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

This will be the first of three posts which will explore the themes emerging from the Institute over the last 7 days.

The groupings emerged in the course of an exercise with our process group: 

Please feel free to leave comments and make suggestions for amendements or additions

INSTRUCTIONAL FOCUS
Promoting academic proficiency should be our central goal
Improve instructional tasks
Purposeful Observation - makes a difference
Teaching matters!
Inspect what you expect
Command presence – be where the game’s happening
Feedback – tell them how their doing
What does engagement look like?
Keep an instructional focus
Reduce the variance in the quality of the instructional process
Set clear and unambiguous proficiency targets for learners
The teacher makes the difference
Identify a body of knowledge about instructional practice
Increase the knowledge skills of teachers
Believe that teachers can learn
Change the role of the student
Raise the content – more complex tasks

THE HURT OF CHANGE
Inner work - what’s going on inside people’s heads?
“Cherished Theories” – reluctant to let go
“Circle the Wagons” – them against us
Remember that allegiance fills the a void of belonging
We all have an emotional attachment to practice
Emotional response to change
Displacing responsibility to others
“That’s not my swing”
Experiencing loss in the process of change
Limited through the presumption of competence
Conflict has to do with underlying change
It’s human nature to resist change
Hurt people hurt people
Reflective listening – not reflexive
Honesty – are we prepared to have the uncomfortable conversations?
Always proceed with valid data
Believe that teachers can get smart
Separate a teacher’s practice/professional behaviour from the person

BELONGING
Have high expectations – for all
Giving children a hand up – not a hand out
Advocate for children
There is no such thing as potential
Kids can get smart
Promoting tenacious engagement
Be aware of unwitting segregation
Our mantra must be “Think you can”
“Believe that it is possible”
Promote a confidence to learn
Interrupting children who are on the journey to failure
 Everyone must say “These are MY children”
Commit to children
Avoid symbiotic dependency
Identify factors that erode belonging in school
Ability groupings don’t work

ADAPTIVE/CULTURAL LEADERSHIP
Develop a sense of common purpose
Move the school culture through critical mass
Concentrate on adaptive (cultural) challenges
Trust – comes only comes through consistency between action and practice
Create and sustain norms of behaviour
Manage your time to create space for our real business
Open source leadership – encourage contribution
Transparency  - don’t hide behind supposed confidentiality
Underpin your actions through - rigor, relationships, relevance
Seek out and use valid data
Authenticity – be who you who say you are?
Work “on” the system – don’t be “in” the system

THE LEADER’S LEARNING
Leaders must be prepared to learn from the ‘”sting” of negative feedback
Confidence – take risks  and learn
Be flexible with the leadership styles you adopt
Express a comfort with confusion
Challenge the concept of presumed competence
We can learn the most from those who are moving from “low performing” to “high performing”
Don’t expect others to go where you won’t go
Technical duties – master and deliver
Demonstrate a commitment to the instructional process above all else
Expect and support administrator proficiency
Get things done through people

ARE YOU MAKING AN IMPACT?
Social return on investment – what’s in it for society?
Effective effort – are you focussed on the right things?
Always be clear about the impact of your actions
Can you demonstrate impact in concrete ways?
Face up to uncomfortable truths if actions are not resulting in improvements

BUILDING YOUR COMMUNITY
Present “yesable” propositions
Build a coherent organisation
Be flexible with all but belonging and instructional focus
Be willing to negotiate
Build a consensus
Promote collective responsibility
Build a sustainable community, which extends beyond your presence
Develop partnerships
There can be no such thing as professional autonomy
Be aware that you inherit from others and leave a legacy to other leaders
Work to prevent atomised classrooms

DEVELOPING THE TEACHING PROCESS
 “Teaching without content – is not teaching”
Expect and support adult proficiency
Encourage people to reach into their “stretch zone”
Challenge through choice
Education must define and take control of its practice
Focus on improvement – not change
Create a sense of urgency
Develop networks of practice
Support teacher collaboration

Yesterday I moved very definitely into my “stretch zone” when I volunteered, in front of over 140 delegates, to participate in a role-play situation with Barry Jentz.

Barry asked me to engage in one of those “difficult conversations” we sometimes have to conduct as leaders. The scenario, in brief, was that I, as the leader, had to share with Barry, the new teacher to the school, that I was unhappy about his conduct in a recent staff meeting.

At the end of the role-play I thought I had done a fairly good job in that I was “cool, calm and collected” and I had also managed to give Barry the bad news.

However I was making these conclusions based on my reflexive thinking i.e. I gave Barry the information I had to share with him BUT I conducted the conversation in a “closed” manner.

