 
Week 4 - Local School Management
|  | School-Based Management in the New Millennium:
A Moral Journey or a Business Venture? |
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Listing of Papers | |
MR TONY McGRUTHER
Queensland, Australia
MR TONY McGRUTHER
Queensland, Australia
SCHOOL-BASED MANAGEMENT in the new millennium faces the challenge of many emerging technologies - that is, to move beyond the technical issues of what is possible to resolutions of what is desirable. School-based management is indeed a technology, which has a potential to deliver enhanced outcomes. However, it is not amoral and not self-directing. Therefore it requires leadership that is able to continuously engage that technology with the moral and ethical purposes of the school in the very dynamic environment of the decade ahead.
This paper seeks to establish an appropriate moral basis and model for school-based management that defines leadership in terms of culture, responsive dialogue and collaborative engagement. Further, the paper will describe how that definition will operate within, and between, three interacting dimensions of daily leadership activity: critical incidents; strategy and reflection - dimensions through which leaders can authentically and morally exercise their influence in rapidly changing times.
More Culture than StructureC
hange within new millennium schools should, in the first instance, be more cultural than structural. Sergiovanni (1997) warns against the trend to adopt corporate models of management to fit schools, asserting that, prior to the application of organisational process and strategic planning, educational leaders need to explore with their communities a definition of their real purposes and moral commitments. School-based leaders will face an increasing set of expectations into the next decade. The corporate paradigm offers seductive models providing all the tinsel and shimmer of status, credibility and political acceptance. Note the whisperings of corporate language beginning to appear in our 'annual reports'- 'human resources', 'business plans', 'market share', 'client orientation' and 'performance targets'.
Sergiovanni (1996), however, sees schools as more like families than business organisations. Families, like schools, exist to promote growth not profit, welfare not status, learning not capital. Relationships are bound by moral covenants, not by contracts, therefore requiring school structures to be based on ethical principles aligned to those purposes and beliefs.
'Once established, the ties of community in schools can become substitutes for formal systems of supervision, evaluation and staff development; for management and organisational schemes that seek to coordinate what teachers do and how they work together; and for leadership itself...' (Sergiovanni: 1992)
Senge points to the inadequacy of traditional models of leadership to meet the needs of contemporary times.
'The organisations that will truly excel in the future will be the organisations that discover how to tap people's commitment and capacity to learn at all levels of the organisation.' (Senge: 1992)
His holistic model is based on a natural inter-relational system requiring engagement with values, beliefs, purposes as the key cultural foundations that meet the human needs in post-industrial organisations - the need to identify with an altruistic purpose, to be bound by teamwork and by common values, and to be energised by an embrace of inquiry, discovery and change.
Fullan (1991) draws attention to the values of understanding the non-rational world, suggesting that the view of reality proposed by those seeking an orderly logic to school growth is based on wishful thinking.
'We need to move away from the notion of how the principal can become master implementer of multiple policies and programs. What is needed instead is to frame the question ... what does a reasonable leader do, faced with impossible tasks?' ( Fullan:1991).
A response to that particular question of Fullan's becomes the focus of the last section of this paper.
In order to respond to the complex, paradoxical and volatile context ahead, schools require a cultural foundation of values, beliefs and purposes from which to interpret and choose responses. Leadership will need to be more 'behaviour than action', more 'power to' than 'power over', more 'communal' than 'organisational' and more 'ethical' than 'skilful'. (Sergiovanni: 1994)
More Dialogue than Direction
Patrick Duignan (1997) uses the metaphor of dance to describe the leadership of schools. In order to be cultural leaders of schools in emerging times, we need to be dancing with our people. The image of dance captures many compelling facets of the leadership required for the decade ahead, engaging of all in a continuous creative act that is responsive and critical of itself; that is multi-dimensional and is practised with skill, according to a mental map of what constitutes a gratifying outcome. However, the most potent understanding that can be drawn from Duignan's analogy is that of site-based leadership as the dance existing at, 'the still point of a turning world' that is, it lives free-forming on the edge of chaos where together, the actors continuously improvise and respond to each other and to their environment in an emerging reality where there is no 'fixity' (1997).
If schools more closely resemble living systems of people, ideas, politics, beliefs, values and talents, then leadership which acts in creative response to these factors, is more likely to produce a synergetic 'dance' than that which seeks to program and control. The still point around which the chaos is interpreted into meaning is the moral and ethical commitments of the school. In fact, educative leadership in the next decade will require leaders to invite chaos, seeking the school community to continuously challenge and reflect on the moral and ethical basis of each and every choice made, and then aligning pedagogy to those choices.
