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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