Instructional Leadership

Thinking about..."Instructional Leadership":Creating the Conditions for a Professional Learning Community
The need for instructional leadership...
Conventional wisdom about schooling asserts the existence of an unambiguous positive correlation between the quality of teaching and learning in schools and the quality of leadership evidencing itself in schools. Parents and teachers as well as governmental officials, policymakers, and television pundits unanimously assert that the quality of school leadership significantly impacts student learning outcomes. The operative notion is that the quality of teaching and learning is largely dependent upon an individual or group that exercises supervisory responsibility for the technology of schooling, namely, curriculum, teaching, and learning.
Educational research does provide some evidence that supports the conventional wisdom, especially as researchers have identified the positive effects that instructional leaders have upon schooling outcomes. Summarizing the research, Murphy (1990) lists four practices that characterize effective instructional leaders. These women and men:
· develop a mission and goals and translate them into professional practice;
· manage the educational production function;
· promote an academic learning climate; and,
· develop a supportive work environment. (1990, p. 169)
There is a paradox, however. While both the conventional wisdom and educational research assert that instructional leadership correlates positively with quality teaching and learning, the sad fact is that most principals devote little time to supervising this absolutely crucial dimension of the schooling enterprise. One study reports that elementary school principals spend less than 2% of their time attending to their instructional leadership responsibilities (Howell, 1981, cited in Murphy, 1990, p. 165). In a second study, high schools fare only a little better as "...only 17% of principals' time and only 8% of the tasks on which they work deal with academic matters" (Martin & Willower, 1981, cited in Murphy, 1990, p. 165).
Surveying the research, it looks like principals have forgotten two important matters.
First: organizations are not the buildings and structured behavior that many people believe them to be. Rather, as Barnard (1986) noted decades ago, organizations are the consequence of a decision individuals make to cooperate and to communicate with one another in order to achieve a shared purpose. In school organizations, Barnard's insight mandates that educators must not only be willing and able to talk to and with one another. In addition, educators must open their doors to criticism and to suggestions from others if they are to grow (Lortie, 1975; McDonald, 1999).
Second: the "80/20" rule. That is, principals should spend 80% of their time attending to the technology of schooling (that is, curriculum, teaching, and learning matters) and the other 20% of their time attending to the more routine matters of school management. Were principals of the nation's elementary and secondary schools simply to reverse the 80/20 rule, Murphy's (1990) summary indicates that in many cases principals would be devoting more than double the amount of time they presently do to curriculum, teaching, and learning.
But, even if principals were to direct a greater proportion of their time to the tasks associated with providing instructional leadership, "the organizational context in which they work and the set of skills, beliefs, and expectations that they bring to their role" function as roadblocks to effective instructional leadership (Murphy, 1990, p. 181). Inadequate training and preparation to fulfill one's instructional leadership responsibilities abounds. Furthermore, having to attend to the host of pressing problems that confront principals from the very minute they enter the school each morning and leave it each evening, principals tend to view the problems associated with curriculum, teaching, and learning as less crucial, if only because teachers can attend to these matters while a principal "puts out the fires." Lastly, school district superintendents who place a premium on a principal's professionalism and successful building management also thwart principals from being able to devote significant amounts of time and energy on instructional leadership.
From an international perspective...
A study of English head teachers (principals) reported similar trends (Day, 2000).
In successful schools, teachers and staff members reported their head teachers are "values led," that is, they promote the values of care and equity within the school and its decision-making process. In addition, these head teachers are both people-centered and achievement-oriented as well as inward and outward facing. Lastly, these successful head teachers manage a number of ongoing tensions and dilemmas simultaneously.
What is interesting, however, are the eight tensions those head teachers report themselves having to contend with as they provide what their teachers and staff members identified as "successful" leadership for their schools. These tensions include:
1. leading versus managing;
2. program development versus maintenance;
3. autocracy versus autonomy;
4. personal time versus professional tasks;
5. teaching versus not teaching;
6. personnel development versus dismissal;
7. power over versus power with; and,
8. subcontracting versus mediating.
