Mapping Leadership

The Tasks that Matter for Improving Teaching and Learning in Schools

Richard Halverson, Carolyn Kelley

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781118711576
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

Drawing on twenty years of research in school effectiveness, this book presents a distributed model of task-based school leadership that leads to continuous school improvement. The book outlines the tasks school leadership teams must focus on to improve teaching and learning, grouped into the following five domains:

• Focus on Learning
• Monitoring Teaching and Learning
• Building Nested Learning Communities
• Acquiring and Allocating Resources
• Maintaining a Safe and Effective Learning Environment

Recognizing that the principal is a single actor in a complex web of activity influencing student learning, the focus is not only on the principal's role but on a range of leadership and instructional practices to be shared across the leadership team (including APs, counselors, teachers, and support personnel). These tasks, organized into 21 subdomains, have been demonstrated through extensive research to contribute to improved student learning.

1
Distributed Leadership in Action

THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT YOU KNOW GOOD LEADERSHIP WHEN YOU SEE IT. The energy in great schools is so palpable that you can feel it the minute you walk into the school.

Throughout our careers, we have worked to understand and capture the dynamics of great school leadership. Having taught in a top‐ranked educational leadership preparation program for over 20 years, we have seen many changes in public education, policy, and the expectations of leaders. One of the most exciting and energizing experiences we have had is working in schools with great leaders who strengthen educator capacity and improve learning opportunities for children. We know what creates that energy and what school leaders can do to create the conditions for students, teachers, parents, and staff to engage.

In response to the question, “Who leads?” you might say the principal is the formal, designated leader of the school. After all, the principal is responsible for establishing direction, developing people, and building the capacity of the school organization.¹ The principal sets the tone and ultimately is responsible for the success or failure of the school. A focus on the leadership of the principal is important because a strong principal is critical to the long‐term success of the school.

But focusing narrowly on the principal as the leader of the school ignores the many important contributions of others to the nuanced tapestry of leadership that occurs throughout every school day. Consider this sampling from a day in the life of Truman High School:

• 7:00–7:45 a.m.: The leadership team meets to work on restructuring the school day to create time for teacher teams to collaborate around student work and problems of practice.
• 7:50–8:00 a.m.: A student confronts one of his peers in the hallway before class and prevents him from bullying another student.
• 8:00–8:05 a.m.: In morning announcements, the principal welcomes the school community and elicits feelings of school pride as she reminds them what it means to be a Truman Wildcat!
• 10:00–11:00 a.m.: The math department chair engages math teachers in an examination of data showing that Truman students who fail freshman math are 80 percent less likely to graduate compared to other students. The team plans a strategy to better support students. They agree to examine the data further and determine what areas of freshman math trip up these students the most.
• 12:00–12:45 p.m.: A paraprofessional works through lunch to help a student struggling in Spanish class.
• 2:00–2:45 p.m.: A special educator coteaches with the freshman English teacher to ensure that all students can master the core learning outcomes for the course. They plan to share their experiences and mentor other teacher teams during upcoming staff development time.
• 3:45–4:30 p.m.: The night janitor comes in early to work with the art teacher to clean up a messy student project designed to spark student creativity and expression.
• 7:00–8:30 p.m.: The choir director supervises a student rehearsal of The Wiz as part of her commitment to creating a welcoming space to engage and support students.

Large and small, these and many other regular acts of leadership contribute to shaping Truman's culture of learning.

Understanding the kind of leadership needed in today's educational environment means thinking in a new way about leaders and leadership. Obviously the principal plays a critical leadership role in the school, but the principal's leadership works by engaging and building leadership capacity throughout the school. In other words, the work of leadership is distributed across educators and through tasks that shape the everyday practices of teaching and learning.

LEADERSHIP AND SPAN OF CONTROL

An interesting difference between schools and businesses is that in schools, the span of control—the number of employees a single supervisor oversees—is about three times what it is in business. In business today, a typical manager oversees about 10 employees. But in an average elementary school, one leader oversees 33 employees.² The span of control is even larger in secondary schools.

In the past, this organizational design wasn't a major problem because leaders were expected to hire good teachers and let them do their jobs. Teachers were considered to be professionals who operated largely on their own. Expectations of teacher autonomy led school leaders to adopt loose, compliance‐based practices of supervision and left professional development to the interests of teachers. Teachers taught, and the responsibility—and the consequences—for learning fell on students.

But an interesting shift occurred with implementation of No Child Left Behind in 2002. This law changed the expectations of schools and school leaders. The law required that over a ten‐year period, each succeeding class of students needed to produce at higher and higher levels as measured by standardized test scores. The requirement that schools continuously improve scores over time meant that leaders had to continuously build the skills of educators to produce higher and higher levels of achievement. Leaders could no longer simply control hiring and firing; now they were responsible for improving the ability of educators to refine their practices in order to improve outcomes.

