Reach the Highest Standard in Professional Learning

Leadership

Karen Seashore Louis, Shirley M. Hord, Valerie von Frank

• Editore: Corwin
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781452292120
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Éducation
• Categoria: Développement professionnel

Make your school a place where professional learning thrives This volume, part of Learning Forward’s series on its seven Standards for Professional Learning, shows school leaders how to orchestrate a learning environment that empowers teachers to take charge of their own development. Features include:

• An original essay by Karen Seashore Louis on creating a school culture where all adults are part of the enterprise of continuous learning
• Strategies, tools, and examples focused on the leader’s role in promoting professional learning
• A case study of one district’s success in improving outcomes for students by building trust, developing collaborative capacity, and fostering leadership at all levels

Chapter One Leadership for Professional Learning Creating the Learning Organization

Karen Seashore Louis

Leadership: Professional learning that increases educator effectiveness and results for all students requires skillful leaders who develop capacity, advocate, and create support systems for professional learning. (Learning Forward, 2011)

Neither educators nor policy makers question the role of leadership in creating more effective schools. Even as we acknowledge that classroom teachers are the most important adults in a student’s life, we know that the teacher leaders, principals, and district staff members who stand behind them either enhance or diminish their ability to develop. The consequence of good leadership is the classroom magic that engages young people in their initial steps toward becoming successful, adaptive adults.

Recently much attention has been given to the larger question of whether the actions of school leaders can have any impact on the bottom line of student learning. While that question will receive some attention in this chapter, the primary focus is on how leaders and leadership affect the learning of other adults in the school. More particularly, the emphasis will be on the way in which school leaders can create a school culture in which all adults see themselves as part of the larger enterprise of continuous learning. Thus, the focus is on those who have responsibilities that include supporting adult professional learning in schools. This, book will not engage deeply with the nuts and bolts that are the critical emphasis of many of the standards for professional learning (Learning Forward, 2011). Instead, it will focus on understanding the pathways by which leaders orchestrate the learning environment, allowing teachers to take charge of their learning.

The chapter is organized around the main topics that are shown in Figure 1.1, which reworks a framework developed to create challenging college programs (Fink, 2013). The data I present draw on recent research about school leadership, including the work of my colleagues and me on a large national study. The topics include the following:

• Foundations: Assumptions underlying the Learning Forward standards and what leaders need to know about how their work affects teacher and student growth
• Integration: How the work of leaders helps to keep the school focused on professional development and learning that addresses significant areas of growth for a school
• The Human Dimension: What leaders do to foster professional communities that lead to organizational learning
• Caring: Why the emotional side of leadership is critical in creating a strong, learning adaptive school
• Learning How to Learn: A summary of the elements of a school culture that foster organization learning, with a focus on those that may require leader development

This volume and chapter are grounded in the assumption that all members of a school are responsible for learning and growing, but that administrators and teachers in formal leadership positions have a particular responsibility for creating the culture and structures that make adult learning a vibrant and visible component of their daily work. As is clear in the Standards for Professional Learning and related publications, learning communities (also known as professional communities and communities of practice) are the site for collaborative teacher learning. While these can often emerge spontaneously, when teachers or others who share an interest come together to share ideas, they are most often nurtured in schools and districts where leaders give priority to creating supportive conditions for engagement. What these are, and how they can be deliberately fostered, is what this and the other chapters in this book are about.

Figure 1.1 Leadership for Professional Learning Framework

Foundations

Leadership Is Important—in New Ways

Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.

—John F. Kennedy¹

It is hardly surprising that the leadership standard comes second to the foundational standard of learning communities in the 2011 version of the Standards for Professional Learning. We have known for a long time that principals and district administrators have a big impact on teachers’ experience of their work life. From Willard Waller’s pungent observations about teachers’ lives in high schools in the 1930s to Richard Ingersoll’s research documenting how principals contribute to high teacher turnover in less effective schools, we see that formal leaders are critical (Ingersoll, Hoxby, & Scrupski, 2004; Waller, 1932). The earliest efforts by the National Staff Development Council (now Learning Forward) to develop standards for professional development emphasized the role of leadership:

An essential element . . . is skillful leadership on the part of principals and district administrators. These leaders must help create community-wide consensus regarding a compelling vision that embodies high expectations for student learning, teaching, and staff development. In addition, they must be “keepers of the dream” who frequently remind everyone of the school’s values and core beliefs. (Killion, 1999, p. xi)

The Leader’s Job: New and Complex

Principals have always had responsibility for making sure that their schools are well managed, that student behavior is acceptable to teachers and other stakeholders, and that the “core technology” of teaching is insulated from disruption. According to Richard Rossmiller, this traditional perspective on a school leader’s responsibilities was hardly challenged (and was well-ensconced in most principal preparation programs) throughout the high-innovation years of the 1970s and ’80s (Rossmiller, 1992). Even today, when so many leadership scholars trumpet the need for transformational leadership, it is clear that a solid and effective approach to managing the school is an essential feature of what good administrators do to make teachers’ work easier—and is associated with improvements in student learning (Grissom & Loeb, 2011; Horng & Loeb, 2010).

Still, although the need to manage schools has persisted, the world of school administration has changed a great deal since the early 2000s. Principals are increasingly accountable for the quality of the student learning in the schools that they head, and (for the first time) district administrators have also been informed that they are responsible for the performance of the schools that they oversee. The urgency associated with school improvement has become a political reality in the United States (and other countries) with the initiation of public, comparable measures of student performance, and administrators (even more than teachers) are on the hot seat.

Since principals and district administrators can have direct impacts on only a few students, they have increasingly been urged to improve their schools by improving teaching. As Guskey notes, a rush to do this through formal mass professional development programs was a nonstarter: Too little was known at that time about what constitutes formal learning opportunities that woul...