With some input from Barry I was able to see that I need to move to a much higher level of engagement and shift my thinking from this reflexive mode to the more open, reflective mode where one is entering into a two way, problem-solving approach.

This reflective mode has far more intellectual rigour and also it is something we ask the people around us to engage in regularly so if we are asking them to do this we must show that we, as leaders, are ready and able to engage in this too.

A reflective skill set is about giving good data i.e. sharing accurate information AND listening. The outcome of this is that we can decrease the amount of defensiveness from the person with whom we are speaking which in turn increases the openness to change. This in turn leads to more opportunities to improve performance.

I found yesterday that, as Jentz says,

“Any information that helps improve your performance will make you sting inside.” 

However I can now see that

“A Reflective Mind is a Learning Mind.”

A challenging day!

In the course of Norman Kunc’s thought provoking presentation about Inclusive Education, he described a situation, which is all too familiar, both in school and, in society as a whole.
Often, educators, at all levels, can find themselves, when working with disabled people, involved in providing an “unaccepted attack of help.” This is where the support that someone is offering to a disabled person is very different to that which is actually required – and all because no one has given the disabled person the opportunity to actually outline and detail the help they need.

The intention in a situation like this is well meaning. However people without a disability see things through their lack of disability and, as such, they do not always see things accurately. As Norman, a disabled person himself outlined, very often the disabled person does not require or indeed want the help, which is forced upon them.
We, as educators, need to be mindful of this and take account of it when engaging with disabled pupils in our schools. Such imposed, unnecessary help can actually do more harm than good in that it can inhibit the development of independence in a young person. Also it can be detrimental in allowing them to exist in as inclusive an environment as possible i.e. they can be made to feel unnecessarily different due to input which does nothing more than “single them out.” This can lead to stigma being attached to the disabled person and this goes against all we are trying to create in our schools in terms of inclusion for all pupils.
Norman Kunc feels that it is, more often than not, fairly straightforward, in avoiding such unacceptable attacks of help. The person who has the most relevant and accurate information about a child, his/her disability and the help he/she does actually require is the child themselves and/or their family. We need to ask them about the appropriate help and support that is required. Yes, other agencies can and should be involved but the child and their family should be central to the process wherever possible.
Kunc issues a warning in that, as practitioners we should never see expertise in working with disabled pupils and their families as giving us the power to decide upon the help they require. He says that this leads to generalisation and it often actually leads to the practitioner taking over and this undermines a child’s authority.   We should always “trust the experience over the expertise.” It is only the experience in working with each and every individual youngster and their family that then gives us the information required to make available the correct support for that person.
Kunc gives a very interesting example of approach in the “October Rule.” If a child enters school at the start of the session discussions regarding a support / help package should not take place until October. The reason for this is that the period between August and October should be used as a time of evaluation where a pupil and their family are able to assess the actual support they are going to need – an interesting consideration!
Kunc is of the view that we live in a society which values perfection and that this must change. I share his thinking here. Life is supposed to be messy and ambiguous and we, as practitioners, need to continue to try and assist all pupils, disabled or not, in finding those magical moments of learning where we all achieve our potential.
In Scotland, recent developments in terms of meeting the needs of all, are very encouraging. With the introduction of the Additional Support for Learning Act, each and every child is at the centre of all discussions about their needs and any additional help they may require. I emphasise here again the need to support and help every child - every child may, at some time in their development, require some additional support and the new Act allows us to take account of this and the wide and varied needs that may be involved here. This for me is what we mean by a real, inclusive approach to education!
 

In the course of today we’ve spent quite a bit of time discussing education in Scotland and some of the issues which present real leadership challenges - this list is not exhaustive and will grow and change over the course of the the next few days but we thought we should try to capture them here:

1. How do we provide leadership to teachers who do not want to engage in the improvement process?
2. How do we establish a balance between parental rights and parental responsibility?
3. How do we encourage flexibility and creativity in how we approach the curriculum and yet maintain a strong focus on improving attainment?
4. How might Head Teachers and Local Authorities work together to do something about weak Head Teachers?
5. How do we create a culture where we can share difficult truths about the quality of teaching and learning or leadership - without it being seen as a personal attack?
6. How do prevent some people coming through Intital Teacher Training and quite obviously not being up to the required standard?
7. How do we really embed self-evaluation within our schools and local authorities?
8. How do we introduce five year school based contracts for teachers and head teachers, where they could then be transferred to another school?
9. How might head teachers “reinvent” themselves after a period of time in post?
10. How do we manage incompetence in our schools and local authorities?