Meanwhile, the span of control didn't get any smaller. In support of these improvement expectations, policymakers adopted new curriculum standards, student assessments, evaluation systems, new approaches to special education, and new approaches to student behavior management. These policies provided guidance and resources for schools to improve, but they also required significant time to reevaluate current practices and consider how to best add these new approaches to the daily work of schools.

Even under the old management model, researchers found that principals' days were packed with a series of brief, fragmented interactions with students, parents, teachers, staff, and community members.³ The new responsibilities for teacher development come on top of managing campus safety, building and grounds, scheduling, public appearances, budget and finance, welcoming visitors, and building a positive climate. Being the principal of a high school is like being a CEO or a mayor of a medium‐sized city.

While the federal No Child Left Behind Act has been replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act, the changes in expectations of schools and school leaders ushered in by No Child Left Behind remain. At the core of the new expectations for school leadership is that leaders can help to improve teaching and learning. Teaching is a complex and uncertain skill. A principal can readily manage the basics of teaching—making sure teachers are in the classroom, on task, maintaining order, covering relevant material, and meeting district or state curriculum and safety requirements. But being responsible for moving teaching practice to the next level requires more than passing through a classroom to make sure everything is all right. It requires intensive engagement with data to understand the dynamics of teaching and learning in the classroom, and making sometimes seemingly small shifts in teaching practice to move learning forward. Most important, it means having the ability to see when teaching is working, when it is not, and knowing what to do to help teachers and learners improve.

LEADER OF LEADERS

In the past, we have thought about leadership as a relationship between leaders and followers. It was the responsibility of the leader to lead and the follower to follow. But we have begun to think about leadership differently. Leadership is not about the relationship between leaders and followers, but the relationship between coleaders and their work.

Schools are service organizations. Anyone who works in a service organization can tell you that the face of the organization is the face of every individual in that organization. When we walk into the bank and talk to the bank teller, he or she is representing the face of that bank. Similarly, when a student has an experience with a teacher in the classroom, that teacher is the face of the school. Because each individual plays such an important role in carrying out the work of the organization, it is important to get everyone on the same page, with the same goals, and the same understandings of how to respond in ways that will move the organization forward. This is a major leadership task for managers in service organizations.

In carrying out the goals of the organization, leadership acts occur all the time and throughout the school. They are carried out by the custodian who makes a connection with a shy student. They are carried out by the school secretary who works with a student to get a message to her parents so she can stay late after school to finish a test. They are carried out by the teacher who seeks feedback and support from other teachers to help him better support student learning. And they are carried out by the student who stands up to confront his peers about a racist remark.

Understanding leadership in this way draws attention away from the role of the leader to the practices that need to be carried out for the school to be effective. It means that the principal doesn't have to have his or her hand in everything that happens in the school. Instead, the principal's role shifts to creating supporting structures and expectations so that many individuals can stand up and take responsibility for carrying out the critical leadership tasks of the school. Mapping leadership means describing how leadership is directed and shared across an organization and guiding the work necessary for effective practice.

DISTRIBUTED LEADERSHIP IN ACTION

The model that principals alone lead schools is outmoded and increasingly irrelevant. Yet many of our ideas to support and evaluate school leadership are still focused on the principal. We need new ways of thinking that take the shared and structural nature of school leadership into account. Distributed leadership theory provides a model for us to map school leadership practice.

Distributed leadership theory began in the late 1990s as a way to think about leadership as a set of tasks directed, shared, and enacted across the school organization. It was initially shaped by pioneering work in distributed cognition. The traditions of cognitive psychology emphasized that understanding thinking depended on studying what went on in the heads of actors. Distributed cognition researchers felt that thinking and acting unfolded in interaction with others and with the environment, and that to think about cognition in terms of the individual alone missed the reality of how cognition unfolds in the world.

In his book Cognition in the Wild, Edwin Hutchins analyzed how navigators pilot ships.⁴ A central concept in distributed cognition theory is the task, a unit of work that organizes the efforts of actors and is supported (or constrained) by the context of action. While a task can be a novel response to an emergent situation, most tasks are repeated in ways that make work familiar to actors. Over time, repeated tasks help actors form routines that guide action. Learning these routines helps new actors become familiar with how to act and think. For expert actors, routines become the critical resource for how to deal with novelty. Routines become the standard operating procedures for navigational teams to handle ordinary events and react effectively to the extraordinary. Over time, the network of routines forms the organizational culture. The culture becomes a self‐defining, and self‐preserving, force that bends new initiatives and new actors to expected traditions of the way things are done.

Observing ship navigation led Hutchins to describe two key aspects of how tasks unfold in real work. First, navigation is a social act that involves sharing knowledge through the division of tasks and routines with others. The social...