Leading Professional Practice in Education

Christine Wise, Marion Cartwright, Pete Bradshaw

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781446253342, 9781446253335
• eBook ISBN: 9781446268667
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

This volume provides an overview of key contemporary themes in educational leadership. It focuses on developing professional capacity, organisation improvement and the implementation of change, looking at theoretical frameworks and concepts, recent research studies and case examples of effective practice.

The book covers:

- leading learning and learner leadership

- change processes and distributed leadership

- leading professional development for educational contexts.

Designed to encourage critical analysis and debate, this volume will be a useful resource for postgraduate and professional development courses in educational leadership and for practitioners. It is a companion to Educational Leadership: Context, Strategy and Collaboration, also published by Sage.

Part 1

Leading Learners and Learner Leadership

Introduction

Pete Bradshaw

 

In this first part of the Reader issues of the inter-relationship between leadership and learning are considered. While this may seem to be a straightforward statement of a relationship between two concepts – leadership and learning – the definitions and scope of each of these terms are subject to dispute. Thus, what could, at first, seem to be a simple discussion is, in fact, problematic. What is meant by leadership in this context? Who, indeed, are the leaders – or perhaps, more accurately, where is leadership being shown and how might we recognise it? On the other hand, what is meant by learning? Or more precisely, what is being learnt and who is learning?

In the first chapter, Sue Swaffield and John MacBeath outline a set of principles for practice in the connection of leadership and learning, and stress the importance of ‘leadership for learning’. The contested nature of these concepts is discussed and new frames proposed for each. Just as leadership is multi-faceted, learning is discussed as a concept located in a number of loci – student, professional, school and system. Central to the relationship, Swaffield and MacBeath argue, is ‘agency’. The connections between leaders and learners, and between leadership and learning, are dynamic, with individuals acting as agents and impacting on both sides of the relationship.

Kenneth Leithwood (Chapter 2) continues the theme of the connections between leadership and learning – focusing especially on student learning. He identifies four ‘paths’ for the discussion of the relationship between leadership practices and student learning, and the impact of the former on the latter. Instructional leadership is to the fore here but the difficulties in defining concepts are acknowledged. The elegance of the model should not obscure the complexities underlying it. The chapter concludes with a view of how leadership practices might ‘improve’ learning and what those practices might be. The notion of ‘improvement’ here is a moot point which will need to be contextualised by the reader for her own situation.

In Chapter 3, Alma Harris considers the relationship between leadership, the organisation and its development, and how this relationship plays out in schools. Here leadership is firmly distributed – it is not seen to reside in one individual or only in those with specific job roles. Rather it is seen in the interactions between individuals, in the collaboration between them and in the coming to a shared understanding of the needs of developing organisations. Harris then considers each of these in the context of teacher leadership and its impact on the school, the teacher and the student, arguing that there is greater empirical evidence for a positive impact of leadership on teacher behaviours than on student outcomes. The chapter concludes with a coda containing a set of ways in which teacher leadership can be developed.

Chapter 4 continues and develops the theme of the impact of leadership on students. Viviane Robinson and others consider the typology of leadership and the differential effects of each type on students’ academic and non-academic outcomes. A meta-analysis of 27 studies from a range of international contexts is presented. Key dimensions for each are the type of leadership being demonstrated, the measures of leadership and the types of outcome. When comparing this to Harris’s overview in Chapter 3, the ways in which impact on outcomes is ‘measured’ are striking. The typology of measures offered by Robinson and her colleagues provides a framework for making assertions about the impact of leadership on outcomes.

Moving to a more tightly focused research study in Chapter 5, Pamela Hallam and colleagues take just two contexts and one dimension of leadership – that of ‘trust’. The behaviours of educational leaders – the authors use the word administrators reflecting the locus of the study – in the USA and Uganda are compared. A taxonomy of ‘competences’ is derived and similarities and differences between the ‘actions’ of two sets of school leaders are discussed. The reader is invited to consider how these ‘competences’ and ‘actions’ apply to others in education, both in terms of different roles and contexts.

