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

The Role of Leadership in Sustaining School Reform: Voices From the Field - July 1996

Research Connections

The principals assembled for this forum shared their professional experiences, concluding that the art of exercising leadership in the context of sustained school reform is really a combination of eclectic skills, abilities, experiences, and personal traits. Throughout this chapter we have used the five general categories of vision and values, partnership and voice, knowledge and daring, savvy and persistence, and personal qualities to highlight factors that these outstanding leaders cited as integral to their success at sustaining reform in the schools they lead.

A brief review of selected recent research confirms and extends the insights revealed in participants' anecdotes and explanations. For instance, in Reshaping the Principalship (1994, p. 32), Murphy and Louis attribute the success of reform endeavors to the principal's direct efforts to model and reinforce behaviors related to the common vision and shared values. According to Sergiovanni (1994, p. 170), a school's vision must ensure that students, parents, teachers, and principals all become school leaders in some way. Effective principals focus and maintain their school's vision, says former Superintendent Richard Wallace (in Lynn, 1994), keeping essential goals in mind and distractions to a minimum.

Lieberman's work (1988) documents some of the issues that arise when principals undertake collaborative leadership with teachers. There's plenty of leadership opportunity to go around--principals don't need to do it all. Often teachers' concerns may be better addressed by peers than by an administrator and empowering teachers to act as problem solvers is often quite effective. However, delegation may be tricky, and teachers' willingness to participate sometimes depends on their relationship with the principal. Murphy and Louis (1994) found that if teachers perceive principals to be open, facilitative, and supportive, teachers' participation increases. Modeling collaborative relationships and acting like colleagues rather than supervisors when the situation permits cultivate teachers' willingness to share authority and responsibility. Sergiovanni (1994) describes leadership as:

the exercise of wit and will, principle and passion, time and talent, and purpose and power in a way that allows the group to increase the likelihood that shared goals will be accomplished (p. 170).

Leaders must be willing to accept the risk and ambiguity that develops as they embrace new visions, based on new knowledge. New ideas threaten staff accustomed to old constraints, but offer exciting opportunities for those willing to put the visions into practice (Murphy and Louis, 1994). If we expect students to be more adventuresome in their thinking, then the adults must model risk taking. According to Lieberman (1988), principals who offer to share the responsibility with teachers can encourage the teachers to apply new strategies to improve their practice.

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, attraction to the "cult of efficiency" led school administration away from a central concern with teaching and learning. "Management," not "learning," was the byword of this era. Today the pendulum has reversed; substantive educational issues and pedagogy are coming again to be seen as central to effective school leadership. Like the participants in the forums, those who study and write about leadership for the twenty-first century characterize effective school leaders as those who are visionary and skillful learners, strong and competent partners in sustaining reform.
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