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Matthew Lynch published in list, Matthew Lynch, Policy & Reform

3 Ideas to Consider about Corporal Punishment in Schools

It’s difficult to believe in this day and age that we still have some schools around the nation that are using corporal punishment as a form of discipline. 19 states allow corporal punishment in schools. Such punishment usually includes a spanking of some kind, typically done with a wooden paddle. Although not allowed in the majority of states, it is reported that there are over 200,000 children who are victims of it each year around the country. It’s difficult to imagine that so many children are going home throughout the school year with welts, bruises, and broken vessels, as punishment for something they did in school.

Spankings themselves, as well as corporal punishment, are controversial topics at best. There is a lot of evidence and research that has pointed to the fact that spanking as a form of punishment, at any age, can be problematic. We as a society need to be aware of this research, especially when it comes to it still being allowed in the schools of 19 of our states. Here are some of the most troubling aspects of corporal punishment in schools:

  1. Research indicates that children who are disciplined with spanking go on to have more mental illness as adults. Spanking has been linked to children becoming adults who not only have mental health issues, but also experience more depression, and have problems with substance abuse.
  2. Spanking children has also been shown to make them become adults who are more aggressive, antisocial, and who go on to abuse their own spouse and children.
  3. As a nation, we are concerned with our high school dropout rates. This makes me wonder how many adults would want to continue showing up at their jobs if they knew they would be paddled if they didn’t perform their jobs correctly. Perhaps if students were not being paddled, they may hang in there a while longer and take to their studies a little better.

Corporal punishment may be under attack, but until we outlaw it from every state in the country, we will have the problems associated with it each year. And those problems, as we have discussed, are far reaching and long lasting. They impact us as a society long after the child has completed their schooling.

While the Supreme Court allows corporal punishment in whatever states and school districts have it legally on the books, this is a matter of ethics. We as a nation need to do what is right by the next generation. By the looks of it, if corporal punishment continues in the 19 states it is currently allowed in, we will be raising a lot of children who may go on to have mental illnesses, be more aggressive, abuse their spouses, and have addiction problems.

Once they are adults, society can point the finger at them and say that it’s their own fault, and they have created the problems in their life by the choices they have made. But if we can agree that the writing is on the wall, and the potential long term impact is there, then we may need to start pointing a few fingers at the schools, as they are using a form of punishment that experts agree goes on to create more unwanted behavior.

Now is the time for parents around the nation, especially those who live in states where corporal punishment is still allowed, to take a stand. It’s time that we focus on more peaceful and less harmful ways to teach the children of the nation right from wrong. Getting rid of the paddles in the schools of this nation is a great place to start.

 

 

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Matthew Lynch published in Education Leadership, Matthew Lynch

Empowering Leadership Behavior in Schools: Lessons Learned from the Business Sector

Empowering leadership behavior includes encouraging of self-reward systems, self-leadership, opportunity awareness, participation in goal setting, and independent behavior by followers and group members. In other words, it’s all about helping followers take ownership of their positions, toward the greater good of the organization. And, as studies have shown, the effects are often positive and far-reaching

Empowering leaders, through positive emotional support and encouragement, increases  motivation and confidence among subordinates as they set out to accomplish their individual and organizational goals. Therefore, empowering leadership can be quite useful, particularly as a behavioral tactic for entrepreneurs, who must gain commitment from those they work with in order to compete against bigger, more established, and resource-rich enterprises.

Additionally, empowering leadership behavior in entrepreneurs is crucial in dynamic environments. Entrepreneurs attempting to lead their ventures toward higher growth while operating in ever-changing conditions can benefit from adopting an  empowering leadership style. It is an effective way to distribute leadership throughout the management team. This enhances the shaping of emerging strategy, which harnesses the individual talents of each team member that are most relevant to the current situation.

However, there are some negative effects that come with empowering leadership, which are often left out of leadership literature. One of the disadvantages of empowering diverse teams is that it can be counterproductive. Empowering leadership can cause incompatibility among certain innovative enterprises.

In addition, empowered management teams tend to seek out too much information before making decisions. They may also attempt to follow too many opportunities, without refining a single business concept to establish a solid basis in the market. These challenges more often occur in experienced firms with diverse top management teams.

