Leadership and Student Outcomes: Are Secondary Schools Unique?

Contents v vi x Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Foreword by Geoff Whitty ati on SECTION I EXPLORING MODELS FOR LEADERSHIP AND IMPROVEMENT row nlo wE du c 1 Establishing platforms for leadership and learning Helen Timperley and Jan Robertson 1 3 13 3 How effective leaders reduce educational disparities Russell Bishop 27 er B 2 The layering of leadership Christopher Day 41 5 Leadership and student learning outcomes Philip Hallinger and Ronald H. Heck 56 6 Connecting leadership and learning Geoff Southworth 71 7 Realising the potential of system leadership David Hopkins 86 ©H aw k 4 Leadership and student learning: what works and how Kenneth Leithwood SECTION II CHALLENGES IN DEVELOPING LEARNING-FOCUSED LEADERSHIP 8 Leading professional learning communities Louise Stoll © 2013 Hawker Brownlow Education • 9781743306345 • SA6345 101 103 iii Leadership and Learning iv 9 Leading teachers’ professional learning Helen Timperley 118 10 Leadership and student outcomes: are secondary schools unique? Viviane M.J. Robinson, Linda Bendikson and John Hattie 131 11 Instructional leadership: teacher level Helen Wildy and Simon Clarke 143 SECTION III BROADENING IDEAS OF LEARNING AND KNOWLEDGE DEVELOPMENT 157 159 13 Leadership and diversity Marianne Coleman 172 row nlo wE du c ati on 12 A distributed perspective on learning leadership James P. Spillane, Kaleen Healey, Leigh Mesler Parise and Allison Kenney 186 15 Why the study of emotion matters in school leadership Megan Crawford 202 er B 14 Educators as knowledge leaders Lorna Earl and Lynne Hannay 213 17 Fusion and the future of leadership Andy Hargreaves 227 Index 243 ©H aw k 16 Partnership in leadership and learning Jan Robertson SA6345 • 9781743306345 • © 2013 Hawker Brownlow Education CHAPTER 1 Establishing Platforms for Leadership and Learning ati on Helen Timperley and Jan Robertson ©H aw k er B row nlo wE du c Traditional understandings of leadership have focused on individuals who occupied formal positions of authority within organisations; the ‘leaders’, their personality traits and their work. In business, the focus was on the chief executive officer (CEO). In education, the equivalent was the school principal. Studies of leadership within this framework typically examined how the leadership styles of these individuals allowed them to exercise influence and have authority over others. Of particular interest was, ‘the heroic leader standing atop a hierarchy, bending the school community to his or her purposes’ (Camburn et al., 2003: 348). Such a view of leadership, however, failed to realise its promise. On a practical level, there were simply insufficient numbers of heroes (Copland, 2003; Elmore, 2002; Harris, 2008) or ‘want-to-be heroes’ (Gronn and Rawlings-Sanaei, 2003) to run all our businesses and schools. On an empirical level, the evidence demonstrated that effective organisations were not typically run by a single leader who controls the activities of others who, in turn, play minor support roles. What happens within any organisation is more complex than this. Many people are involved in both formal and informal leadership practice in influencing direction and outcomes. Thus, the vocabulary of ‘leadership’ replaced that of ‘leaders’ to reflect this complexity and the relational nature of leadership influence. While there might be a general consensus about the importance of leadership rather than focusing on individual leaders and their dispositions, there is less agreement about how we should think about leadership. Ideas have been proposed, fallen into disuse, only to re-emerge some time later. Most of these ideas have been captured in the form of ‘adjective-plus leadership’. Leadership, for example, might be transformational, shared, instructional, pedagogical or distributed. The ‘adjective plus leadership’ label has been deliberately avoided in the title of this book because it is not another book about a depiction of, or prescription for, leadership. Rather, it is designed to answer the question raised by Starratt (2004) that asks, ‘Leadership of what, for what?’ Clearly, given the title of this book, it is leadership of and for learning. © 2013 Hawker Brownlow Education • 9781743306345 • SA6345 3 Leadership and Learning 4 This learning focus is a relatively new area of scholarship but it draws on, and has emerged from, a tradition of research and thinking in the area. There are many possibilities for how these ideas can be broadly grouped and we have chosen three themes to include in this introductory overview because each has contributed to the foundations of what we know about leaders and learning. These themes include empowering relationships, patterns of leadership distribution, and how leadership contributes to improvements in teaching and learning. Our reason for providing this overview is to locate the central theme of this book on leadership and learning within the broader ideas and traditions of the study of leadership. ati on Empowering relationships ©H aw k er B row nlo wE