It was a fortuitous moment because this visit would end up framing the rest of our journey. We hope it frames this book for you as well.

Colleen introduced us to Todd Sumner, the principal, and Ruth Whalen Crockett, director of the New Teacher Collaborative. Colleen promptly seated us beside her desk. We dove into details about the school while sitting at a large, finely honed table that clearly showed its age. These leaders were used to telling their story. They adored sharing their story. When we visited classrooms, it was evident that the students were used to visitors and were happy to share details about their personal educational journeys.

Francis Parker Charter Essential School is a quintessential deeper learning school. The classes are multiage and multidisciplinary. Students engage in a well-crafted flow of serious projects in which they take increasingly larger leadership roles. Many of these projects are service-oriented and are intricately linked to the surrounding community. Students are responsible for tracking their own work in paper portfolios and defending their mastery of academic expectations and the school’s nine established habits for learning. There is a robust advisory model as the school works to build student capacity and engender responsibility for learning and self-care across the organization. There are no traditional grades and very little that would remind you of a typical secondary school in the United States. However, as was a theme at nearly all of the schools that we visited for this book, almost every student at Parker goes on to some sort of postsecondary education. Even though the school does not focus on the standardized assessments required by state law, its students nevertheless do well on them. Most importantly, when we spoke with older students during our classroom visits, we realized that these individuals were young adults in control of both their present daily lives and their uncertain futures. These students were not preparing to be adults. They were practicing to be adults.

The serendipitous visit to Parker framed our entire journey because, compared to every other school that we visited for this book, it is not actively innovating. Instead, it is relatively stable. The school is a generation old. It opened in 1995 when Massachusetts permitted its first charter schools, inhabiting an older school building on the edge of a disused military base. As we sat at that aged wooden table with Colleen, Ruth, and Todd, there was another unmistakable presence in the room with us from a prior generation. We soon came to realize that we were actually sitting at Ted Sizer’s writing table, upon which Horace’s Compromise (Sizer, 1984) and the Nine Common Principles that formed the initial ideological agreements of the Coalition of Essential Schools were crafted. A large poster of Ted was on the wall. We sat in his collection of chairs from his various offices as dean and headmaster of some of the nation’s most elite schools and colleges of education. We sat that day in awe inside the school that Ted and Nancy, his wife and collaborator, built. They served as co-principals of Parker for a spell and remained connected to the school until their passing. Ted and Nancy clearly were in the room with us as we began the journey for this book. Speaking to us through the school. Touching us through the wooden grains of the table. Grounding us firmly in the chairs in which we sat.

All of the schools that we visited for this book can trace their own histories back to that same table and the same set of core ideas that shaped both Parker and the hundreds of other schools across the United States that joined the Coalition of Essential Schools. The leaders that we feature in this book are modern participants in a much longer and larger tradition. There have been numerous attempts to perfect a vision of public schools and accompanying systems for learning that equitably provide students and educators with the opportunity to access the best of humanity. The stories in this boo...