Diverse teams can be quite effective at considering multiple alternatives and making sense of challenging situations, but they are much slower to reach agreement on decisions. Different perspectives within top management teams can produce conflict, slowing the decision-making process.

We can conclude that empowering management teams can provide greater opportunity for conflicts to emerge. Conflicts among team members are likely to be particularly damaging to ventures operating in dynamic environments, where decision-making must be speedy in order to take advantage of the brief windows of opportunity . Entrepreneurs should be cautious about when and where to empower their management teams.

In fast-changing environments, empowerment reduces the new enterprise’s performance, causing the relationship between the  management team’s diversity and the new venture’s performance to become increasingly negative. In more stable industry environments, this kind of empowerment leadership behavior is more likely to have a positive effect on the performance of new ventures with non-uniform top management teams . This is because the information available is clearer and there is more time available for planning.

Stable environments allow the empowered top management teams to spend more time considering what alternative strategies are available, and exploring the potential for various innovative activities, since total agreement is not urgent. As a result, there is generally less conflict within empowered diverse teams operating in stable environments.

School leaders seeking effectiveness should learn from entrepreneurs, and particularly those from start-ups in fast-moving industries, which tend to be highly creative. They should strive to create environments in which positive ideas are encouraged, and in which there is ample opportunity for those ideas to be put in place.

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Matthew Lynch published in Parental Involvement

Are parents missing from schools or are they being pushed out?

**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.**

A guest column by Regina Paul

Dr. Matthew Lynch’s “Parents: The Missing Ingredient in K–12 Success” in the September 24 issue of The Edvocate is insightful as far as it goes, though that is not far enough.  Dr. Lynch writes, “As K-12 academic standards become more rigorous, parents are becoming an even more integral piece of a student’s success.”  Yes, most of us policymakers and advocates would agree that parents should understand what their children are expected to learn in school and should be engaged in helping them learn it.  That goes for parents with college educations, parents with high school educations, and parents with grade school educations.  That goes for parents with great jobs, parents with not-great jobs, and parents with no jobs.  In fact, as we prove time and again, all parents can help teach their children.  

Some three decades ago when the Cleveland Public Schools were the subject of a long Court-ordered desegregation case, we worked on behalf of the Federal District Court to establish new reading curriculum objectives for grades 1 through 9 and to develop new districtwide tests to see whether children were learning the new objectives.  It sounds so old-fashioned now, but it worked.  Reading improved, but not just because of what teachers did in the classroom.

Reading improved because we sent the new reading objectives home to every family of every child in those nine grades—the actual objectives that teachers taught every day.  On the back of the Reading Skills Checklist (there was one for each grade), we had an important tagline—Remember:  The schools cannot do it all alone.  We followed up the parent checklists with Reading at Home:  A Parent’s Guide to Helping Children Read (there was one for each grade), which explained each objective, gave some easy-to-do activities for parents to use to teach it, and gave a sample test question from the districtwide test.  We sent a parent handbook to every family of every child in those nine grades.  

Many people told us that parents in Cleveland were way too busy to help their children learn to read.  Many people told us that parents in Cleveland wouldn’t be able to help their children learn to read even if they wanted to.  Many people were wrong on both counts.

When we did the same thing a few years later in the Savannah-Chatham County Public Schools—this time with parent checklists and parent handbooks for language arts, mathematics, science, social studies, and health objectives for each marking period—we got the same pushback.  People told us that the parents who still had children in the public schools after desegregation were just not able to do what we imagined.  They told us we were wasting the district’s money.  They were wrong again.

When the school district was late sending out Savannah’s parent checklists at the beginning of the next school year, the principals said their phones were ringing off the hook, with parents calling to say, “Where is my checklist?  How do you expect me to help my child this year when you haven’t sent me my checklist?”  Standardized test scores improved so much that the testing company rescored the tests; gains like that were never seen, the testing company said.

So, I know that parents can make a big difference—maybe all the difference.  But here is a problem I have run into in some of the hundred school districts I have worked with:  Some schools and school districts are staffed with professionals who would rather that parents just stayed out of the way.  They are willing for parents to come to back-to-school night in the fall, to take part in fundraisers, to sign homework before it is turned in or tests after they are graded, and to attend twice-yearly parent-teacher conferences.  But are they willing to give parents any power, any say about how things are done?

