Preparation and Development of School Leaders in Africa

Pontso Moorosi, Tony Bush, Pontso Moorosi, Tony Bush

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350081161
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Éducation
• Categoría: Éducation comparative

The book is based on African research and reviews on school leadership preparation and development, taking stock of where the field is in this geographical region and what lies ahead. The exclusive focus on sub-Saharan African countries is driven by the desire to foreground African experiences, highlighting gaps and asking critical questions about contextually relevant models of leadership that can drive towards improved educational outcomes for African children. The countries explored include Botswana, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania. Written by a collective of seasoned researchers with extensive experience in the field and on the continent, this volume is timely, as the field is in need of serious political attention. For these reasons, the book is an important resource for policy-makers, school leaders and other practitioners, students, educators of school leadership preparation programmes as well as researchers in the field on the continent and the diaspora.

1

Introduction and Setting the Scene

Pontso Moorosi

Introduction

Leadership development and specific preparation for school leadership represents a rapidly growing body of literature and has been of significant interest for scholars in the field for decades. This aspect of the field is concerned with the readiness of those who take up leadership positions and the level of professional development support while in office. Tony Bush has consistently argued over the years that the journey from teaching to leading is ‘an incremental process, which generally involves the gradual substitution of leadership and management activities for classroom teaching’ (Bush, Bell and Middlewood, 2010: 7). An even more compelling case is made in Bush (2018), where he posits that headship is a specific occupation requiring specific preparation in view of the increasing complexity of the demands facing school leaders in recent years. Thus, the preparation and development of school leaders has become an important issue for scholars in the wake of the now widely accepted recognition of leadership as a very significant aspect (second to classroom teaching) in influencing and shaping students’ learning outcomes and for leadership succession. Accordingly, Leithwood, Harris and Hopkins (2008: 29) asserted that ‘unplanned headteacher succession is one of the most common sources of schools’ failure to progress, in spite of what teachers might do’.

Within many of the most advanced and developed education systems, the preparation of school leaders is typically discerned by a certificated programme of training, usually undergone by those aspiring for headship in advance of taking office. In these contexts, research primarily focuses on the nature and scope of preparation programmes, processes of recruitment and selection of participants of leadership development programmes, content and providers of training programmes and the extent to which these programmes lead to improved learning outcomes for schools. However, it has become evident over the years that this preparatory training is not a universal phenomenon and does not receive the same level of priority in other parts of the world. In some contexts, no training is provided or is provided long after incumbents have taken office, in which case the retrospective training becomes part of induction and/or ongoing professional development. In such contexts, research ought to be asking different questions that aim to unearth, understand and develop the actual practices that school leaders go through to develop skills, knowledge and dispositions that give them the confidence to lead and manage schools. This remains a gap in the literature, and this book is intended to illuminate some of those experiences.

As the chapters in this volume demonstrate, in many African countries, formal preparation training for school leadership is not a priority. However, the volume is intended to showcase other ways in which school leaders in Africa have been, and continue to be, prepared for positions of leadership, despite the absence of formal preparatory training. The book also highlights some of the experiences that shape professional development for school leaders, which are equally important in ensuring that the latter keep up with the demands of the office and provide improved learning outcomes for students. This introductory chapter sets the scene for the rest of the book, providing a conceptual background to the field and introducing key concepts central to the book. It summarizes key developments in the field and raises questions for both preparation and development research, particularly as understood, practised and experienced in the African context. The chapter ends with an overview that foreshadows the rest of the chapters in the book and highlights some good practices.

Understanding school leadership preparation and development

School leadership preparation has often been understood in the context of formal programmes that help individuals to become ready for the principalship and other leadership positions. Although school leadership entails a collective of leaders and the process of leading, both processes of preparation and development often involve individual leaders. Additionally, although school leaders and school leadership include all leaders at different levels, preparation is often understood and used to refer to preparation for school principalship or headship, while leadership development involves the advancement of those already in the headship. In earlier work, Moorosi and Bush (2011) drew a distinction between preparation and development, wherein the former was understood to be pre-principalship training normally undertaken before the assumption of duty, while the latter has more to do with post-appointment professional development that includes both induction and ongoing professional development. In addition to training, principalship preparation would also entail middle-leadership experiences through positions occupied before one is finally appointed as a school principal. However, those who are not en route to headship are often left out of the preparation programmes, and those who are not in headship do not have many opportunities to attend leadership development programmes.

In this volume, we adopt a broad understanding of leadership development as one that advances the capacity of a collective of leaders and teachers, including those teachers who are not holding managerial roles. We also define school leaders as those playing a role in leadership and management activities in schools, whether or not they are in formal managerial positions. This includes school principals, deputy principals, heads of departments and teachers. We acknowledge that school governors could, in some contexts, be broadly placed within this category, given the breadth of their responsibilities and their significance to the overall functioning of a school, particularly in the context of site-based management. However, school governance research has remained an independent sub-field, albeit complicated and under-researched. Our notion of school leaders in this chapter and in the rest of the book does not include school governors and learners.

