A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Lately I've been thinking a lot about a comment one of my teachers made to me about three weeks ago. She said, "We've been talking. What we want to do next year is coach each other. We've gone to all the conferences on multi-age classes, and we haven't found anyone who knows as much as we do ... We can do our own training--we can learn from each other ..." She described a plan for coaching that the teachers had devised. I was elated because I believe that coaching is one of the highest forms of learning. Then I began to reflect on how the staff had come to this place in their thinking...

For five years, we have been learning together via various means. We meet monthly for discussion of research and staff development sessions led by teachers. The reading specialist has weekly 30-minute "coffee conversations" about language arts, and teachers drop in. Recently, as part of her mentor project, the specialist set up voluntary coaching sessions for teachers wishing to get more information on student progress by using a tool called a running record. The staff loved these coaching sessions--perhaps this is the impetus for the next level of coaching.

But I don't think these events are [the whole story]. For five years, different teachers have taken leadership in providing training in their particular areas of expertise. We all learn together. I go to workshops with teachers so I know what they are learning and can provide materials and emotional support. I'm sure modeling being a learner is part of this, but I'm not sure this is all. Empowerment is part of it too...

Bennetta Mclaughlin, Principal
Mt. Diablo (CA) Unified School District

Helping children achieve high standards demands leadership that involves faculties, families, and neighborhoods in transforming ordinary schools into learning communities. Creating places such as Mt. Diablo, where "coffee klatch" conversations center on methods and colleagues are partners involved in peer coaching, is the kind of challenge that faces educational leaders all over the country. Research tells us something about the knowledge and skills of effective leaders in past eras, but school reform movements--with their significant changes in teaching and organizational structures--have brought about changes in leadership requirements. For a long time, good school leaders have been viewed simply as good managers, but in The Principal's Edge (1994), McCall claims that most schools now suffer from too much management and too little leadership--leaving them deficient in purpose, direction, shared vision, and activities related to their goals.

Isobel Lopez (1990) suggests that leadership draws strength from wisdom that "uses intellect, knows heart, and understands spirit. "In addition to the skills and knowledge cultivated in experience and formal study, many effective leaders--especially those charting new paths to excellence--use self-assessment to monitor the development of their wisdom. They reflect on their own behavior, sometimes using data they collect from peers, mentors, staff, parents, and students, to determine whether they are pursuing their intended course successfully. These leaders support adoption of new, more authentic assessments of student learning and collaborate with teachers to find more stimulating and enriching forms of professional performance review. In a similar vein, they take responsibility for criticizing their own work, weighing the evidence of its effects thoughtfully. They cultivate the habits of mind and heart that enable leaders to guide successful changes over the long term.

Three years ago, I entered a staff meeting to introduce myself as the new principal. I found an angry faculty: the new master schedule did not reflect the staff's recommendations for change. Fortunately, I had done my homework and foreseen this problem. We formed breakout groups and identified the missing elements in the schedule. Then we commissioned a steering committee to work with the counselors to rebuild the schedule. The staff not only had an opportunity to meet me, but they saw me as a risk-taker with the ability to involve everyone in winning consensus. I became part of Fremont High and worked with the staff to provide students with "houses" focused on career paths, an onsite health clinic (in partnership with Children's Hospital), wider use of cooperative learning in classrooms, and other programs that have led to a great reduction in student homicides in the streets of Oakland. We used to lose 15 to 20 students a year that way, but in the last two years, we have only lost one. Our programs have won may awards and our students achieved many accomplishments.

Robert Duran; writing of his work as
Principal of Fremont High School in Oakland, CA

What do successful, long-term reform leaders view as essential professional competencies? How do these official or unofficial "keepers of the school's dream" know when they are doing a good job? To the extent that a reform project really does involve breaking new ground in curriculum, instruction, and/or organizational arrangements and roles, existing benchmarks may not apply. Taking risks--even carefully calculated risks--may result initially in falling back nearly as often as one moves forward. Practitioners tell instructive tales about reforming schools systemically and keeping up the pace and direction of change after the first flush of enthusiasm for innovation fades. This volume presents reform pioneers' hard-won insights about the qualities of leadership needed to sustain effective innovation and their recommendations for figuring out whether one's own performance meets a high standard.

To learn the views of outstanding school leaders, we asked each of the United States Secretary of Education's regional representatives to convene a meeting of 25 to 30 local educators who had well-earned reputations as leaders of sustained school improvement efforts. We also took advantage of a few national education conferences to call such meetings.

Most participants were seasoned education leaders--principals, teachers, parents, and others--whose diversity reflected that of the local education workforce. In focus groups of eight to ten, they spent four to six hours discussing three items (quoted here from the forum worksheet):

• From your own experience as a school leader, name two or three key dimensions of leadership for sustained reform--the habits of mind and heart that enable leaders to guide successful school change over the long term. . . . Describe these in the context of your concrete experiences as a school leader.

• Take the next few minutes to think of a story from your career as a school leader, one that is very important to you, and relate it to a dimension of leadership that best expresses the essence of the story.

• Take the dimensions of leadership that you have identified and featured in your stories and develop a strategy for using them for self-assessment, peer coaching, or other professional development activities.

Here we report their answers. Chapter 2 describes the dimensions of leadership that participants most commonly characterized as essential. Chapter 3 retells some of the participants' stories, which clothe important dimensions in the fabric of real life scenarios. Chapter 4 explains some of the strategies for self-assessment that these innovators use themselves--or think might be worth using. And in the last chapter, we draw a few conclusions based on the lessons we learned from our own experience and from the forum discussions.

Acting on the advice of forum participants, we scatter throughout the report invitations for the readers to reflect on experience in the same way participants did at the leadership forums. Many of the successful reformers who met with us insisted that doing their job properly demanded more than simply acquiring a storehouse of special knowledge and skills from formal professional coursework, intellectual inquiry, and studies in the school of hard knocks. They said that it was stimulating and refreshing to take the time to rummage through one's own memories in search of inspiration and to compare their findings with those of colleagues. Readers may want to try the reflective exercises we pose to them to explore and analyze their own responses, using a real conversation with a friend or mentor or imagining a conversation with the leaders whose views are presented here.

References

Lopez, I. (1990, June).

Leadership defined. Colorado Business Magazine.

McCall, J. (1994).

The principal's edge. New Jersey: Eye on Education.

Note: All the stories used in this report are written as told by participants, who approved the final text and decided what identifying information to provide about themselves and their schools.

1. In your view, what is "school reform"? How is it different from adopting a new textbook, for example, or rearranging the schedule to add or subtract a class period or extending the school year by a few days or even weeks?

2. Where in the lifespan of "innovation" do you draw the line between the stage of "introducing and adopting" and the stage of "sustaining"? Think for a minute about the demands of an organization when it is in the midst of launching a change, and its demands later, when ongoing implementation if the focus. What do you think are key differences in demands at these points?

3. In the process of monitoring leadership development, what do you think is the role of the capacity to assess oneself?

[Executive Summary]

[Chapter 2 Dimensions of Sustaining Leadership]