Are they willing to let parents have a voice in the curriculum, for example?  Not long ago, I attended a statewide PTA convention.  The Common Core and its matching statewide tests were all most people were talking about.  Yet, there was not one workshop session about the Common Core, the tests, or any curriculum topic.  The sessions were about how to get more PTA members, how to conduct meetings, and how to raise money—all useful topics, but far less important than what kids are being taught.  The exhibit hall was full of parents with misinformation about the Common Core and the tests being used to measure them, but there was not a workshop to be found.  Who was benefitting from the parents’ confusion?

My question is this:  Are the parents missing or are they being pushed out?  Do they even realize that they are often being held at arm’s length?  Could they do more if they were invited in?  Would schools be better if parents had a real voice in more school decisions, if they wielded real power and not just a rubber stamp?

One clear path to increased parent power is for parents to run for local school boards.  As someone who has worked with and trained literally thousands of school board members nationwide, I can honestly say that I think there is no nobler calling.  I continue to be amazed at how smart and perceptive most school boards are when their members are working together to improve schools.  Parents, if you haven’t attended a school board meeting lately—or ever—it is time.  Watch the way the board handles its power.

And when you go, ask the board to discuss its policies on parent involvement.  Look at how parents in your school district are encouraged and expected to engage with teachers and administrators.  Are there structures in place that put any power in the hands of parents and that give parents a real voice in important decisions?  If there are policies that call for real engagement, then you are lucky.  Make sure you take advantage of them—in the best possible way.

________________

Regina H. Paul is president of Policy Studies in Education (PSE), a nonprofit organization with more than 40 years of experience in working with schools, local and state boards of education, state and federal education agencies, foundations, professional associations, and colleges to improve education.  Ms. Paul is the co-host of NYCollegeChat, a weekly podcast for parents about negotiating the world of college, and the co-author of a new book, How To Find the Right College:  A Workbook for Parents of High School Students.  She blogs regularly at ParentChatwithRegina.org.

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Matthew Lynch published in Education Leadership, Matthew Lynch

The Principal’s Role in Improving Student Learning

Increased attention at both the local and national levels on improving student learning has resulted in a growing expectation in some states and districts for principals to be effective instructional leaders. Consider these statistics: nearly 7,000 students drop out of U.S. high schools every day and, every year approximately 1.2 million teenagers leave the public school system without a diploma or an adequate education. There are 2,000 high schools in America in which less than 60% of students graduate within four years after entering ninth grade.

The situation is not much brighter for students who do earn a high school diploma, and enter a two –year or four-year institutions. In community colleges, approximately 40% of freshmen (and approximately 20% in public, four-year institutions) are in need of basic instruction in reading, writing, or mathematics before they can perform in college-level courses. It is vital that principals advocate for these students and provide leadership to reverse this appalling educational outcome.

The failure of many public school districts to provide the working conditions that well-trained principals need to prosper is often a central reason for these ongoing graduation and future preparation issues. By having access to resources and being committed to school reform, principals are able to work with teachers to create school environments that facilitate excellence in learning.

The issues that principals need to work on with teachers include aligning instruction with a standards-based curriculum to provide a good measure of achievement, and improving both student learning and classroom instruction by effectively organizing resources. Principals must use sound hiring practices, ensure professional development is available at their schools, and keep abreast of issues that may influence the quality of teaching in schools.

While having good leaders in place is crucial, it is not always enough. If principals don’t have supportive work environments for their improvement efforts, then even the most talented and best-trained individuals may be discouraged by the challenges they face on a daily basis. Districts where no major high school improvements have been made don’t have a cohesive agenda for improvement. Such an agenda would specify clear goals, research-based practices, improvement-focused accountability, and strategies to support implementation. In practice, schools without such an agenda can often be characterized by disjointed actions. Many of the principals in such schools report that they are not involved in defining existing instructional issues in their schools.

The district (or state) makes these decisions , meaning that principals have little ownership of their problems or the proposed solutions to them. They also report having little support or motivation to find solutions, and that they do not feel there is a well-designed system of improvement. Rather, they feel that “improvements” are undertaken in a series of random acts.