In Chapter 6, Pat Thomson then brings us back to the learner. While we have been considering leadership and learning, the notion of learners and the roles that they have in the dynamic of leadership through change is as contested as that of what makes for a leader. Here Thomson deals with this by a consideration of what is meant by learner ‘voice’. This is looked at from a critical standpoint and a ‘recuperation’ of it is proposed, placing it in the nexus of communication and action between, and with, other actors in the educational system.

Mark Priestley, in Chapter 7, brings us a study of how schools, and teachers, deal with curriculum change. The concept of change is more fully dealt with in Part 2 of this book, but this chapter presents case studies of two schools in Scotland that have very different approaches, and resultant leadership actions, in dealing with a change that came from a national policy review.

1

Leadership for Learning

Sue Swaffield and John MacBeath

‘Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other’

‘Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.’ So wrote John F. Kennedy in a speech to be delivered in Dallas on what turned out to be a fateful day in November 1963. But how are leadership and learning indispensable to each other? What is the nature of the relationship?

With a little thought, a number of ‘common sense’ connections between leadership and learning come to mind. Leaders need to learn and leaders learn as they lead. Leadership of others involves being first able to lead oneself, a crucial premise of self-directed learning. Leadership and learning also share common skills, such as problem solving, reflection, and acting on experience. In educational organisations such as schools, leadership is needed to promote learning. In schools, learning should be the prime concern of all those who exercise leadership, and learning should both set the agenda and be the agenda for leadership. Leadership and learning are mutually embedded, so that as we learn we become more confident in sharing with, and leading, others. And as we lead we continuously reflect on, and enhance, our learning. Guy Claxton has suggested the new ‘four Rs’ of learning: resilience, resourcefulness, reflectiveness and reciprocity (Claxton, 2002). These dispositions are all as relevant to leadership as they are to learning, both of which are as much a matter of character as of skill. In talking about learning Claxton says:

Being able to stay calm, focused and engaged when you don’t know what to do is not merely a matter of technical training … Of course learning capacity is partly a matter of skill. But we also need a richer vocabulary that includes words like attitudes, dispositions, qualities, values, emotional tolerances, habits of mind. (Claxton, 2006: 4)

The same may be said of leadership. When thinking about the relationship between leadership and learning it is possible to start with either concept, and then work towards the other. For example, we may start with leadership, scrutinising leadership roles and activities for their learning content. Or we may start by focusing on learning, which raises questions about forms of activity and the creation and sharing of knowledge. In turn this raises questions as to responsibility, focus of initiative, and about individual and shared leadership.

Little words make a difference

In education we seem to have a penchant for joining two big words with a variety of little ones. So, for example, ‘teaching and learning’ are used to refer to planned activity in the classroom. ‘Coaching and mentoring’ are often presented as conjoined twins or even a single entity, perhaps indicating a lack of clarity about their differences. Assessment of learning, for learning and as learning are three importantly distinctive concepts, where the little conjunction renders different meanings (Harlen, 2006; Earl, 2003).

So too can leadership and learning be joined by a variety of linguistic connectives, for example leadership and, of, as learning, or leadership by, with, from learning. Each connecting word creates a different phrase, some of which may be familiar, while others may surprise us into new insights. The focus of this chapter is leadership for learning.

Another ingredient in the rich leadership soup?

How we construe ‘leadership for learning’ depends on our beliefs and understandings about leadership and about learning. If our conception of leadership is one that resides in a leader, and if we believe that knowledge is transmitted or delivered from teacher to pupil, then leadership for learning is about the school leader ensuring that the pupil learns what the teacher teaches. This appears to be implicit in the American use of ‘instructional leadership’, a mindset that may encompass the view that valued learning is measured by testing pupils and assumed to be a telling indicator of teachers’ effectiveness. Leaders may be encouraged to act on this information, perhaps by awarding incentives and rewards for what is deemed to be ‘successful’ teaching and learning and taking remedial action when required. Another interpretation casts leaders as experts in fostering learning, proud of their hands-on expertise and deep pedagogic understanding. Others again concentrate more on putting in place structures and support for colleagues so that heads of department and team leaders take the direct lead in teaching and learning, while the principals prioritise shielding teachers from distractions to their focus on pupils’ learning.

