Harvard Graduate School of Education - Leadership: an Evolving Vision 2007

This morning we have been talking about the professionalisation of teaching! Of making teaching a real profession and moving away from what Elmore describes as a school being a group of islands of private practices.

To ensure real teacher leadership Kitty Boles advocates 3 pathways:

1. Rounds - promoting collaboration through the sharing of successful practice
2. Lesson Study – Promoting collaboration through improving content knowledge
3. Teacher Action Research – Promoting collaboration through systematic and intentional inquiry

Within Scottish education we are all working towards this culture in our schools and with our teachers but I wonder do we as Head Teachers take the opportunity to practice what we preach? Do we engage in action-based research to develop our practice? Do we engage in frequent conversation with each other about our work? Do we have easy access to each other’s schools? Do we take it for granted we should observe and comment upon each other’s work?

How do we nurture and engender the sense of belonging amongst all those involved in education that would allow this to take place effectively? And how do we create an environment where we can all work together, adopt a truly collegiate approach and share our practice?
 

Throughout the course of the week  the central theme coming through for me is the vital importance of creating a sense of belonging, of valuing everyone and of being truly inclusive in our education systems. Yesterday Jeff Howard talked about the vicious circle of underdevelopment in American education where children are often viewed as having a ‘fixed’ intelligence and where educators and parents have low expectations of certain groups ability to achieve. He stated it is important to develop all in our schools because “developed people are free to find meaning to find quality lives and to leave a legacy of wisdom and humanity”. To him this quite simply means we must create proficient pupils and develop a strong character in all. If people have a strong character we realise that our behaviour matters, we understand the principle of proper conduct and we choose to apply these in our lives at all times, not just when we are being watched. To do this we must work with families and communities and understand that as members of society we have our part to play in teaching young people to behave and learn instead of thinking we can’t do anything about it. We are all responsible and can’t just blame society.

This message and the themes running through this summer school were brought sharply into focus for me last night when we visited the Holocaust memorial in Boston. The memorial consists of 6 number of high towers etched with millions of numbers representing the numbers tattooed on those killed in concentration camps. This was a very powerful, deeply moving experience for me. I had such overwhelming feeling of disbelief that man could do this to man, and equally disturbing is the thought that inhumanities are still occurring all over the world.

It was an extremely humbling experience and for me really drove home the message that if we do not actively foster a sense of belonging, of valuing people and of being truly inclusive we could create the circumstances which allow atrocities like the holocaust to take place and destroy the lives of individuals and whole sections of society.

 ‘Hurt people hurt people’ – Jeff Howard 

For me my challenge is to ensure that I do what I can do to stop this happening and to ensure that generations of children in our schools do not lose out. And that they receive the appropriate education which enables them to actively and constructively participate in our society.

Today one of the delegates described this summer school as a united nations of school principals and it certainly fees like that with delegates from many countries across the globe as well as the United States. Understandably the audience is predominantly American as are the speakers. Their work is based on some of the excellent research being undertaken in this country. Despite this, many of the issues raised so far have proven to be common across the world. This has been a unifying factor realising that it doesn’t matter whether you are Head teacher of a small primary school in Scotland, Principal of a large international school in India or Principal of an American high school of 4000 pupils we all face the same leadership challenges. However at times for the international delegates where some difficulties have arisen is in understanding the American school system and the culture within which American schools operate. For some international delegates there has been a feeling that not enough cognisance has been taken of the fact that we may not all have a complete understanding of the American system.

With this in mind I was delighted yesterday afternoon when we went into our discussion groups (mine has 4 international delegates out of 11) and our group leader, Marilynne Smith Quarco a School Principal from Massachusetts acknowledged the international delegates and raised the issue that we may not fully understand some of the issues raised with out having greater information on American school systems. She had handouts for us all on specific American issues and we spent some time discussing these. She then invited the international delegates (1 Scot, 1 Indian and 2 Australians) to share something of the education systems in our countries, the cultures within which we operate and the major issues we are facing.

By doing so we were better able as a group to understand each other, to get a greater understanding of each others perspectives and to look at education in a truly international context. From this discussion came a greater openness and realisation that we can all learn from each other and can all make significant contributions to educational debate. Marilynne truly made us feel valued and gave us all that sense of belonging Norman Kunc spoke of on Saturday.

Fiona MacPhail shows is how it’s done on the high wire.

How often do we find our assumptions challenged in a very powerful way which has quite a profound impact upon us. For me this morning’s session was such an occasion.

As we entered Longfellow Hall for a session on inclusive education by Norman Kunc I was surprised to see a man in a wheel chair sitting on the podium. I was even more surprised when it became clear he was Norman Kunc and was our speaker for the morning. As he started to speak I realised he had cerebral palsy and physical difficulties and speech difficulties. I sat listening to him wondering how on earth I would be able to understand him and be able to listen to him for the next 3 hours and take anything meaningful from the session. How wrong could I be? The lecture was profound, moving and challenging. But for me the most challenging aspect came in the section of the session where Norman was discussing how to support teachers in an inclusive school and in particular how society perceives disabled people.

Norman asked us how many of us had thought at the start of the lecture there was no way they could listen to a disabled guy (his words) with a speech difficulty speak for 3 hours and the majority of people in the room fell into that category. He then went on to discuss how society perceives disability. For him his disability is one tenth of who he is. And the other nine tenths is an ‘ordinary’ individual. But research has shown that most often society perceives the disability as the defining characteristic of a disabled person and does not see the person beneath the disability.

I realised that that was exactly what I had done this morning but as the lecture developed I found that I was no longer focussing on the disability but on the lecture and didn’t see Norman as a disabled man but as a highly intelligent individual from whom I could learn so much.

For me this was a very powerful message that too often in life we can have preconceived ideas about people and we need to consider the whole person and if our society is to be truly inclusive we need to see people for who they are not what they are.

This video says it all!!!!