When decision-making is shared, leadership roles are redefined at all levels. Principals are supported by district staff members, not blocked by them. District staff members make frequent visits to schools to provide coaching, technical assistance, and staff development. Teachers benefit from continuous professional development;principals have sufficient autonomy and resources to engage and develop staff. Professional development may target groups or individual teachers, and the teachers are given opportunities to work together on curriculum and instruction.

In contrast, many districts focus on educational management instead of educational leadership. The support provided to improve instruction in these districts is not grounded in research on effective teaching. In addition, these districts lack a systemic approach to improvement and fail to provide principals with the guidance and support they require to reform processes and put effective instructional practices into place.

Many principals spend much of their time finding ways to work around the district office, rather than with them. To obtain the support they need, they often decide to avoid hiring protocols and develop “underground” relationships with individual staff in the district office. Supportive district leaders understand the challenging work principals must do, as in many cases they have been successful principals themselves.

These district leaders support principals’ focus on instruction and acknowledge that priority by publicly focusing on curriculum and instruction in school board and superintendents’ meetings. Rather than micromanaging staff, they routinely involve school and teacher-leaders in developing and using tools such as walk-throughs, pacing guides, and research-based instructional practices.

The best districts have developed a collaborative “lattice” approach between the central office and the school. This entails districts providing good principals with the support they need to enable their schools to succeed. When given the space by the district to focus on improving their schools, principals can then support their teachers to do the same. The focus of districts must be on raising standards and achievement, and improving instruction by supporting and enabling principals to develop their ability as instructional leaders.

 

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Matthew Lynch published in Education Leadership, Matthew Lynch

Understanding Strategy and Strategic Leadership

Strategy leadership involves decision-making aimed at shaping the direction of the organization. In a school, creating strategy takes time, three to five years and beyond. Strategy also includes considering broader core issues and themes for development in the school, instead of day-to-day issues.
Strategic planning is held to be one among a number of development approaches. While strategy can be a framework to set future direction and action, it can also be used to judge current activities. A strategically focused school is educationally effective in the short term, but also has a clear set of processes to translate the core purpose and vision into an excellent educational provision that is sustainable over time.

Through strategic leadership, this broad activity is linked to shorter-term operational planning, responses to immediate events, and the long-term strategic direction. In simple terms, strategic leadership defines the vision and moral purpose of the school and translates them into the desired action.

In their analysis of data from interviews with leaders possessing high-level strategic skills, Davies, Davies, and Ellison (2005) split their research findings into two categories – what strategic leaders do and what characteristics they possess. Their analysis established that strategic leaders participate in five main activities.

1. They Set the Direction of the School

This activity relates to the traditional definition of strategy as a pattern of decisions that set the direction of the organization. Strategy is the actual framework of choices that is relied upon to determine the nature and direction of an organization. The following summarizes what strategic leaders do:

• They set the direction of the school.
• Dissatisfied with the present, they challenge and question..
• They turn strategy into action.
• They prioritize their own strategic thinking and learning by re-framing their understanding and that of others.
• They align the people and the organization with the strategy.
• They display strategic wisdom based on a clear value system.
• They know when to intervene.
• They network.
• They develop strategic capabilities within the school.
• They have high-quality people skills.

2. They Translate Strategy into Action

While most schools establish plans, few translate them into action. Strategic leaders are good “completer-finishers.” They were capable of not only “seeing ahead” but also “seeing it through.” This characteristic of strategic leaders is born of their ability to focus on a limited number of issues and move forward on those issues.

It is key that a leader be seen as a person who not only builds a sense of purpose and direction in the school, but also as one who translates them into reality.

There is a danger where strategy is seen as a desirable activity, and in consequence so much time is spent designing strategic frameworks and plans. Thus the question that emerges is: “How do we translate these frameworks into the capacity to move toward better outcomes in the school?” A strategic leader uses his or her strategic ability to translate strategic vision into action.

3. They Align the People, the Organization, and the Strategy

It is vital that school leaders build in-depth capacity within the school to deliver the strategy. Davies (2003) suggested a four-stage approach that, first, articulates the strategy in oral, written, or structural ways; second, builds a common understanding through shared experiences; third, creates a shared mental image of the future through dialogue; and fourth, defines the desired outcomes.