Summarizing these findings, Day asserts that values seem to be central to the exercise of successful instructional leadership because values challenge teachers to think more critically and, then, to consider how they might act upon these values as teachers think about how they might improve curriculum, teaching, and learning. Especially important to professional development, Day notes, is how head teachers---as instructional leaders---link together personal, professional, and organizational development in an overall effort to improve curriculum, teaching, and learning.
Focusing upon providing instructional leadership...
How might principals think about instructional leadership in a way that would enable them to overcome the professional, personal, and organizational roadblocks standing in their way?
Checkley (2000) responds to this question by arguing that rather than focusing solely upon teacher supervision and evaluation as the crucial tasks associated with providing instructional leadership, principals might consider instead how to encourage and promote teacher growth and development within their own ranks.
In a practical vein, Checkley suggests that principals begin by envisioning how they might engage teachers in sustained discourse whereby, as colleagues, teachers can define what student learning should look like and, furthermore, can identify instructional approaches that will support their vision. By getting teachers to be attentive to teaching and learning and to work together to improve both, principals foster the conditions through which teachers can specify instructional goals. In addition, rather than immerse themselves in the effort, principals can direct the overall effort by offering teachers the support, encouragement, and challenge they need as teachers collaborate together toward achieving more substantive goals.
But, engaging in professional discourse is only a first step.
To institutionalize this focus upon the technology of schooling, Checkley also asserts that principals and teachers need to learn how to collaborate with one another. By promoting a forum for professional discourse, principals in the role of instructional leader construct a school culture through which teachers redefine curriculum, teaching, and learning. They also learn to translate that definition into new classroom practices as they build relationships characterized by mutual trust, risk taking, and experimentation, all in a supportive and professionally challenging environment.
For Checkley, feedback---whether provided by a colleague or the principal---is a necessary element in institutionalizing a redefinition of curriculum, teaching, and learning. What is critical, however, is that the feedback provide teachers the "hard" (or "factual") data they need to understand whether and to what degree they are effectively engaging in changes that facilitate achieving their goals. In addition, feedback should be just that, namely, data which are "fed back" to teachers, data which indicate key areas where teachers might modify curriculum and classroom instruction before students fail. In this sense, data that are provided through post-observation feedback point out specific areas where teachers can make adjustments. In such a school culture, mistakes are not viewed as failures that teachers must rectify but as opportunities for teachers to learn about and to refine curriculum, teaching, and learning.
In these and so many other ways, principals function as instructional leaders. They promote a sustained focus on improving the technology of schooling. They build a school culture that emphasizes collegiality and professional discourse. They model for teachers the importance of trust, the willingness to listen, as well as offering and receiving feedback. These instructional leaders also celebrate the accomplishments and achievements of the teachers. Lastly, these instructional leaders help the members of the local community to experience, to celebrate, and to promote the school's success by providing the members of the local community with multiple opportunities to become meaningfully involved in the school.
Covering similar terrain, King (2002) offers instructional leaders three practical recommendations.
The first recommendation is that instructional leaders host twice monthly meetings of three hours duration each for teachers and administrators to discuss any gaps they may find in curriculum, teaching, and learning. The operative notion here is that instructional leaders are creating the condition for teachers and administrators to identify problems with the technology of education as a foundation for considering how, moving forward, educators might deal with the gaps they have identified.
The second recommendation is to invite outside experts to provide teachers and administrators an overview of the research about curriculum, teaching, and learning so that they can contextualize the situation in their school within a larger framework. Rather than allowing gaps to be perceived as simply "a problem we have caused," understanding how these gaps are related to large issues in society and culture can help teachers and administrators to blunt the sharp edge and to feel more comfortable in understanding what these gaps reveal. Once again, instructional leaders are creating the condition for teachers and administrators to come to grips with the challenges confronting them in a way that they can better deal with these challenges.
