Values for Educational Leadership

Graham Haydon

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781412934688, 9781412934671
• eBook ISBN: 9781446239919
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

`If you are intending to embark upon or support others taking part in any of the programmes of the National College for School Leadership I would definitely keep this book close by? - Cliff Jones, CPD Update

What are values? Where do our values come from? How do our values make a difference to education?

For educational leaders to achieve distinction in their practice, it is vital to establish their own clear sense of values rather than reacting to the implicit values of others. This engaging book guides readers in thinking for themselves about the values they bring to their task and the values they intend to promote. Crucially, the book promotes critical thought and constructive analysis about the underlying values involved with:

- aims and moral purpose in education

- individual qualities in educational leadership

- vision in education

- school ethos and culture

- the school as an educational community.

By inviting reflection using valuable case studies and work-through activities, as well as referring to a wide range of academic literature, this book will be an important resource for those working towards professional qualifications such as NPQH, and invaluable for anyone aspiring to excellence in educational leadership.

Graham Haydon is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy of Education at the Institute of Education, University of London, where he teaches on Masters courses in Values in Education and Applied Educational Leadership and Management.

1	Values and their place in educational leadership

If you approach your thinking about values by way of your experience of leadership or your reading about it, you may bring various preconceptions with you. There is already a mass of ideas available in the academic literature and the professional literature about what leaders should do and how they should think. This chapter, after a brief opening section, will reverse the order: it will ask you to think about values in general, before thinking about educational leadership or even about education. Later in the chapter we will bring the discussion back to education by looking directly at a number of ways in which values can make a difference to educational thinking.

This chapter will help you to:

• understand why values are vital in educational leadership;
• articulate what you take values to be, and which values are important to you;
• be aware of a variety of answers to the question ‘where do values come from?’;
• reflect on the difference between moral or ethical values, and other values;
• be aware of a variety of ways in which values can impinge on educational decision-making.

After a brief introduction reviewing why values are important in educational leadership, this chapter has four main sections: what are values? where do our values come from? morality and ethics; how do values make a difference in education?

Why are values important in educational leadership?

It is not difficult to find answers to this question within the academic literature on leadership and management, but many answers give only part of the picture. For instance, the following statement by Willower has been quoted by a number of writers:

Because a significant portion of the practice in educational administration requires rejecting some courses of action in favour of a preferred one, values are generally acknowledged to be central to the field. (Willower, 1992, quoted in Begley and Leonard, 1999: 51. Willower is using the term ‘administration’ in the American sense which, in educational contexts, approximately equates to ‘leadership’)

Willower’s statement is not false, but it does illustrate the sort of preconception to which I have already referred: in this case, the idea that values are important because they come into decisions. Certainly the decisions we make turn on values, but is that the only way in which values come into our lives – either our professional or our personal lives? There is more to educational leadership than making a decision from time to time, and it would be surprising if values only made a difference when there is a decision between alternatives to be made (as if everything else in educational leadership is somehow a value-free sphere). By the end of this chapter you should be aware of a number of other ways in which values are important in educational leadership.

First, though, we need to understand more about values in general. The following sections will ask you to think about your own values, personally as well as professionally.

What are values?

In entering on a distinct area of enquiry it is natural to want some clarification about exactly what we are meant to be studying. Sometimes we find that a definition of terms is helpful. But definitions need to be treated with some caution. ‘Values’ is not a technical term. In talking about values, we are talking about something which is part of the experience of everyone. You already in your life have a lot of experience of values, though you may not have spent a lot of time in thinking about your values or articulating them. This chapter will encourage you to do that. So it is best to start, not by giving you a definition, but by asking you to think about what you recognise as the values that you take to be important.

Before you read any further, try to call to mind some values that you are sure are important. Then see if you can write down two lists:

• values that you think are important for anyone;
• values that you take to be especially important for you, in your own life.

(Later we shall come to values that may be especially important in educational leadership. It does not matter if some of the same items come into more than one list.)

It is often easier to list examples of some kind of thing than it is to give a definition. For instance, you would find it easy to list some examples of fruit but more difficult (unless you happen to be a botanist) to give a definition of fruit. The same applies to values, though even to list examples of values may be more difficult than listing examples of fruit.

I do not know, of course, what you will have listed, but I can make some guesses, and these underlie the next few paragraphs.

In the first list, it is possible that you have written down some abstract terms such as ‘justice’, ‘truth’, ‘goodness’, ‘health’, ‘happiness’, ‘love’ – of course there could be many other such terms.

In the second list, you may have repeated some items. But you may also have mentioned some things that are more personal to you. This might be doing well in your job, or having a good relationship with your family, or many other things.

Is there anything in common so far about all the things you have listed? One guess is that you have probably not included in your lists any concrete physical objects. For instance, while it may be important to you to live with your family in a comfortable house – this may be something you value – you have probably not written ‘my house’ in your second list.

I may be wrong about this. Some of the writers in the literature of educational leadership, when they talk about values, have included physical objects in their lists. To me, while there is no doubt that we can value particular objects – a vase which I have inherited from my grandmother might for instance have great sentimental value to me, and my computer may have great usefulness to me (another word for ‘usefulness’ here is ‘instrumental value’, and we shall come back to that idea) – it would seem odd to me to include ‘my grandmother’s vase’ or ‘my computer’ in a list of my values.

You will have to see if you agree with this. We are talking for the moment – as philosophers often do – about how we use words, and words can be used rather differently by different speakers, especially by different speakers of an international language like English. To me, a value has to be something less tangible than a physical object: it might be justice, it might be my relationship with my family, it might be having a comfortable house, but it is not actually the house itself.