4. They Determine Effective Strategic Intervention Points

An important aspect of strategic leadership is timing. Knowing when to make a change is as important as the change itself. This critical issue arises from rational analysis or leadership intuition. Discerning when both external circumstances and internal conditions can be effectively managed toward successful change is significant in effective leadership.

The issue of strategic timing goes hand in hand with the concept of strategic abandonment. The issue that comes up is that of differentiating between abandonment of things that are not working well and abandoning those that were satisfactory in pursuit.

A key ability of strategic leaders is not only knowing when to make a change, but knowing how to free up organizational space to have the capacity to move into a new strategic direction.

5. They Develop Strategic Capabilities in the School

A good example of long-term competency is the fundamental understanding of learning and the varying needs of students. Strategic leaders agree that more focus should be on the development of long-term abilities.
If leaders develop strategic abilities, they would achieve more, in the form of a reflective-learning culture in teaching staff, a no-blame problem-solving approach, and a deeper understanding of learning.

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Matthew Lynch published in Education Leadership, Matthew Lynch

Empowering Leadership Behavior in Schools: Lessons Learned from the Business Sector

Empowering leadership behavior includes encouraging of self-reward systems, self-leadership, opportunity awareness, participation in goal setting, and independent behavior by followers and group members. In other words, it’s all about helping followers take ownership of their positions, toward the greater good of the organization. And, as studies have shown, the effects are often positive and far-reaching.

Empowering leaders, through positive emotional support and encouragement, increases motivation and confidence among subordinates as they set out to accomplish their individual and organizational goals. Therefore, empowering leadership can be quite useful, particularly as a behavioral tactic for entrepreneurs, who must gain commitment from those they work with in order to compete against bigger, more established, and resource-rich enterprises.

Additionally, empowering leadership behavior in entrepreneurs is crucial in dynamic environments. Entrepreneurs attempting to lead their ventures toward higher growth while operating in ever-changing conditions can benefit from adopting an empowering leadership style. It is an effective way to distribute leadership throughout the management team. This enhances the shaping of emerging strategy, which harnesses the individual talents of each team member that are most relevant to the current situation.

However, there are some negative effects that come with empowering leadership, which are often left out of leadership literature. One of the disadvantages of empowering diverse teams is that it can be counterproductive. Empowering leadership can cause incompatibility among certain innovative enterprises.

In addition, empowered management teams tend to seek out too much information before making decisions. They may also attempt to follow too many opportunities, without refining a single business concept to establish a solid basis in the market. These challenges more often occur in experienced firms with diverse top management teams.

Diverse teams can be quite effective at considering multiple alternatives and making sense of challenging situations, but they are much slower to reach agreement on decisions. Different perspectives within top management teams can produce conflict, slowing the decision-making process.

We can conclude that empowering management teams can provide greater opportunity for conflicts to emerge. Conflicts among team members are likely to be particularly damaging to ventures operating in dynamic environments, where decision-making must be speedy in order to take advantage of the brief windows of opportunity . Entrepreneurs should be cautious about when and where to empower their management teams.

In fast-changing environments, empowerment reduces the new enterprise’s performance, causing the relationship between the management team’s diversity and the new venture’s performance to become increasingly negative. In more stable industry environments, this kind of empowerment leadership behavior is more likely to have a positive effect on the performance of new ventures with non-uniform top management teams . This is because the information available is clearer and there is more time available for planning.

Stable environments allow the empowered top management teams to spend more time considering what alternative strategies are available, and exploring the potential for various innovative activities, since total agreement is not urgent. As a result, there is generally less conflict within empowered diverse teams operating in stable environments.

School leaders seeking effectiveness should learn from entrepreneurs, and particularly those from start-ups in fast-moving industries, which tend to be highly creative. They should strive to create environments in which positive ideas are encouraged, and in which there is ample opportunity for those ideas to be put in place.

 

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Matthew Lynch published in Education Leadership, list, Matthew Lynch

4 Transformational Leadership Practices That Motivate Teachers

The emotions of teachers are an often ignored, but very important part of a school’s learning climate. With each decision or policy they put in place, school leaders have an effect on the emotions of their teachers. Transformational leadership practices that have emotional consequences reflect four sets of “core practices” for effective leadership. These practices form a major part of what most successful school leaders do, in many different organizational and cultural contexts. Here are four core practices that keep teachers excited to come to work every day.

