Leadership and Learning

Jan Robertson, Helen Timperley, Jan Robertson, Helen Timperley

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781849201742, 9781849201735
• eBook ISBN: 9781446243718
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

Bringing together internationally recognised scholars this book focuses on the relationship between leadership and learning for the education community.

It draws together a wealth of knowledge and research in the field across a variety of contexts, such as system leadership, professional learning communities and leading different cultures. Themes covered include:

- exploring models for leadership and improvement

- challenges in developing learning-focused leadership

- broadening ideas of learning and knowledge work.

This book will be of interest to educational leaders at all levels and in all sectors, as well as consultants, academics and those who wish to extend their knowledge in educational leadership whether engaging in further academic study or in reflective practice around the ideas presented. This book is essential for anyone taking advanced programmes in educational leadership and management.

Section I

Exploring Models for Leadership
and Improvement

CHAPTER 1

Establishing Platforms for Leadership and Learning

Helen Timperley and Jan Robertson

Traditional understandings of leadership have focused on individuals who occupied formal positions of authority within organizations; the ‘leaders’, their personality traits and their work. In business, the focus was on the chief executive officer (CEO). In education, the equivalent was the school principal. Studies of leadership within this framework typically examined how the leadership styles of these individuals allowed them to exercise influence and have authority over others. Of particular interest was, ‘the heroic leader standing atop a hierarchy, bending the school community to his or her purposes’ (Camburn et al., 2003: 348). Such a view of leadership, however, failed to realize its promise. On a practical level, there were simply insufficient numbers of heroes (Copland, 2003; Elmore, 2002; Harris, 2008) or ‘want-to-be heroes’ (Gronn and Rawlings-Sanaei, 2003) to run all our businesses and schools. On an empirical level, the evidence demonstrated that effective organizations were not typically run by a single leader who controls the activities of others who, in turn, play minor support roles. What happens within any organization is more complex than this. Many people are involved in both formal and informal leadership practice in influencing direction and outcomes. Thus, the vocabulary of ‘leadership’ replaced that of ‘leaders’ to reflect this complexity and the relational nature of leadership influence.

While there might be a general consensus about the importance of leadership rather than focusing on individual leaders and their dispositions, there is less agreement about how we should think about leadership. Ideas have been proposed, fallen into disuse, only to re-emerge some time later. Most of these ideas have been captured in the form of ‘adjective-plus leadership’. Leadership, for example, might be transformational, shared, instructional, pedagogical or distributed. The ‘adjective plus leadership’ label has been deliberately avoided in the title of this book because it is not another book about a depiction of, or prescription for, leadership. Rather, it is designed to answer the question raised by Starratt (2004) that asks, ‘Leadership of what, for what?’ Clearly, given the title of this book, it is leadership of and for learning.

This learning focus is a relatively new area of scholarship but it draws on, and has emerged from, a tradition of research and thinking in the area. There are many possibilities for how these ideas can be broadly grouped and we have chosen three themes to include in this introductory overview because each has contributed to the foundations of what we know about leaders and learning. These themes include empowering relationships, patterns of leadership distribution, and how leadership contributes to improvements in teaching and learning. Our reason for providing this overview is to locate the central theme of this book on leadership and learning within the broader ideas and traditions of the study of leadership.

Empowering relationships

One of the early alternatives to the heroic leader involved a focus on empowering relationships between leaders and followers. Volumes have been written on these relationships and the associated micro-politics (for example, Blasé, 1991) but probably the best known adjectival label is transformational leadership. The origins of transformational leadership came from the generic literature on leadership rather than that specifically focused on education (Burns, 1978). The central question of this early work was why some leaders were able to engage with others in ways that raised each party to higher levels of motivation and morality. These leaders were able to motivate their staff to pursue the goals of the organization over their own interests.

