Some Helpful Definitions and Distinctions


As one of the first tasks ahead of us is to redefine school leadership, it makes sense that we should first define leadership as it will be discussed in this and future posts. In the online report that I referenced in the previous post, Improving School Leadership Volume 1: Policy and Practice, leadership is process of “intentional influence.” To start with, I’d like to clarify that in this report, and for our purposes, there is a distinction between leadership, management, and administration. Dimmock (1999) is credited with the following quote, which I tried desperately to rephrase, but could just not succinctly capture the sentiment (so, please forgive the long quote):
Irrespective of how these terms are defined, school leaders experience difficulty
in deciding the balance between higher order tasks designed to improve staff,
student and school performance (leadership), routine maintenance of present
operations (management) and lower order duties (administration). (Pont, Nusche, and Moorman, 2008, qtd. on p. 20)
Addressing all three areas will be necessary for successful school leadership, but we will focus on those “higher order tasks designed to improve staff, student, and school performance” when we discuss leadership in this blog.

“Principalship” is defined as the traditional administrative model where the principal is largely responsible for running the school alone. And what I call “distributed leadership” is what the authors of this report see as simply, “leadership.” Rather than merely managing and maintaining systems that are already in place (management), leadership involves guiding and influencing people’s behaviors and motivations to improve performance. In the case of school leadership, this improvement is shown in student performance and in their acquisition of skills needed for the workforce. School leadership can include a wide variety of roles and titles, including principal, assistant principal, leadership teams, school boards, parent/student groups, and school staff that has been delegated with leadership tasks.

Another distinction which I feel is important to discuss before we redefine leadership is one that Pont, Nusche, and Moorman make between leadership and instructional leadership. Leadership has less to do with management and administration (as mentioned above) and more to do with building and maintaining school vision; with creating and supporting a climate of learning. While instructional leadership includes “monitoring and evaluating teacher performance, conducting and arranging for mentoring and coaching, planning teacher professional development and orchestrating teamwork and cooperative instruction.” (Pont, Nusche, and Moorman, 2008, p.28). These duties can and should be shared with the entire school. Teachers should have input in how these things are implemented; they should be invested in the school’s vision and the climate in which their students are learning. They should plan and deliver professional development to share their own expertise. They should be on leadership teams to collaborate and plan for the good of the school. They should, but aren’t.
So, how do we make it happen? How do we move from principalship to leadership? How do we get the community and staff to buy into a new model? In the next few posts, I will attempt to answer these questions and will talk more about what this model would look like at my school.

Works Cited
Pont, B., Nusche, D., & Moorman, H. (2008) Improving School Leadership Volume One: Policy  and Practice. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/education/school/44374889.pdf

Dimmock, C. (1999), “Principals and school restructuring: conceptualising challenges as
dilemmas”, Journal of Educational Administration, 37 (5), 441-462.

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