  1. Direction-setting. The practices of school leaders geared at building an inclusive sense of purpose in the school, and a grasp of the specific goals often leads to success, and broader school purposes are also accomplished. Most successful school leaders set higher expectations for their own performance as well as those of their teaching staff and students.
  2. Focusing on helping teachers improve professionalism. The development of teachers’ capacities includes most of the principal practices that influence teachers’ feelings. These practices include: being genuinely friendly, considerate, supportive, attentive to teachers’ ideas, and mindful of teachers’ welfare. School leaders who provide individualized consideration and learning opportunities build the teachers’ need to accomplish their own goals as well as those of the school. Success in building capacity is also achieved by reducing distractions to instructional work, as well as modeling values and practices that are aligned with the teachers’ core purpose.
  3. Redesigning the organization. This entails building a culture that is supportive and collaborative in teaching and learning, and creating and sustaining school structures that complement such a culture. In this context, successful principals nurture productive relationships with parents and the entire community, to influence future policies and prevent situations that might affect the school.
  4. Managing the instructional program. This aspect of leadership basically requires instructional knowledge. It includes efforts by school leaders to ensure that their schools have highly competent staff, to observe the progress of students and the school improvement, to monitor teachers’ instructional practices, and to provide supportive, helpful feedback to their staff.

Based on the extensive research carried out in both educational and non-school contexts, it is evident that emotionally responsive practices are closely associated with social assessment abilities. These abilities enable one to appreciate the emotional states of others, find out what those states entail in complex social situations, respond in helpful ways, and manage one’s own emotions.

Transformational leaders are known for their emotional capabilities and are prepared to include it in their professional life, despite the fact that it may involve breaking the traditions of professional culture and norms to maintain and repair relationships. They realize that building trusting relationships is vital for a cooperative culture.

References

Transformational leadership is a theory of leadership that was developed by James Burns (1978), and has been written about by many other scholars since then. To read more of James Burns’ work on transformational leadership and other topics, click here to visit his Amazon.com page.

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Matthew Lynch published in Education Leadership, Matthew Lynch

The Eight Principles of Ethical Leadership in Education

While there has always been a requirement for ethics in leadership, the last hundred years have seen a shift in the paradigm of leadership ethics. Leadership for the 21st century is grounded in moral and ethical virtues, but the challenge is to define what exactly moral and ethical virtues are and how they should be measured and implemented. What qualifies as ethical in the educational context? What character traits are associated with ethical leadership? What is the application of leadership ethics within the U.S. school setting?

George Marshall’s Eight Principles of Ethical Leadership offer a strong scaffold for administrators who seek guidance on how to implement ethical practices in their schools. These principles add to the significant conversation about ethical leadership happening within the educational community, and in fact across the public domain. Ethics are a key domain in public administration, in particular, the school setting thanks to the vast number of schools in the United States, their community integration, and their importance for society as a whole.

Read on to learn about how the Eight Principles of Ethical Leadership can be effectively applied to the school environment.

