A new approach to leadership in schools is needed to control “grossly inflated” expectations of what school managers can achieve, a senior academic will argue tonight (Wednesday, June 17th).

In his inaugural lecture as Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge, Peter Gronn – an eminent researcher in leadership studies – will say that a lingering “culture of heroism” in schools is putting unnecessary pressure on head teachers and other senior members of staff.

His presentation will lay out a revised understanding of leadership roles, such as those of head teachers, deputies or heads of subject, with implications for research, preparation and selection.

The aim is to offer an antidote to what the lecture describes as an enduring heroic culture that echoes the “superhead” or “superprincipal” model developed during the 1980s and 90s.

The concept, which was fashionable internationally among education researchers and policy-makers at the time, suggested that improvements in schools could essentially be driven by a single management figure – often a charismatic head capable of turning around even challenging institutions.

While modern theorists acknowledge that running a school is a more complex affair, Professor Gronn’s lecture suggests that the notion of the heroic leader-figure has not completely disappeared.

In particular, it argues that head teachers and senior teachers are often expected, as leaders, to meet performance standards or complete designated tasks that take little account of the fact that schools rely on a complicated network of interrelationships between managers, classroom teachers, parents and support staff.

As a result, many of these senior staff are still burdened with “the feeling that they are obliged to fulfil the often grossly inflated expectations placed upon them by other people.”

“The expectations we place on school leaders have to be scaled down to a reasonable level,” Professor Gronn said. “At the moment, when these leadership figures are trained or assessed, there is a tendency to equate overall demand with their individual role. This leads to unrealistic expectations and fails to reflect the way in which schools operate.”

The lecture explains that schools function as a complex network of smaller groups of people working with one another to ensure that pupils learn in an effective manner.

Some of these groups, such as management teams, are part of the school’s formal hierarchy. Others, however, emerge naturally as staff strike up informal partnerships to solve a particular problem or do a particular job. A school’s overall leadership is therefore a complex and shifting configuration of these different groupings which together share the burden of improving overall performance.

The lecture contends that it is not possible for individual leaders, such as head-teachers, to drive change entirely by themselves within such an environment. Rather, they should be expected to enable that network of different groupings to perform.

To do this, they need to exhibit certain capabilities. For instance, recent studies have shown that school leaders’ ability to build up a strong level of trust with colleagues and parents has an extremely pronounced effect on the productivity of a school.

The lecture therefore argues that school leaders should be making informed, sensitive and morally-grounded decisions using frameworks of capabilities which are evidence-based. At the moment this is not always the basis on which standards are set. Ideally, heads and teachers themselves – through professional associations and industrial bodies – should determine capabilities that are grounded in evidence about what helps students to learn.

While easier said than done, the lecture contends that many such capabilities can be agreed. Recent US research, for example, suggests that to lead learning in mathematics demands five basic qualities: (1) knowledge of the subject, (2) knowledge of how children acquire it, (3) knowledge of how teachers aid that acquisition, (4) knowledge of how teachers learn to do so, and (5) knowledge of how external figures, such as specialists, can help.

“Head-teachers and leadership figures don’t just act alone, they are part of a network of relationships with others who together get the job done,” Professor Gronn added. “In preparing them for their task, we should ask what it takes to co-ordinate those relationships, rather than burdening them with expectations of change which are all but impossible to fulfil.”
 


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