Education Leadership

Helen Keller said, “Alone we can do so little; together, we can do so much.” This truth certainly applies to the critical connection of our schools to our communities. Yes, the funding comes from federal and state resources, but the local community should be the real sustenance of learning experiences.

Because a community of people live in the same area and have common interests, there should be an understanding that they will influence each other’s lives in some way. And, what better way to expose students to real life experiences than to form partnerships with businesses, volunteer organizations, retirement homes, and churches to bring added resources and accountability to schools.

XQ America proposes Super Schools where educators collaborate with small business owners, large corporations, and healthcare providers to enable students to study in a multitude of scenarios. Because learning is authentic, and not just classroom-based, students are able to watch and assist business leaders as they work through interactions and negotiations intended to bring success to the company. XQ America espouses 4 key strategies to connect schools with the community:

By repurposing vacant buildings in the community into schools (in the same manner as a mixed-use downtown area), students are then able to interact on a regular basis with surrounding businesses, museums, and healthcare institutions. In this way, students get real-life experiences while the community has a true stake in the success of the school.

Schools should develop partnerships with community partners to accomplish projects that have real use to the community. They “want to broker access to opportunity and resources to change privileged knowledge to common”

Early access to internships helps local businesses identify talented students who could bring value to these companies while exposing the students to potential future employment and career opportunities.

Provide early access to higher education through partnering with colleges and universities nearby for dual credit courses.

Within our schools are students with physical needs, and the schools themselves cannot meet all of these alone. Community partnerships should not only focus on educational opportunities, but also on aiding families with physical needs. Connecting families with mental health services, dental and medical services, and food banks is another critical area. Some concrete ideas for connections aside from mentoring and internships are:

• Afterschool homework help and enrichment activities
• Neighborhood involvement day with activities such as planting flowers in the yards of elderly neighbors, or planning and maintaining a community garden.
• Enlist retired teachers and older people to be reading and lunch buddies for students.
• Participate in multicultural events and arts activities.

The New Hampshire Department of Education reports that “these partnerships result in sharing and maximizing resources. And they help children and youth develop healthy behaviors and promote healthy families”.  And the Michigan State Government found that “when families, schools, and community institutions (e.g., local businesses, community colleges, and health agencies) collectively agree upon their goals and decide how to reach them, everyone benefits.” Collaborating with the surrounding community can only strengthen the students and their families while building strong relationships with businesses, healthcare providers, and volunteer groups.

To become an effective school leader, you must help all your staff members succeed. Let’s discuss a school management model that will help you accomplish that. Invitational leadership is a school management model that aims to “invite” all interested stakeholders to succeed. The leadership model utilizes “invitations” as messages communicated to people, which inform them that they are valued, able, responsible, and worthwhile.

The messages are sometimes transmitted by interpersonal action but are mostly disseminated through the institution’s policies, programs, practices, and physical environments. Invitational leadership is based upon four basic assumptions, which exemplify the characteristics of invitational leaders. These assumptions are optimism, respect, trust, and intentionality. Lets briefly discuss these assumptions:

• Optimism – The belief that people have untapped potential for growth and development.
• Respect – The recognition that every person is an individual of worth.
• Trust – The possession of confidence in the abilities, integrity, and responsibilities of ourselves and others.
• Intention – A decision to purposely act in a certain way to achieve and carry out a set goal.

Invitational leadership is a tough skill to master, so let’s look a scenario that illustrates how it operates in an actual school environment.

Scenario: Angela Murray, an art teacher at Blue Ridge Elementary, came to Principal Frank Anderson one day with a problem. While using a shared computer in the staff room, she had discovered an email exchange between two other teachers that made snarky comments about her off-putting mannerisms and even the way she dressed. Ms. Murray was hurt. However, even though she’d discovered the emails by accident, she didn’t feel comfortable confronting the teachers because of privacy issues.

Principal Anderson sympathized with Ms. Murray’s problem, but he also realized that she was not wholly blameless. The art teacher’s social skills were somewhat lacking, and her creative outfits were causing merriment among students and teachers alike. She was a relatively new teacher, and a few small changes, he thought, might make her job easier.

Principal Anderson had a dilemma. Should he just deal with Ms. Murray, and ignore the email exchange, which was certainly private? Or should he bring in the other teachers and lecture them on respect? Which direction would create the best future for the school?

In the scenario, Principal Anderson is faced with a situation in which trust has been breached, and there is a lack of open communication among the parties. The invitational model would suggest that he find a way to bring Ms. Murray and the gossiping teachers together in a non-threatening environment, to enable all sides of the conversation to be heard. As the vignette illustrates, invitational leadership has a highly personal and ethical character, which is included within its modular constructs.

Let’s look at the four assumptions (optimism, respect, trust, and intentionality) as they relate to the vignette. If Principal Anderson was cynical, he might dismiss Ms. Murray as a hopeless case, and laugh along with the other teachers. However, the invitational model shifts the focus from negative to positive.

Using the four assumptions (optimism, respect, trust, and intentionality), Principal Anderson would understand that Ms. Murray was still a work in progress, and he would believe in her potential. He would realize that her creativity and quirkiness were, if tapped appropriately, assets rather than liabilities, and would attempt to transmit that notion to the other teachers. He would work with Ms. Murray, helping her hone goals that would make her a better teacher.

As principal, you are expected to be one of, if not the best teacher in the building. You can’t be an effective principal if you were never an effective teacher. It’s like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. It just won’t work. As the instructional leader, you must spend at least 20 percent of your time observing teachers, evaluating them, and helping them to grow.

