Finally, It All Comes Together

We have now reached the final post for this blog – the post where everything comes together and we are left with a clear picture of what distributed school leadership is and what is could look like. To recap some of the earlier posts, I work at a K-8 charter school, which operates differently than a public school. We do not have to follow the curriculum that the district schools follow, but we do participate in district and state standardized assessments. We must follow the Read Act and must provide special education services. We do not receive as much state money as public schools and unlike district schools, we need to budget for operating expenses and mortgage on our buildings and land. We do not answer to the same Board or Superintendent of Schools, but rather have a school board made up of community members and parents. We have an executive director (principal) who is retiring at the end of this year, and until very recently had an assistant principal, as well. An executive director at my school has responsibilities that fall into the same categories I discussed in the posts about redefining school leadership; supporting, evaluating, and developing teacher quality, setting learning objectives and implementing intelligent assessment systems, strategic use of resources and their alignment with pedagogical purposes, and taking school leadership beyond the school’s borders.

Thinking about these responsibilities and the resources available to us, I am going to use the set of principles for distributed leadership that are outlined in Improving School Leadership, Volume 1: Policy and Practice. These are five guidelines that lay the ground rules for distributed leadership:

1.       The purpose of leadership is the improvement of instructional practice, regardless of role.
2.       Instructional improvement requires continuous learning by all and distributed leadership needs to create an environment that views learning as a collective good.
3.       Leaders lead by exemplifying the values and behavior they want others to adopt.
4.       The roles and activities of leadership flow from the expertise required for learning and improvement, not from the formal dictates of the institution.
5.       The exercise of authority requires reciprocity of accountability and capacity.
(Elmore 2008 as quoted in Pont, Nusche, and Moorman, 2008)

If we, as a staff, are aware of and adhere to these guidelines, there should not be any room for push-back. It is understood that if a team is in place, the members are there for a reason – either they have the expertise or they have the initiative to improve instructional practice.

In my mind, I see the leadership responsibilities in our school being distributed as such: the principal, as the head of the school is responsible for managing the staff and other day-to-day operations in the school. They are there for parents, students, staff, community, and the board as needed. The principal will also responsible for evaluating teachers and their performance and for communicating with and through designated school leaders and teams. The principal should approach the board concerning incentive and compensation for those who participate in leadership teams. And the board should support providing leadership development and distributed leadership responsibilities.

I also believe we should have two “deputy principals” – these could even be teachers, ideally, one elementary and one middle school teacher, who have lightened teaching loads; one to act as a “dean of students” whose main responsibility is discipline and behavior issues (this may even include writing behavior plans, heading up a behavioral Response to Intervention (RTI) team, or serving as the 504 Coordinator). And the other to act as budget director or business manager. I think that a team of three “administrators” will ensure that there is plenty of representation when it comes to decisions being made that affect the entire school.

In addition to the administrative staff, I think there should be at minimum, a professional development (PD) team, a reading/math support team, an RTI team, and a community outreach team. These teams will be made up of teachers qualified in each area, but it will be understood that resources should not be limited by team members – for example, if the professional development team decides to have a PD on administering and interpreting Fountas & Pinnell Benchmark Assessments, they would be free to recruit anyone on staff that is an expert in F&P assessments. The reading/math support team would serve as a group of mentor teachers and reading/math specialists. They would be responsible for ensuring all staff has the support they need to feel confident teaching the content and curriculum. Since we already have a strong RTI team and system in place, there would not need to be too much adjustment. However, the community outreach team would be new and would likely need some guidance to even get it established. Without knowing exactly what their duties would be, they would be responsible for taking school leadership beyond the school’s borders – for strengthening the connection between learning skills (school) and applying them (community).

                There would, of course, have to be other teams that form as needs arise – like the school-wide policy situation that I talked about in my last post. The possibilities for teams are unimaginable as there is no telling what we will face in the next few years. However, if we, as a school, commit to a distributed leadership model, we will be able to handle whatever comes up. And, if we, as a school commit to being proactive and responsive, we will also be committed to improving our instructional practices and our school community.

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