These ideas gained currency within the education sector and shaped much of the educational leadership training through the 1980s and 1990s (Leithwood et al., 1999). Initially four categories of transformational leadership behaviours were the focus. These included idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individualized consideration. They were seen in combination with what was referred to as transactional dimensions of contingent reward and management-by-exception. Through the research of Leithwood and colleagues (Leithood et al., 1990; 1996; 1999), these dimensions were subsequently combined into four broad categories according to the immediate intended outcome. These categories included: setting directions (vision, group goals, high-performance expectations); helping people (individualized consideration/support, intellectual stimulation, modelling key values and practices); redesigning the organization (helping to build collaborative cultures, creating structures to foster collaboration, building productive relations with parents and the community); and transactional and managerial aggregate (contingent reward, management by exception, management).

Many of these key concepts within transformational leadership have underpinned some chapters in this book, particularly with the emphasis on developing clear visions and high expectations, together with promoting collaboration and productive relations. The problem, however, has been the difficulty in linking the dimensions of transformational leadership to outcomes for students in an environment of increasing international pressure for accountability within schools for these outcomes. In a review of research on transformational leadership and student outcomes, Leithwood and Jantzi (2005) found reasonably consistent relationships to measures of school engagement but more equivocal relationships with student achievement. These authors concluded that the effects of leaders on students were largely indirect – an idea that has gained increasing currency in the leadership literature.

Some argued (for example, Robinson, 2006) that the reason for the limited impact of transformational leadership on students’ learning and achievement was the focus on relationships among the adults within the system, rather than on the students they were supposed to be serving. To achieve the impact on student learning and achievement, more focus was needed on developing the kind of relationships that would develop professional knowledge about the improvement of teaching and learning more directly. Focusing on relationships alone, however empowering, was unlikely to be sufficient in bringing about this change.

Patterns of leadership distribution

Another alternative to the heroic leader came with the work of Camburn et al. (2003), Gronn (2003) and Spillane et al. (2004). Their collective empirical work confirmed that leadership involves activities and interactions that are distributed across multiple people and situations. This work had its origins in the ideas of shared leadership (Etzioni, 1965) and distributed cognition which shows how material and social artefacts aid in the distribution of understandings across situations (Cole and Engeström, 1993). This work shifted the focus from the ‘what’ of leadership concerned with people, structures, functions, routines and roles, to ‘how leadership gets done through the ordinary, everyday practices involved in leadership routines and functions’ (Spillane, 2006: 5). Who leads and who follows is dictated by the task, and not necessarily by the hierarchical positioning of any individual (Copland, 2003).

In line with this rather non-heroic view of leadership, Spillane defines leadership in the following way: ‘Leadership refers to activities tied to the core work of the organization that are designed by organizational members to influence the motivation, affect, or practices of other organizational members or that are understood by organizational members as intended to influence their motivation, knowledge, affect or practices’ (Spillane, 2006: 11–12). While the main premises of this definition (core work, influence, practices) appear to be widely accepted, inevitably differences in perspectives have arisen. Spillane and colleagues have been concerned about developing analytical and conceptual frameworks for studying this influence process through a distributed lens. Others have transformed the leadership descriptor to the adjectival form of ‘distributed leadership’. This latter group have advocated that greater distribution of leadership is something to which educational organizations should aspire if they are to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century education (for example, Harris, 2008).

Something on which most researchers taking a distributed leadership perspective agree is the potential benefits of utilizing expertise across and within organizations through the co-construction of knowledge (Harris, 2008). Effective distribution of leadership creates more opportunities for professionals to learn. The increased opportunities, coupled with the focus of distributed leadership on the core work of the organization, create strong links between leadership and learning. Thus many of the chapters in this book implicitly, if not explicitly, take a distributed perspective on leadership.