Once coached and rehearsed with some effort, these choices begin to be made intuitively, 'on the run', allowing the school to dance to its own tune, focused continuously on its purposes. Each interaction, timetable, class organisation, choice of resources, budget decision, assembly format becomes reflective of the school's purposes. A strategic vision in this sense is therefore embodied fully and holistically within each classroom and working relationship of the school, rather than being segmented, departmentalised or delegated within a corporate strategy. It must therefore be created using the dialogue on daily issues of teaching, rather than from board room direction, no matter how well-informed that direction is.
More Collaborative than Controlling
As we enter the next millennium a challenge awaits us. As we invite more collaboration and co-operation of others, we actually need to expect conflict and some degree of chaos as differing ideas, perspectives and values are shared and compete for meaning. At this point, leaders must choose between the seduction of control, albeit by persuasive influence, or instead to enter the dialogue necessary to improvise a balanced dance with the people, values and ideas that form around the critical issues of change that threaten the comfortable daily status quo of our schools.
The choice to be taken rests on the leaders' belief system as to what in the end will contribute to the sustained and positive change in outcomes for pupils. Neumann and Wehlage (1995), in their much lauded study on school effectiveness and school restructuring, isolated four factors:
- the need to identify what is high quality learning;
- the need to agree on the standards of teaching required to achieve that learning;
- the need to create professional communities to achieve those standards, and finally;
- the need for the professionalism so created in schools to be well supported externally.
'The most successful schools were those that used restructuring tools to help them function as professional communities.' (1995:3)
Creation of Professional Communities
The creation of professional communities involves active teacher engagement in not only the implementation of change but in its creation and leadership. For almost a decade, Fullan and Hargreaves (1991) have espoused the need for cultural change in the nature of schools, to allow meaningful collaboration on the things that count for teachers and children. Their recommendation for the next decade of school leadership could be based on three principles:
- that meaningful collaboration in schools has depended largely on the actions of principals;
- that the kind of leadership is what will count. It is not the charismatic high flier that moves schools forward but the more subtle kind of 'meaning making' and empowerment; and lastly,
- that leadership can, and should, come from a variety of sources. In fact, in a fully functioning school, all teachers are leaders.
What therefore is suggested in self-managing schools is leadership that serves the professional learning needs of the school-leadership and which pursues the ideas, values and norms upon which the vision for learning is based. Once the leader has established that, he or she will act consistently and authentically towards these moral parameters, then trust is bestowed sufficient to allow the leader to speak and act with authentic authority. Authentic authority will allow the leader 'to put first things first' - expressing outrage when necessary, praise when earned, and uncertainty when confused - all premised on the covenental commitments underpinning the school's culture.
The literature is strongly suggestive of an approach to the leadership of increasingly self-determining schools which accepts that schools will be living in a constantly changing context and in direct interaction with that environment. Schools must establish the ethical purposes they seek to achieve, and then engage in the dance with its participants and its environment. This is necessary to enable them to be productively focused on their apparently chaotic interactions. Just as our culture will be in continuous formation and reformation, as our community responds to the critical events of its history using its understandings of relationship and morality, so must schools use its critical events, its people and its environment to engage in an interactive discourse which leads the school towards its ethical purposes - purposes deliberately advanced and embodied within each and every daily act.
How to Dance, Not Direct
The challenge remains to establish some form, pivot points and balance to the dance of leadership in the decade ahead. If leadership of schools can not rely on strategy alone, if culture will be more informing and resilient than structure, and if dialogue and engagement will be more powerful than directives, then how do leaders focus their steps and moves to create purposeful synergy from potential chaos?
Newmann and Wehlage (1995) pose the challenge:
'The most successful schools were those that used restructuring tools to help them function as professional communities; that is, they found a way to channel staff and students efforts towards a clear and commonly shared purpose for student learning: they created opportunities for teachers to collaborate and help one another achieve the purpose: and teachers in those schools took collective responsibility for student learning. Schools with strong professional communities were better able to offer authentic pedagogy and were more efficient in promoting student achievement (1995:3).
The experience in my school in attempting to establish a strong ethical community so recommended by the literature helped me to isolate three elements of structure around which I could improvise my leadership dance. These are:
- critical events;
- leadership action or strategy; and,
- critical reflection.
Critical events describe those commonly significant events, or those made significant, through which the school community establishes its culture of values, purposes and its immediate directions, and through which it demonstrates those beliefs and purposes in expressions of culture. These events include not only preplanned strategy but also the spontaneous events that emerge in response to leadership intervention or the influence of other leaders or factors in the community. It requires leadership skill to identify those events which should be made significant for the purposes of building new or deeper understandings and the courage to pursue them to the point of creating disequilibrium.