You can’t do this unless you know what good teaching looks like, and as I have already established, this comes with experience. If you are up for the challenge, you will see your teachers blossom under your tutelage and instructional leadership. If you are not, then you will see your students suffer, all because you wanted to escape the rigors of the classroom and become a principal. Just calling a spade a spade.

Now let’s practice your ability to give teachers corrective feedback. In the scenario below, Principal Cho must confront Mr. Raffles about his lack of emotional intelligence. What are three constructive things she could say that would allow him to connect more solidly with his students? Reflect on your answer and use your thoughts to inform your practice.

Scenario: Jeremy Raffles was a physics and chemistry teacher at Elton Park High School. He had graduated with top honors from one of the most prestigious universities in the country, and the principal, Laura Cho, felt honored that he had chosen to teach at Elton. In his first two years, he’d transformed the science lab, bringing in new equipment and creating elaborate experiments, and he dazzled the staff with his impromptu lectures on new techniques in teaching chemistry.

Ms. Cho always gave teachers a bye their first year – she figured that it took a year to settle in and find their style. After the second year, she would evaluate their performance. When she looked at the grades of the older science students after Mr. Raffles’ second year at Elton Park, she was dismayed: nearly all of the grades, except for those of the extremely gifted students, had dropped since Mr. Raffles had begun teaching.

Ms. Cho called some of the students into her office and asked them to describe their learning experiences with Mr. Raffles. It emerged that, while they respected his intelligence, he had an off-putting, and at times wooden, manner. He would occasionally ignore or mock questioners if he felt he’d already covered the material. One student complained that when she went to the lab after school for assistance, he’d shouted at her to leave, because he was in the middle of an experiment. He seemed to talk only to the top two students in the class, and they were the only ones who could understand him.

Following the conversation, Ms. Cho realized that she would have to confront Mr. Raffles, and talk to him about the need to connect emotionally with his students. A brilliant academic pedigree was excellent, but it needed to be accompanied by empathy and good manners if learning was to take place.

To help Mr. Raffles develop the emotional intelligence skills that he needs, Principal Cho should consider creating a list of areas for improvement that would include academic skills and lab organization (at which he excels) as well as self-awareness, social awareness, and relationship management, three areas where he lacks skills. In evaluating his responses to the list, she might start by emphasizing his intellect and lab skills, and then move on to a detailed, point-by-point explanation of what social awareness entails. This method would appeal to his rigorous scientific nature and would allow him to work through the issues intellectually.

A lot of education leaders wait until there is a problem before they make changes. This is not the optimal way to respond to challenges. You have to be proactive and practice a philosophy of continuous improvement. Continuous improvement means that instead of waiting for problems to occur, you regularly work on perfecting and updating your practices and procedures, no matter how well they are working. Essentially, you are always trying to be better. However, this does not mean that you constantly change things. In some instances, you are just monitoring the situation or process, and watching for possible signs that it needs to be improved.

For example, if school discipline referrals are at a historic low in their high school, most principals would toot their own horn, publicize their success and keep using the same process for handling discipline issues. Then they are caught off guard when discipline referrals suddenly spike the next year. If they were continuously monitoring the situation, they would see that the drop in discipline referrals was due to the hard work of two veteran teachers (grades 9^th and 11^th), and a football coach (20+ years).

The teachers and the coach required that students adhere to a level of decency in their classrooms and all others. Although she knew that they had an impact on school discipline, she never recognized the extent of their influence, as she placed too much faith in her own self-efficacy. Well, to make a long story short, these educators retired and left a leadership vacuum that went unfilled.

If the principal had recognized this beforehand, she could have asked these teachers to coach up their colleagues, helping them to develop the same type of influence, through tried and true measures. During their final year, they could have led professional development sessions that focused on just that. This is what we mean by continuous improvement. Now the principal is stuck spending most of their day handling student discipline, instead of being the complete leader that they would like to be.

As a principal, not everything will go your way. You will make plenty of mistakes, and at times you will fail. There may even be times when you won’t be able to isolate the cause of a problem. In these times, you must rely on your skills as a reflective practitioner.

Being a reflective practitioner means that when problems arise and you feel confounded or unsure of yourself, you take some time to reflect. Reflecting on a situation or issue, allows you to think critically about it, thus allowing you to formulate a series of appropriate responses. Afterward, you just implement your series of actions, and take a breath a sigh of relief when you see results.

Let’s look a scenario in which a principal is facing a complex issue, with lots of moving parts. After reflecting on the situation, he formulates long-term solutions that end up bringing the community together. After you finish reading the vignette, think of two additional strategies that the principal could have used. Reflect on your answer, using your thoughts to inform your practice.

Scenario: During the great recession of the late 2000s, many families from poor socioeconomic backgrounds fled inner city areas and moved to thriving, middle-class cities nearby. Principal Joseph Gutierrez’s school was located in a district that straddled a middle-class area populated mainly by European Americans and a much poorer area, where the housing was relatively inexpensive. During the flight from the inner cities, many socioeconomically disadvantaged families, most of them African American and Hispanic, moved into the poor area, and the number of minority students at his school nearly doubled.

Faced with a sudden drop in test scores, frictions between the middle-class and lower-class students, and an increased dropout rate, Principal Gutierrez realized he had to completely overhaul his school. Quick-fix solutions like begging the community for mentors to help disadvantaged students study during testing periods were not going to do much in the long run.

After extended discussions with staff members and the school board, he instigated monthly meetings for parents. He got local restaurants and taxi services to commit to providing free food and rides to and from the meetings, and teachers volunteered to provide activities for the children.

The parents held directed discussions on issues such as nutrition, bedtimes, and homework, with an emphasis on creating structures that would assist each other. Out of the discussions grew a network that extended across the socioeconomic lines. Over time, students’ test scores stabilized, and the communities grew closer together.