du c One of the early alternatives to the heroic leader involved a focus on empowering relationships between leaders and followers. Volumes have been written on these relationships and the associated micro-politics (for example, Blasé, 1991) but probably the best known adjectival label is transformational leadership. The origins of transformational leadership came from the generic literature on leadership rather than that specifically focused on education (Burns, 1978). The central question of this early work was why some leaders were able to engage with others in ways that raised each party to higher levels of motivation and morality. These leaders were able to motivate their staff to pursue the goals of the organisation over their own interests. These ideas gained currency within the education sector and shaped much of the educational leadership training through the 1980s and 1990s (Leithwood et al., 1999). Initially four categories of transformational leadership behaviours were the focus. These included idealised influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individualised consideration. They were seen in combination with what was referred to as transactional dimensions of contingent reward and management-by-exception. Through the research of Leithwood and colleagues (Leithood et al., 1990; 1996; 1999), these dimensions were subsequently combined into four broad categories according to the immediate intended outcome. These categories included: setting directions (vision, group goals, highperformance expectations); helping people (individualised consideration/ support, intellectual stimulation, modelling key values and practices); redesigning the organisation (helping to build collaborative cultures, creating structures to foster collaboration, building productive relations with parents and the community); and transactional and managerial aggregate (contingent reward, management by exception, management). Many of these key concepts within transformational leadership have underpinned some chapters in this book, particularly with the emphasis on developing clear visions and high expectations, together with promoting collaboration and productive relations. The problem, however, has been the difficulty in linking the dimensions of transformational leadership to outcomes for students in an environment of increasing international pressure for accountability within schools for SA6345 • 9781743306345 • © 2013 Hawker Brownlow Education Establishing Platforms for Leadership and Learning row nlo wE du c Patterns of leadership distribution ati on these outcomes. In a review of research on transformational leadership and student outcomes, Leithwood and Jantzi (2005) found reasonably consistent relationships to measures of school engagement but more equivocal relationships with student achievement. These authors concluded that the effects of leaders on students were largely indirect – an idea that has gained increasing currency in the leadership literature. Some argued (for example, Robinson, 2006) that the reason for the limited impact of transformational leadership on students’ learning and achievement was the focus on relationships among the adults within the system, rather than on the students they were supposed to be serving. To achieve the impact on student learning and achievement, more focus was needed on developing the kind of relationships that would develop professional knowledge about the improvement of teaching and learning more directly. Focusing on relationships alone, however empowering, was unlikely to be sufficient in bringing about this change. ©H aw k er B Another alternative to the heroic leader came with the work of Camburn et al. (2003), Gronn (2003) and Spillane et al. (2004). Their collective empirical work confirmed that leadership involves activities and interactions that are distributed across multiple people and situations. This work had its origins in the ideas of shared leadership (Etzioni, 1965) and distributed cognition which shows how material and social artefacts aid in the distribution of understandings across situations (Cole and Engeström, 1993). This work shifted the focus from the ‘what’ of leadership concerned with people, structures, functions, routines and roles, to ‘how leadership gets done through the ordinary, everyday practices involved in leadership routines and functions’ (Spillane, 2006: 5). Who leads and who follows is dictated by the task, and not necessarily by the hierarchical positioning of any individual (Copland, 2003). In line with this rather non-heroic view of leadership, Spillane defines leadership in the following way: ‘Leadership refers to activities tied to the core work of the organisation that are designed by organisational members to influence the motivation, affect, or practices of other organisational members or that are understood by organisational members as intended to influence their motivation, knowledge, affect or practices’ (Spillane, 2006: 11–12). While the main premises of this definition (core work, influence, practices) appear to be widely