  1. Personal Courage – While it seems that the challenges that schools are facing increase by the day, it’s still the case that in order to create a positive educational environment, administrators must be willing to stand up against policies that they feel are not helpful for their students, rising against both local, state and national interests as needed. Dissenting opinions are must essentially be expressed, even in the face of the administrators own superiors.
  2. Public Interest Ahead of Self – What is best for students and staff must be placed ahead of the needs of the individual leader. In this case the public interest is understood to be the interest of the school community, and the stakeholders therein. Their opinions and needs should always precede the self interests of the school leader.
  3. Self Control, Self Discipline and Integrity – All types of leadership essentially include these three traits in order to be considered ethical . Followers in the wider community look to leaders in all capacities, and as such, it’s necessary for leaders to be a positive role model and force in the lives of the stakeholders. Relationships between leaders and followers should not rely too heavily on trust, but rather should be built on mutual respect and ethical actions.
  4. Task and Employee Centeredness – School leaders must create a foundation of success that draws from the strengths of the teachers and staff who interact with students. Successful school leaders focus on both the needs of students and the needs of staff when they make decisions. The key is balancing energy between the current task while also creating unity by building on the varied needs of students and teachers.
  5. Recognizing Talent – Ethical leaders recognize the talent of their followers. This means that administrators identify both staff and students who display the qualities of excellence and then go on to recognize and promote those individuals in ways that create goodwill among all of the members of the school community. The other side of recognizing talent is maximizing it – so placing people where they’re talents are most useful to everyone. This affords opportunities to both individuals and to the organization as a whole.
  6. Requiring High Ethics From Everyone – Administrators need not only concern themselves with their own ethical standards but also with the ethical standards of others in their organization. That includes not only teachers and staff, but extends to students and parents. These standards must be communicated clearly and enforced without exception in order to be effective.
  7. Sensitivity and Understanding – This applies to the political, social and economic environment of the stakeholders in the school settings. Sensitivity and understanding are necessary in order to practice equity among members of the school community. One of the most challenging areas of the ethical picture, this practice must be implemented through educational as well as institutional policies.
  8. Inclusiveness – A sense of belonging is key to gaining trust within an organization, and trust a driving factor in success in any context but most especially within the educational context. Inclusiveness requires that all stakeholders be brought into process of making and implementing decisions. Consideration of, and respect for, members of the organization has been shown to motivate followers and lift morale, thereby increasing school performance and effectiveness.

When school leaders follow these eight points of ethical consideration, they are far more likely to gain a higher degree of success in their school environment. Schools are uniquely charged with not only affecting the people who walk through their doors every day, but the transitory nature of the population means that administrators and staff have that much more of a responsibility to execute their jobs ethically. Solid ethical practices are inspiring to followers, earning respect for instructional authority and leading by example.

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Matthew Lynch published in Education Leadership, Matthew Lynch

Parallels Between Entrepreneurial Traits and School Leadership

Most school leaders don’t play a part in recruiting teaching staff, but are largely responsible for their development. Career development of teachers depends on the school culture and environment. School leadership must shape a school system in order to allow the growth of teacher professionalism and instructional capacity.

School leaders are supposed to shape teaching staff to gain other skills by assigning duties that are non-academic : e.g., bus duty, sports supervision, and coaching instruction. Similarly, school leaders should try to retain the most productive teachers without stifling their growth. The same predicament befalls entrepreneurs in Small Market Enterprises (SME’s). An entrepreneurial school leader strives to ensure that their school retains the most competitive, productive teaching staff, leading to better student results.

Good entrepreneurs conceive and implement workable communication channels to achieve meaningful results. School leaders could use this in dealing with teaching staff and students. Communication has always been an important part of leadership. Since successful entrepreneurs are good communicators, school leaders need to keep their communication channels open and develop good listening and negotiation skills.

School leaders also need to keep teaching staff motivated, because satisfied employees produce better results. It is up to the school leader to create innovative motivation techniques for staff satisfaction. While school leaders don’t have the same powers as entrepreneurs in raising teachers’ wages, they must implement non-monetary motivation techniques, such as creating a conducive workplace with reduced stress and burnout levels, and a friendly school culture.

Most teachers quit work for similar reasons as other employees, including feeling under-appreciated , broken agreements, harassment by superiors, or unpleasant working environments. Entrepreneurial school leaders should avoid the mistakes that lead to those situations. Employees associate leader empathy and fairness with a highly motivational culture. Therefore, school leaders should try to develop these traits. Job satisfaction is strongly influenced by the sense of job freedom, as well as satisfaction with the leadership style .

The basic requirements for successful entrepreneurship include appropriate wage systems, team building, and a satisfactory internal communication system. Since higher wages are not necessarily a motivator , team-building and internal communication systems are most applicable to the school setting.

Separating entrepreneurs into “employee friendly” and “employee distant,” we assess how these two entrepreneurial characters apply in relation to the teaching staff’s perception of the school leader.. “Employee friendly” leaders are more creative in designing the right motivational and communication structure in their organizations, and possess empathy and fairness, providing higher motivation and job satisfaction for employees than “employee distant” leaders. Teachers would almost certainly prefer the friendly leader over the distant one.

This preference, however, does not affect entrepreneurial leadership, since it is more concerned with ends than means. Entrepreneurial leaders find a balance between empathy and authority.