In understanding the preparation and development of school leaders, a further distinction has often been made between the concepts of leadership and management. Here, the argument is that preparatory programmes focus more on knowledge, skills and dispositions that enhance performance for managerial roles rather than leadership roles. The latter should focus more on enabling different groups of people within an organization to work together more meaningfully towards change and the achievement of goals, regardless of whether they are holding managerial positions or not. We acknowledge these debates over leadership and management as distinct but interrelated processes by accepting the use of both terms depending on different contexts. For example, in Ebot-Ashu’s chapter on Cameroon, the use of management is stronger than leadership, while Mestry uses leadership in the South African context, suggesting that leadership has now been fully embraced. Thus, for the purposes of this volume, ‘leadership development’ is used to refer to knowledge, skills and dispositions that enhance both management and leadership performance.

A further distinction is also made between developing a ‘leader’ (individual) and ‘leadership’ (collective). Bush (2008) argues that although the notion of ‘leadership development’ is often used in contrast to ‘leader development’, the focus usually remains on developing leaders as individuals. The argument is that, because of its collective nature, leadership development speaks more closely to school improvement and hence needs to be given more attention. Therefore, in this chapter and generally throughout the volume, leadership preparation and development is referred to in both individual and collective terms.

As many of the chapters in this volume show, most preparation for principalship is for individuals, with training (where it happens) occurring as induction. However, in a more recent analysis of school leadership socialization, Moorosi and Grant (2018) problematized the distinction between preparation and development, arguing that the lack of a clear-cut boundary renders the distinction problematic. In this understanding, a confusion arises where principals are appointed into post with no specific preparation. In this case, professional socialization, which is often defined as the acquisition of new knowledge and skills – usually prior to role acquisition and incorporating preparation training – is seen as overlapping with organizational socialization, which usually incorporates induction after role acquisition as part of leadership development. Thus, in view of these contested issues, the use of ‘leadership preparation’ and ‘development’ in this volume denotes a field of research that covers some or all the aspects referred to above and does not necessarily indicate a differentiation between the concepts.

The global context for and background to leadership preparation and development

The earliest work on school leadership preparation and development research dates back to the late nineteenth century in the United States, when school leadership as we now know it was referred to as mere supervision and the school principalship role was limited to (financial) planning, coordination and public relations, as opposed to more instruction-focused leadership (Murphy, 1998). Murphy’s analysis shows that the preparation of school principals in the United States has been linked to university teaching from the 1960s, when different states required formal coursework in educational leadership for principalship positions, leading to higher numbers of school principals and superintendents embarking on university training for their administrative preparation. According to Murphy (1998: 365), the establishment of the University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA) in 1956 fell within a period of rapid growth of the field of educational administration, marking a significant milestone that ‘helped shaped the evolving conceptions’ of school leadership as a field of study, leading to a high number of doctoral degrees. Brundrett (2001) argues that centring school leadership preparation in university programmes ensured an intellectually sophisticated approach to school leadership training which embedded academic critique from the get go. Consequently, research became central to school leadership preparation and open to a range of analyses, including the significant work of Greenfield (1985), which critically looked into the socialization processes of being and becoming a school principal. Greenfield scrutinized principalship role learning among teacher aspirants for the principalship and its impact on actual readiness.

In the United Kingdom, the focus on leadership preparation and development pretty much followed the US model (Bush, 1999; Brundrett, 2001). Brundrett (2001) states that programmes offering systematic preparatory training and development opportunities for senior teaching staff in schools in England were only initiated in the 1960s, followed by the establishment of researcher chairs in educational management in the 1970s. To this end, an important early work on educational management development (as it was referred to when the field started) was by Glatter (1972), following what has been famously known as the Plowden Report of 1967, which basically highlighted the inadequacy of the training programmes that were meant to prepare prospective heads and deputy heads for their roles (Brundrett, 2001). Glatter’s (1972) initial work started looked into how school managers were developed and began to question the responsiveness of the then models to the needs of school management. However, Brundrett (2001) indicates that the period before 1980 was characterized by inconsistencies and lack of coherent structure at national level. Significantly, the English approach to school leadership training and development (as opposed to the US one) was characterized by bureaucratic interjections to the national programme that arrogated training to a competency-based model at the expense of academic critique that the US model enjoyed.

Although these early works focused more on processes of individual school leaders’ preparation through university-led programmes as well as leaders’ socialization within the school context, and less on the complexity of the interplay between the different agents involved in the socialization of school principals (as does more recent research), they kick-started a significant debate that shaped the current thinking around the preparation and development of school leaders, not only in the global north but also in the rest of the world. Significantly, they began to highlight the need for more responsive models of leadership preparation and development in view of the shifting social climate, technological advances and contextual challenges...