While most researchers have welcomed the shift to studying the ‘how’ of leadership practices with its focus on learning rather than analysing styles or tasks, nagging doubts have surfaced about whether distributing leadership per se will actually be what makes the difference to some of our enduring educational problems. Harris (2008), for example, explains that it is not the distribution of leadership that determines effectiveness, but rather how it is distributed. Timperley (2005) showed that greater distribution may lead to greater distribution of incompetence. Robinson (2009) argues that to tackle the kinds of endemic achievement problems evident in many countries, more focus is needed on the educational content of the leadership process. What this educational content might look like and how leadership contributes to improvement in teaching and learning for students is the focus to which we turn next.

Leadership for the improvement of teaching and learning

While the other two themes of empowering relationships and patterns of leadership distribution have as an important goal the improvement of teaching and learning in schools, this third theme addresses this issue more explicitly and brings us closer to the central task of this book. Part of this reorientation towards leaders being more focused on teaching and learning arose from a concern with the introduction of self-managing and governing schools in many countries in the 1990s. This movement led principals to become more focused on the efficient undertaking of management tasks than on providing professional direction for the school (Southworth, 1998). This emphasis on learning-centred leadership is partly about reclaiming the professional role of school leaders, albeit in a more modern guise than that existing prior to self-managing schools.

Another impetus for more instructionally focused leadership was the research on effective schools. As those studying schools with high student achievement compiled lists of these schools’ characteristics, references to strong leadership were invariably among them (for example, Reynolds et al., 2000). Similarly, in the schooling improvement literature, it became evident that unless leadership influenced what was happening in the instructional core, it was unlikely to have an impact on outcomes for students. As Elmore states:

Improvement occurs … by raising the capacity of key relationships in the instructional core: by increasing teachers’ knowledge of content and their knowledge of how to connect the content to specific students, by increasing the prerequisite knowledge that students bring to their interactions with teachers and by deepening their own knowledge of themselves as learners, by increasing the complexity and demand of content. (Elmore, 2002: 122)

As researchers have sought to identify the kind of leadership activities that lead to improvement in teaching and learning in the instructional core, adjective-plus forms of leadership have inevitably emerged. These forms have included instructional leadership, learning-centred leadership, pedagogical leadership and educational leadership. Each provides nuances on the central theme of learning for both the leaders and teachers within the organization and the students that educational organizations are designed to benefit. What is common among them all is the priority given to thinking about how particular leadership tasks and activities might impact on student achievement and well-being (Hallinger, 2005; Robinson et al., 2009; Southworth, 2004).

A recent meta-analysis of leadership practices that had high impact on student outcomes by Robinson et al. (2009) is one such example of this kind of pursuit. These authors found that those practices that could be construed as ‘pedagogical leadership’ were associated with highest effect sizes for student achievement. In a subsequent analysis, they established that the dimensions with greatest impact included: establishing goals and expectations; resourcing strategically; planning, coordinating and evaluating teaching and the curriculum; promoting and participating in teacher learning and development; and ensuring an orderly and supportive environment. Three of these dimensions are supported by Hallinger’s (2005) review of the literature that described instructional leaders as those who frame and communicate the school’s goals; manage the instructional programme by supervising and evaluating instruction, coordinating the curriculum and monitoring student progress; and align the school’s structures and culture within the school’s mission.

While these approaches to leadership have a stronger instructional focus, they also draw on the other two constructions of leadership, albeit with a different lens. Robinson et al. (2009), for example, include a relationship dimension of indirect influence called creating educationally powerful connections, which has similarities with the transformational leadership literature. Similarly, Elmore (2002) writes that cohesive schools occur when there is a high degree of alignment between individual responsibility and collective expectations complemented by a relatively explicit internal accountability system.

The contribution of the three themes

These three themes, empowering relationships, patterns of leadership distribution, and leadership...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword by Geoff Whitty
• SECTION I EXPLORING MODELS FOR LEADERSHIP AND IMPROVEMENT
• SECTION II CHALLENGES IN DEVELOPING LEARNING-FOCUSED LEADERSHIP
• SECTION III BROADENING IDEAS OF LEARNING AND KNOWLEDGE DEVELOPMENT
• Index