accepted, inevitably differences in perspectives have arisen. Spillane and colleagues have been concerned about developing analytical and conceptual frameworks for studying this influence process through a distributed lens. Others have transformed the leadership descriptor to the adjectival form of ‘distributed leadership’. This latter group have advocated that greater distribution of leadership is something to which educational organisations should aspire if they are to meet the challenges of twenty-first century education (for example, Harris, 2008). Something on which most researchers taking a distributed leadership perspective agree is the potential benefits of utilising expertise across and within organisations © 2013 Hawker Brownlow Education • 9781743306345 • SA6345 5 Leadership and Learning row nlo wE du c ati on through the co-construction of knowledge (Harris, 2008). Effective distribution of leadership creates more opportunities for professionals to learn. The increased opportunities, coupled with the focus of distributed leadership on the core work of the organisation, create strong links between leadership and learning. Thus many of the chapters in this book implicitly, if not explicitly, take a distributed perspective on leadership. While most researchers have welcomed the shift to studying the ‘how’ of leadership practices with its focus on learning rather than analysing styles or tasks, nagging doubts have surfaced about whether distributing leadership per se will actually be what makes the difference to some of our enduring educational problems. Harris (2008), for example, explains that it is not the distribution of leadership that determines effectiveness, but rather how it is distributed. Timperley (2005) shows that greater distribution may lead to greater distribution of incompetence. Robinson (2009) argues that to tackle the kinds of endemic achievement problems evident in many countries, more focus is needed on the educational content of the leadership process. What this educational content might look like and how leadership contributes to improvement in teaching and learning for students is the focus to which we turn next. Leadership for the improvement of teaching and learning er B While the other two themes of empowering relationships and patterns of leadership distribution have as an important goal the improvement of teaching and learning in schools, this third theme addresses this issue more explicitly and brings us closer to the central task of this book. Part of this reorientation towards leaders being more focused on teaching and learning arose from a concern with the introduction of self-managing and governing schools in many countries in the 1990s. This movement led principals to become more focused on the efficient undertaking of management tasks than on providing professional direction for the school (Southworth, 1998). This emphasis on learning-centred leadership is partly about reclaiming the professional role of school leaders, albeit in a more modern guise than that existing prior to self-managing schools. Another impetus for more instructionally focused leadership was the research on effective schools. As those studying schools with high student achievement compiled lists of these schools’ characteristics, references to strong leadership were invariably among them (for example, Reynolds et al., 2000). Similarly, in the schooling improvement literature, it became evident that unless leadership influenced what was happening in the instructional core, it was unlikely to have an impact on outcomes for students. As Elmore states: ©H aw k 6 Improvement occurs … by raising the capacity of key relationships in the instructional core: by increasing teachers’ knowledge of content and their knowledge of how to connect the content to specific students, by increasing the prerequisite knowledge that students bring to their interactions with SA6345 • 9781743306345 • © 2013 Hawker Brownlow Education Establishing Platforms for Leadership and Learning teachers and by deepening their own knowledge of themselves as learners, by increasing the complexity and demand of content. (Elmore, 2002: 122) ©H aw k er B row nlo wE du c ati on As researchers have sought to identify the kind of leadership activities that lead to improvement in teaching and learning in the instructional core, adjective-plus forms of leadership have inevitably emerged. These forms have included instructional leadership, learning-centred leadership, pedagogical leadership and educational leadership. Each provides nuances on the central theme of learning for both the leaders and teachers within the organisation and the students that educational organisations are designed to benefit. What is common among them all is the priority given to thinking about how particular leadership tasks and activities might impact on student achievement and well-being (Hallinger, 2005; Robinson et al., 2009; Southworth, 2004). A recent meta-analysis of leadership practices that had high impact on student outcomes by Robinson et al. (2009) is one such example