The third recommendation is to focus teachers more intently upon their work by organizing peer visits as well as data gathering. The issue here is not simply having teachers and administrators visit one another's classrooms to make observations. Neither is the issue for teachers and administrators to gather data to refute or to substantiate a gap. Instead, the issue here is for teachers and administrators to visit and gather data by focusing upon identified gaps with an awareness of the larger context from which these problems emerge. In this way, instructional leaders create the condition for teachers and administrators to develop a data base for benchmarking the current situation and, as teachers and administrators formulate and implement intervention strategies, to state performance strategies, to develop improvement plans, and to assess progress or lack thereof.
These three practical recommendations, King argues, communicate to teachers the instructional leader's focus upon professional development and, in particular, improving curriculum, teaching, and learning as well as using data to drive decision making as well as to hold teachers accountable for outcomes. These recommendations do not prescribe a litmus test, list of characteristics, or set of behaviors for educators; instead, they identify a series of responsible acts that can improve curriculum, teaching, and learning in an entire school community as that is evidenced in a variety of measures of student achievement. More importantly, as strategies shape professional goals, these three practical recommendations enable instructional leaders work productively with teachers and administrators to improve educational outcomes, to utilize limited resources well, to build a more professional culture, and to form a community of learners.
Importantly, these three recommendations do not posit a unitary approach to instructional leadership. Instead, King's recommendations allow the content of each recommendation to be specified by the school's idiosyncratic context so that teachers, utilizing data, may create the conditions for to learn about curriculum, teaching, and learning. In every context, then, instructional leaders are intent upon building what King calls "professional learning communities" (p. 62), namely, "an environment that fosters mutual cooperation, emotional support, and personal growth as educators work together to achieve what they cannot accomplish alone" (DuFour & Eaker, 1998, p. xii).
What all of this actually seeks to achieve is to build leadership density in schools as instructional leaders provide the conditions which facilitate the development of teachers as leaders in the areas of curriculum, learning, and teaching. As Barth (2001) notes, success in this endeavor positions teachers to make decisions in many areas that were once reserved to the principal. These include: choosing textbooks and instructional materials; shaping the curriculum; setting standards for student behavior; deciding whether students are tracked into special classrooms; designing professional development and in-service programs; setting promotion and retention policies; deciding school budgets; evaluating teacher performance; selecting new teachers; and, most significantly, selecting new administrators.
Thinking about instructional leadership...
Like other successful for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, good schools do not simply happen. Instead, what transpires in good schools functions to foster the achievement of the school's goals. In good schools, people, process, and technology---the individual parts---integrate in such a way that the synergy engendered by the integration of the parts creates more energy than the sum of the individual parts does. By means of contrast, in bad schools the individual parts do not integrate. For example, the people may be good while the process and technology lack. Whatever the configuration may be, in bad schools the lack of integration of the parts thwarts the achievement of school goals.
Instructional leadership, then, concerns the responsibilities that an individual accepts to see to it that the people, the process, and the technology of schooling---curriculum, teaching, and learning---deliver on their promise to form capable, adult citizens. Possessing a "super-vision" about how the individual parts can integrate and create a synergy of effects that enable people, process, and technology to work together in a way that achieves this vision (Sergiovanni & Starratt, 1988), instructional leaders focus inward by devoting a considerable amount of time (perhaps as much as 80%) in building a school culture characterized by professional discourse that is attentive to the issues of improving curriculum, by providing support and opportunities for the teachers' professional growth and development, and by engaging the members of the school community in democratic self-governance. These instructional leaders also look outward and beyond the school yard by inviting members of the local community to participate meaningfully in the school and to serve as its ombudsmen within the local community.
Obviously, instructional leadership is not exercised by one person but one person does create the conditions through which all teachers and administrators become more responsible for their professional learning and important role in sustaining school improvement. It seems that inquiry-based use of data is particularly crucial in this regard, especially as it guides decisions and subsequence practices.