Empowering leadership behavior includes encouraging self-reward systems, self-leadership, opportunity perception, participative goal-setting, and autonomous behavior by followers. In the school setting, freedom should be granted to teachers where classroom instruction is involved, and they should also be involved in decision-making processes.

Empowering school leaders increase the motivation and confidence of their followers toward the accomplishment of the school objectives through positive encouragement and support. In the school setting, the school leader should distribute leadership among senior staff-members, who can assist in certain school administrative functions such as student discipline, running sports activities, and participating in tasks that can be delegated.

School leaders should draw a line between the issues that need consensus, and those where they should intervene and make quick decisions. As schools are diverse, due to the variety of careers and interests that converge in the school setting, school leaders should be careful not to allow the problems that come from diversity to slow down decision-making processes. It is advisable that entrepreneurial school leaders in dynamic environments where there is external pressure should avoid complex decision-making processes.

However, in stable environments, such as private schools, leaders can allow the empowered staff to spend more time considering what alternative strategies are available and exploring the potential for various activities, since consensus is not urgent.

Directive leadership behavior in the school setting is instructional in nature. School leaders should instruct teachers on matters regarding the curriculum, formulation of rules, and state policies on educational matters.

School leaders can create a common vision in their school through the setting of rules and by enforcing them through instruction. The benefits of this type of leadership are often faster decision-making and clearer goals.

Exceptional entrepreneurial leadership entails a combination of directive leadership and the other mentioned traits, such as empowerment, recruitment, motivation, and communication. School leaders who wish to pursue this entrepreneurial perspective in their running of the school should adopt this approach. A model of entrepreneurial leadership that is inclusive, participative, motivating, and directive seems to be the most suitable in the school setting.

When it comes to entrepreneurial leadership, research on the application of this model in the school setting is rare. Since the model has been used successfully in the business sector, we can relate the factors that enhance its success to the school setting by drawing parallels. It is possible that most school leaders may also be entrepreneurs, and therefore would embrace this leadership style, which involves the use of talents they may already possess.

 

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Matthew Lynch published in Education Leadership, HBCU's, Higher Education, Matthew Lynch

Past, Present, and Future of Sustainable Leadership

Sustainable leadership builds on the past in an effort to create a better future for schools. This is against most educational change theories, which do not find a place for the past, since the “arrow of change” is thought to move only in a forward direction. Past problems are generally either ignored, or overcome in a rush to get to future improvement.

For those leaders attracted or addicted to change, the past is seen as a monument of backward thinking and irrational resistance for those whom they consider to favor the status quo, or those emotionally incapable of letting go of old habits and beliefs. These leaders consider the past to be a dark era of weak or poor leadership practices that leave negative legacies, models of schooling, or “uninformed” professional judgment in classroom instruction. All of these are negatives are seen as barriers to modernization.

Reform based only on the present or future becomes the opposite of sustainability. Sustainable development has the distinction of respecting, protecting, preserving, and renewing all the valuable elements of the past and learning from those elements to build a better future. One way of getting in touch with the past is to see teacher resistance and nostalgia among members of the profession not as obstacles to change, but as sources of wisdom. Teachers’ years of classroom experience should not be discounted.

Change theory must strive to create proposals that are built upon past legacies, instead of trying to ignore or destroy them. While contemplating changes, sustainable leadership calls on leaders to look to the past for precedents that might be reinvented or refined. Events of the past may also be used as evidence of policies that have succeeded or failed before.

However, the above proposal does not mean that leaders live in the past, but value and learn from it. We have to end “creative destruction,” where leaders see the need to wipe out the past in order to create a future. Creative destruction usually leads to endless back-and-forth movements, increased employee burnout, and the unnecessary waste of expertise and memory that has been accumulated over time. Instead, a creative recombination of the best parts of the past in a resourceful and renewing way should be used.

Through sustainable leadership, leaders should find new structures, technology, and people by finding, redistributing, reusing, and recombining mismatched parts that have been lying around in the school’s organizational “basement.” Sustainable leadership and improvement is concerned with both the future and the past. It refuses to treat people’s knowledge, careers, and experience as disposable waste, because, in reality, they are valuable and renewable resources. In conclusion, sustainable leadership does not blindly endorse the past, but respects and learns from it.

 

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