Examples of critical events normally challenge the status quo and can arise therefore at the point of any seemingly routine decision by asking questions of how should we rather than how have we or how could we. To resolve these questions, the community is led to points of reflection or strategy where the values and purposes of the school are identified to govern action. The dance is therefore improvised out of equilibrium by a challenge and a guiding set of values from which the 'dancers' act to redefine their action in rhythm to, and in accordance with, those same sets of values and beliefs.
Leadership strategy describes the action deliberately planned by the principal or others to promote those cultural values and purposes and immediate directions. Actions may create the critical events above or be created in consequence to them. It allows leadership to influence decision-making on core values and beliefs without presuming to determine the result. It is authentic when it is inclusive and collaborative and it is purposeful when it is focused on shared directions and developing collective responsibility for outcomes. Examples of strategy of this kind include action research, data collection, professional development, development of interventions and the pursuit of projects around core purposes. It defines, investigates and practices the skills necessary to create an effective performance. Leaders use strategy to engage their dancers in the practice and preparation that establishes a common appreciation of, and capacity for, a quality outcome.
Thirdly, critical reflection describes the ongoing dialogue the school and its leadership must have with itself to align and realign strategy and action to cultural values, purposes and immediate directions. Reflection may sometimes involve leaders in solitary evaluation of past strategy or in whole school reflective focus on an issue or event. It can therefore be planned or emergent from the educational environment. It can, therefore, arise from a single issue, for example, how the school intends to deal with a challenging disciplinary incident; or from a complex consideration of behaviour management across the whole school. In fact, in both examples the same underpinning cultural values of the school are at issue. The point is that, irrespective of the apparent scale of the issue or incident, the power of the reflective process comes from exposing those underlying values, rather than from its inclusion or not in a strategic agenda. In fact, to ignore the significance of the behavioural incident to attend to the behaviour management plan or vice versa is counter productive to the cultural growth of the school. To dance to the times, therefore, leaders need to use critical reflection to consistently and conscientiously check that strategy is aligned with values and that action within events is aligned with strategy and purpose.
The flow of outcomes between these three dimensions describe the 'dance' of leadership in the millennium. Leadership is a creative act that will immerse leaders in a continuous dialogue where the leader facilitates and co-ordinates a fluid process of decision making between these dimensions. It attempts to track how the actions relate to the thinking and the feeling; or in Sergiovanni's (1996) metaphor, how the hand relates to the head and to the heart of leadership. Finally, it empowers all staff to act both individually and collectively in accordance with the exposed and affirmed values of the school, such that every single act within the life of the school embodies and builds upon the school's purposes and confirms its values. New millennium leaders will need to understand that in very dynamic times their leadership will need to move beyond the corporate chief executive officer paradigm to embrace a tribal one - that is, in order to lead moral communities, school principals will need to be more a chief than an executive.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mr Tony McGruther (M.Ed.; Grad. Dip. Ed. Admin.; B. Ed.; Dip. T.; MACEA ) has been a primary school principal in rural, provincial and metropolitan Queensland schools for sixteen years. Currently Principal at Capalaba State School, in the greater Brisbane area, Tony's leadership has pursued the development of collaborative cultures in schools focusing on teamwork and the development of a values base to the planning of school directions. This builds on earlier work and study in the area of community relationships. Using a background in educational drama, he has been able to apply these skills to the development of interactive leadership in his schools. His current interest is in the development of an integrated, holistic school-based curriculum that serves the Five Key Purposes of school, as identified by the school community in its vision statement.
Tony has been an active member of the Queensland Association of State School Principals and is co-convening the 2001 National Conference of Australian Primary Principals in Brisbane. He has been nominated for the position of President of the Australian Primary Principals Association (APPA) for 2000/2001.
Tony McGruther can be contacted by email at:
tony.mcgruther@capalabass.qld.edu.au
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REFERENCES
Duignan, P.A. (1997). 'The Dance of Leadership-at the Still Point of a Turning World' Australian Council for Educational Administration, Monograph Series, No. 2,Victoria.
Fullan, Michael (1991). 'What's Worth Fighting for - Working Together for your School', ACEA paperback Monograph Series, Victoria.
Newman, Fred and Wehlage, Gary (1995) Successful School Restructuring- A report to the public educators by the center on organisation and restructuring of schools, University of Wisconsin -Madison, distributed by American Federation of Teachers.
Senge, Peter M. (1992). The Fifth Discipline-The art and practice of the learning organisation. Random UK.
Sergiovanni, Thomas J. (1996). Leadership for the Schoolhouse, Jossey-Bass Education Series, San Francisco.
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