This calls for a new type of instructional leader, namely, a "culture builder" who is dedicated to building "teacher leadership" (Barth 2001). This instructional leader is capable of constructing a shared vision with all the members of the school community, convenes opportunities for professional discourse and conversation among teachers and administrators, is insistent upon improving student learning, evokes and supports teacher learning, models and participates in collaborative processes, helps to pose questions, and facilitates dialogue that addresses the confounding issues educators experience in practice (Lambert, 2002). In sum, this new type of instructional leader is intent upon school-based educational reform by creating the conditions which build a professional learning community.
References
Barth, R. R. (2001, February). Teacher leader. Phi Delta Kappan, 82(6), 443-449.
Checkley, K. (2000, May). The contemporary principal: New skills for a new age. Education Update, 43(3), 1, 4-6, 8.
Day, C. (2000, April). Beyond transformational leadership. Educational Leadership, 57(7), 56-59.
DuFour, R., & Eaker, R. (1998). Professional leading communities at work: Best practices for enhancing student achievement. Bloomington, IN: National Educational Service.
King, D. (2002, May). The changing shape of leadership. Educational Leadership, 59(8), 61-63.
Lambert, L. (2002, May). A framework for shared leadership. Educational Leadership, 58(8), 37‑40.
Lortie, D. (1975). Schoolteacher. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
McDonald, J. P. (1992). Teaching: Making sense of an uncertain craft. New York: Teachers College Press.
Murphy, J. (1990). Principal instructional leadership. In P. W. Thurston & L. S. Lotto (Eds.), Perspectives on the school. Advances in educational administration (Volume 1, Part B, 163-200). Greenwich, CN: JAI Press Inc.
Sergiovanni, T. J., & Starratt, R. J. (1988). Supervision: Human perspectives (4th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

say hello

Why is it that people find it so difficult to just say hello?
To find the key to a civil society, look into your own heart.
This week business leaders were told about progress fighting crime, homelessness and street disorder in pursuit of the ideal "a civil society."
But the biggest obstacle to that utopia walks the city's sidewalks, queues up at the coffee shops, waits for the spin cycle to finish at the laundromat.
I'm talking about you.
Yes, you were walking past on the sidewalk without a smile or even a nod, eyes forward.
Yes, you were standing in line if not for coffee, looking uptight and weirdly scared when the person next to you says something friendly.
Yes, you waiting for your clothes to dry, shooting furtive glances at other customers, but never saying a word.
Yes, you who will be hosting the world for tourism in less than two years. Are you going to roll out the welcome mat or yank it inside and slam the door?
Y'all aren't very friendly.
In fact you're downright cold.
Others-- all the way friendlier than us.
Even Thais is cheerier, for Chris sakes, and the people there have been living in trouble waters for 30 months.
I've never been to a place where the ambient level of human interaction is as low as us.
This chill self-perpetuates, slapping down newcomers who dare try and melt the ice.
When a smile is ignored, when a casual comment draws a scowl, when a morning greeting brings an appraising stare, you begin to understand that, here, these things just aren't done.
What's wrong with you people?
I've struggled to find answers. Is it all the pot making people anti-social and paranoid? Unlikely. There are folks who are standoffish, too.
Is it the dreary, soggy rain? Nope, you're clammy even in unpredictable weather. Is it fear of attack? Probably not, given the friendlier attitudes in truly dangerous cities.
I'm at a loss for an explanation. But I'm not giving up yet. I see potential for improvement.
You're polite. You hold doors and generally let people change lanes on the road.
You say please and thank- you. But without the capacity for friendly, human engagement with people you don't know, politeness is a meaningless mask.
Often we lose sight of the importance of everyday engagement.
The civility of our city is measured in large part by the quality of our interactions with the people we live here with.
Please just say hi.