of this kind of pursuit. These authors found that those practices that could be construed as ‘pedagogical leadership’ were associated with highest effect sizes for student achievement. In a subsequent analysis, they established that the dimensions with greatest impact included: establishing goals and expectations; resourcing strategically; planning, coordinating and evaluating teaching and the curriculum; promoting and participating in teacher learning and development; and ensuring an orderly and supportive environment. Three of these dimensions are supported by Hallinger’s (2005) review of the literature that described instructional leaders as those who frame and communicate the school’s goals; manage the instructional programme by supervising and evaluating instruction, coordinating the curriculum and monitoring student progress; and align the school’s structures and culture within the school’s mission. While these approaches to leadership have a stronger instructional focus, they also draw on the other two constructions of leadership, albeit with a different lens. Robinson et al. (2009), for example, include a relationship dimension of indirect influence called creating educationally powerful connections, which has similarities with the transformational leadership literature. Similarly, Elmore (2002) writes that cohesive schools occur when there is a high degree of alignment between individual responsibility and collective expectations complemented by a relatively explicit internal accountability system. The contribution of the three themes These three themes, empowering relationships, patterns of leadership distribution, and leadership for the improvement of teaching and learning, come together to provide a strong base for understanding what it takes to create the conditions for successful learning, for adults and for students – in fact, for all in the educational community. The challenge is that systematic investigation into the field of how leadership influences learning has been relatively recent. However, emerging © 2013 Hawker Brownlow Education • 9781743306345 • SA6345 7 Leadership and Learning 8 and strengthening evidence indicates that leadership that is relational, and is an influence process focused on successful learning relationships that are reciprocal, collaborative and empowering for all parties have an impact on student engagement, achievement and well-being. This means that leaders are learners as much as their teachers and students. All have a willingness to learn from the people they work with in order to work more effectively with them and deliver an education system to which all contribute. Leaders talking about learning, students talking about learning, communities talking about learning, and through these reciprocal, collaborative processes, creating new knowledge about the leadership of learning to improve systems and practices within the school. ati on About this book ©H aw k er B row nlo wE du c Each of the broad traditions we have outlined above have influenced our collective thinking about leadership and learning, with different chapters in this book giving more or less emphasis to particular ideas: transformational leadership with its emphasis on inspiring shared vision and values for learning through strong relationships; distributed leadership with its focus on how the everyday interactions and activities of leaders influence the work of the organisation; and instructional leadership with its focus on improving teaching and learning. This volume brings together the work of a number of leading scholars who have been researching and thinking about this emerging and important field for many years. They are held in high regard by practitioners and research colleagues alike, and they readily agreed to contribute to a book that we have brought together in three important sections, with a central, underlying principle of developing capability of all within the organisation to improve student outcomes. All chapters are about leadership focused on making a difference to students; leadership as an indirect influence; and developing leadership capacity through learning. Section 1: Exploring models for leadership and improvement The chapters in this section focus on models for overall change and improvement. In Chapter 2 Chris Day presents a five-part model which focuses attention not only on what leaders know and do, but who they are. He suggests successful system change is a ‘layered’ leadership approach. The chapter ends with some clear messages for principal educators and policy-makers. A social justice agenda for leadership is right at the forefront of Russell Bishop’s chapter as he challenges that leadership is about reducing disparities for indigenous and other minoritised peoples. He presents six key areas that leaders need to know and do to achieve school change. He acknowledges that school reform is complex, but challenges that we know the conditions that are necessary to support student learning, and that is where we should start. SA6345 • 9781743306345 • © 2013 Hawker Brownlow Education