In a moment I shall ask you to think whether you can suggest a definition of values. Before that, there are two more points worth thinking about. One is about importance. I asked you to list values that you take to be important. That leaves open the possibility that there may be unimportant values. In their book on The Ethics of School Administration, the authors Strike, Haller and Soltis (1998: 36–7) give as an example of a value statement:

‘Pickles are better than olives.’

This example has nothing to do with school leadership, of course, and there is nothing wrong with that. If we are trying to get as clear as we can about our concept of values, it is best not to get involved at the same time in contentious questions on which people might have serious disagreements. That can come later. It often helps our understanding if we start with easy examples and then move on to more difficult ones. The problem in this case is that I am not sure whether most people would count ‘pickles are better than olives’ as a value statement at all. It is certainly, as the authors say, an expression of a personal preference. We shall have to say more later about the relationship between values and preferences. For the moment, you could say either of two things: either this expression of a preference is so clearly just that – an expression of a preference and nothing more – that we would not seriously count it as a value statement at all; or it is an example of a value statement, but the value in question is a thoroughly trivial one. It does not matter which of these things you are inclined to say, provided you recognise that if we can count this claim ‘pickles are better than olives’ as a value statement at all, it is a trivial case. Outside of academic examples, we are more likely to talk about values – actually using that word – when we think there is something of importance at stake.

The second point for the moment is that values can affect what people do. Even in the trivial case just mentioned, if someone thinks pickles are better than olives, she is likely to choose pickles when offered a choice between the two. In more important cases, if you value harmonious relationships within your family more than success in your job, or the other way round, this is likely to make a difference if you have to choose, say, whether to apply for a promotion which will take you further away from your home.

Keeping in mind the points about values made so far, see if you can suggest a definition of values.

Here is a definition, attributable in its original version to the sociologist Kluckhohn, which has been cited by several writers on values in educational management:

Values are conceptions, explicit or implicit, distinctive of an individual or characteristic of a group, of the desirable which influence the selection from available modes, means and ends of action. (Quoted with minor changes from Begley, 2003: 3)

Compare this with the definition you have thought of. Does Kluckhohn’s definition seem to fit your own understanding of values? If not, what would you want to change in the definition?

Here are some comments on Kluckhohn’s definition, following the order of the points mentioned in it:

• That values are conceptions seems to fit the examples we have mentioned so far. We have suggested that values are not physical objects but ideas about what is important or what matters to us.
• Values may be explicit or implicit. If you say that one of your values is justice or truth then you are making this value explicit. But in your choices and actions you will be influenced all the time by what you take to be preferable or important, whether or not you spell out to yourself or to anyone else exactly what ideas are influencing you.
• Values may be distinctive of an individual: perhaps some personal experience has given you an aspiration for your own life which other people do not share. But values can also be distinctive of a group. A religious community, for instance, may hold certain values which are different from those of other groups. (It is important here that values, like ideas generally, do not exist just in the heads of individuals. Ideas are recorded in writing and in symbolism of many kinds – in religious ritual, for instance.)
• Values are conceptions of what is desirable. ‘Desirable’ means something like ‘worthy to be desired’, and this may be different from what actually is desired. If you are a smoker, but you think you ought to give it up, then you will often desire a cigarette but what you think is desirable is that you stop smoking and cease to have a craving for cigarettes. Then being free of such a habit is one of your values – one of your conceptions of what is desirable.
• Kluckhohn says that values ‘influence the selection from available modes, means and ends of action’. This makes the important point that there is a link between values and motivation. Whenever we are doing something deliberately – and not only when we are consciously deciding to take one course of action and reject another, as the statement from Willower might suggest – our values will be influencing us in what we do and how we do it, even though we may not have spelled out our reasons for acting in one way rather than another.

At this point there is another question for you to think about. Do our values always influence us?

You are probably familiar with the idea of paying lip service to values. This means that someone says that something is important but does not act accordingly. For instance, a male headteacher may say that gender equality is important, but actually take no action to prevent practices that discriminate against girls and women. Does he, then, recognise the importance of gender equality at all?

Possibly he does, in a sense. Perhaps we should not be too ready to say, without further details about the case, that such a teacher neglects the value of equality altogether. The idea that there is a connection between values and actions is correct, but it is not a straightforward connection.

Where do our values come from?

This is a question often asked about values. It is one way of expressing a set of concerns about values that often worry people. Can we be confident that the values we are following are the right ones?

If we are confident, then how should we respond towards people who appear to hold different values from our own?

If we are not confident, then can we find some sort of firm grounding for the values we are following? If not, then is it alright just to follow our own values in our own way? In private life this might be possible. But for anyone working in education there are further questions. Many decisions are made which make a difference to the lives of young people as they grow up. Are teachers perhaps just imposing the values they happen to hold onto these young people? And are educational leaders imposing their values onto teachers?

Because such questions can always be raised, we need to look further into where values come from and what sort of justification they can be given.

On this issue, in the context of educational leadership and administration, the work of Christopher Hodgkinson has been influential for several decades. He has offered a framework for thinking about the sources of people’s values that has been adopted for different purposes by various writers (e.g. by Begley (2003) in an article already cited) and criticised by others (see Richmon (2003 and 2004) for an appreciative but critical stance).

It is useful to have some acquaintance with Hodgkinson’s ideas because other writers in the field so often refer to him. And his framework is useful for addressing the question we have asked here, about where values come from and how they can be justified. The most important point to grasp h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Values and their place in educational leadership
• 2 Educational aims and moral purpose
• 3 The individual leader
• 4 Vision in education
• 5 School ethos and culture
• 6 Community and democracy
• References
• Index