Leadership for learning viewed in this way is another category in the typology or ‘alphabet soup’ of leadership (Leithwood et al.,1999; MacBeath, 2003, 2004). It perhaps most closely resembles ‘learning-centred leadership’, resonates with ‘principle-centred leadership’ and ‘moral leadership’, and has similarities with ‘instructional leadership’ and ‘transformational leadership’ (Knapp et al., 2003; Covey, 1990; Sergiovanni, 1992; Southworth, 2002; Hallinger, 1992).

There are, of course, differences among these various forms of leadership (otherwise the diverse labels would not have been coined), but a number of common threads among them may be discerned. They are all concerned with learning, primarily of pupils, but also of teachers and other members of the community whose continuous learning is in the service of student learning. There is a focus on process as well as outcomes, and a commitment to practice that reflects values such as trust and respect. Commitment, obligations and duties arise from individuals’ beliefs as well as from professional and community ideals. Building collaborative cultures and increasing capacity and capital also figure large.

Despite a wealth of literature and a proliferation of adjectival prefixes, we believed there was more to understand about the nature of the links between leadership and learning. We saw leadership for learning not as an additional model of leadership competing for attention with a plethora of alternatives but as qualitatively different from other models. We hope to demonstrate that in the rest of this chapter.

Making the connections: an unfinished business

While the connections between leadership and learning may seem a matter of simple common sense and are taken as a given by policy makers, researchers will remain dissatisfied until they are able to identify an empirical validation of the inter-connections. The quest for solid empirical ground has generated a considerable body of studies and meta studies over the last decade (for example, Bell et al., 2003; Witziers et al., 2003; Leithwood et al., 2004) yet without a definitive conclusion, as is evident from the subtitle Witziers et al. give to their paper: ‘the elusive search for an association’. On the basis of her own extensive review Levačić concludes:

Given the vast literature on educational leadership and management and the presumption of policy-makers that the quality of educational leadership affects student outcomes, the actual evidence for a causal relationship is relatively sparse. (Levačić, 2005: 198)

The multiplicity of studies over recent years, nonetheless, make widely differing claims as to the leadership ‘effect’. One of these is Viviane Robinson’s 2007 metastudy which identified 26 pieces of research as meeting the empirical criteria for inclusion. She identified ‘effect sizes’ in the 0.3 to 0.4 range, which she described as ‘moderately educationally significant’ (Robinson, 2007: 9). She concluded, however:

… these connections need to be substantially strengthened if leadership literature is to deliver more reliable and more useful insights into the particular leadership practices that create the conditions that enable teachers to make a bigger difference to their students. (Robinson, 2007: 22)

The Australian literature is rich with studies. Reviewing these, Mulford (2008) finds a fairly strong body of consensus among them, confirming the indirect relationship of leadership to outcomes, identifying ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Editors
• Introduction
• Part 1: Leading Learners and Learner Leadership
• Introduction
• 1 Leadership for Learning
• 2 Leadership and Student Learning: What Works and How
• 3 Teacher Leadership and Organizational Development
• 4 The Impact of Leadership on Student Outcomes: An Analysis of the Differential Effects of Leadership Types
• 5 Trust and Educational Leadership: Comparing the Development and Role of Trust between US and Ugandan School Administrators
• 6 Coming to Terms with ‘Voice’
• 7 Schools, Teachers, and Curriculum Change: A Balancing Act?
• Part 2: Working as a Change Agent
• Introduction
• 8 Educational Change: Implementation and Continuation
• 9 Teaching and the Change Wars: The Professionalism Hypothesis
• 10 School Leadership in an Age of Accountability: Tensions between Managerial and Professional Accountability
• 11 Distributing Leadership to Improve Outcomes for Students
• 12 Change from the Middle? Exploring Middle Manager Strategic and Sensemaking Agency in Public Services
• 13 Managing Resources to Support Learning
• Part 3: Leading Professional Development
• Introduction
• 14 From Simplicism to Complexity in Leadership Identity and Preparation: Exploring the Lineage and Dark Secrets
• 15 Revisiting Informal and Incidental Learning as a Vehicle for Professional Learning and Development
• 16 Leading Professional Learning Communities
• 17 Leadership Development
• 18 Mentoring and Coaching Programs for the Professional Development of School Leaders
• 19 Myriad Professional Identities: The Challenge for Leading Professional Development in the Further Education Context?
• Conclusion
• Index