ncsl

Resource

Inspiring leaders to improve children’s lives

Schools and academies

Middle Leadership Development ProgrammeLeading learning and teaching closing the gap

2 © National College for Leadership of Schools and Children’s Services

Contents

Introduction

Learning strategies

Module 1: Leading and managing the organisation

— The importance of middle leadership

— Defining leadership

— Leading and managing

— Effective middle leaders

Module 2: Leading in a diverse system

— The importance of context

— The leadership context

— Context and learning

— Leadership and context

— Collaboration and partnership working

Module 3: Leading teaching and learning

— Moral purpose

— Closing the gap

— Understanding effective teaching and learning

— Leading teaching and learning

Module 4: Leading people and effective teams

— Leading through trust

— Developing a high performance culture

— Understanding the effective team

— Professional learning and development

Module 5: Leading change and continuous improvement

— Understanding change

— How much change?

— The components of successful change

— Leadership and change


Module 6: Developing your own leadership potential

— Growing as a leader

— Leadership learning

— Well-being and balance

— Resilience and sustainability


Introduction

These modules are designed to provide the structure and basic knowledge for your work on this programme. They have been designed to recognise and respect the enormous amount of experience and knowledge about effective leadership and management that there is in schools but at the same time test understanding, challenge existing practice and offer alternative perspectives. The central focus of the programme is the quality of teaching and learning and identifying and consolidating what is known about leadership and management that supports pupil achievement.

Middle leaders are found in every school and their work can be described in many ways. They can be identified as those who have responsibility for leading subjects, key phases, pastoral responsibilities or other aspects of the school’s work. Middle leaders provide leadership for every educational context, from early years environments to large departments in secondary schools.

Middle leaders are also recognised as increasingly working in whole-school leadership and being involved in leadership roles beyond their own school in the increasingly significant area of systems leadership. Successful leadership for long-term sustainable improvement requires distributed leadership, or leaders that work in different capacities across the school. What is so important that leadership is not seen in terms of personal status but rather as the collective capacity available to the school.

Middle leaders are essential to leading change and innovation and embedding it in the school. They monitor and evaluate, set direction, and lead and build teams that implement change. They have an influential role with colleagues, helping to create a focus on learning and contributing to the ethos that supports it. Typically, they lead an aspect of teaching and learning across the school and are pivotal in securing consistent high-quality teaching and learning. Middle leaders are the first point of reference for most staff and are highly significant in developing a positive ethos and creating outstanding schools.

A range of sources point to some of the most significant characteristics of highly successful middle leaders:

— The personal qualities, leadership strategies and management skills of middle leaders are often the most significant variables influencing team effectiveness.

— Successful middle leaders have the ability to combine personal engagement, professional credibility, a range of leadership styles and systematic management.

— Middle leaders are highly visible, open and available and they work in a transparent way.

— The most effective middle leaders combine personal and organisational imperatives and balance high trust with directive intervention.

— The most effective teams display a high level of consensus about principles and practices.

These modules will support your reflection and learning from experience, in order to help you develop your personal understanding of what it means to be a successful and effective middle leader. The written resources to support your learning on this programme are:

— The framework document: Leading Learning and Teaching: Closing the Gap.

— The introduction and outline to each module that provides an overview of the main themes and the implications for effective middle leadership.

— The extension units that are designed to explore issues in the module in greater depth and to provide alternative perspectives or short overviews of topics that may be of more specific interest.


Learning strategies

Seven key principles of effective professional learning There is no one route to effective learning; in fact there are probably as many routes as there are people. Having said that, there is clearly a range of strategies that most people are able to benefit from and use with varying degrees of success. What is crucial is that learners in any situation are able to engage with learning strategies that are most likely to lead to the following outcomes:

1. Growth in personal understanding and the ability to transfer and apply knowledge in different contexts.

2. Increasing confidence in the ability to accept responsibility and act.

3. Awareness of multiple perspectives and the ability to make choices.

4. The ability to analyse, synthesise and explain.

5. Crucially, the ability to translate principle into practice and to be comfortable with change.

6. The motivation to learn at every opportunity through a range of people and experiences

7. The confidence to continue to grow as a learner with increasingly sophisticated understanding of how learning works.

Strategies

The strategies that are most likely to support these outcomes will include

Reflection and challenge

Developing the ability to review and reflect and so learn from actual experience and respond positively to challenging circumstances and different experiences. Developing self-awareness and the ability to engage in reflexive learning.

Analytical

Learning to synthesise data, develop arguments based on evidence, classify and prioritise that evidence. Make sense of complex data and develop confidence in dealing with abstract concepts.

Principle into practice

Building the confidence to take broad principles and translate them into actual concrete experiences, for example practising changing behaviours – becoming an active listener. Finding examples of successful practice and adapting or modifying them.

Coaching and mentoring

Learning through a one-to-one supportive relationship. Mentoring for long-term developmental needs and coaching for more specific interventions and support. Learning through dialogue and the development of strategies over time, responding positively to challenge and feedback.

Knowledge and information

Developing a personal knowledge base through a structured reading programme and on-line investigation, systematic monitoring of policy developments and engaging in personal research to support reflection and analysis.

Action learning

Collaborative and team based learning through work-based research engaging in a developmental or improvement strategy. Focusing on developmental improvement strategies over time, working in an open and enquiry based way.

Learning on the job

Developing experience and skills by taking on new responsibilities and working in real time and on real tasks e.g. internship. Work shadowing and structured visits can provide useful insights into the realities of working in different contexts.

Delivery methods

Learning may take place:

• face to face

• in the workplace

• during structured visits

• online


Structured support

Structured support may include:

— facilitator support

— learning colleague

— peer-to-peer support

— in-school colleagues including head and senior leaders

— online support

— learning networks

— role modelling

— journaling

— high-quality resources

— guides for reflection and feedback

— purposeful school visits

— informal on-the-job opportunities to rehearse, practise, or reframe

It is most important that this programme complements and reinforces in-school middle-leader development strategies. Its impact will be significantly improved if the messages in the programme are applied in school. Some specific strategieswillbeparticularlyeffective:•Movingtheschool’s language from ‘middle management’ to ‘middle leadership’, with an appropriate change of expectation, that is, focusing on purpose and vision.

— Providing mentoring and coaching to support middle-leader development.

— Encouraging and supporting peer support between middle leaders.

— Developing middle leaders’ confidence and capacity in key leadership functions.

— Providing access to school leadership meetings for middle leaders.

— Using outstanding middle leaders to model best practice.


Module 1: Leading and managing the organisation

The importance of middle leadershipThe debate about the relationship between leadership and management is one of the most fundamental from both academic and professional perspectives. On the one hand it is purely semantic – a debate over definitions; on the other, it is fundamental to our understanding of what makes schools effective. Irrespective of the size, phase or type of school, middle leadership is pivotal to successful education. From the smallest primary school to the largest secondary and every permutation between, middle leadership is a key variable in explaining why schools succeed or fail.

It is a sad reflection of British culture that leadership is so often associated with seniority, age or experience. Equally there are issues around disability, gender and ethnicity that compromise access to leadership. The nature of leadership is a contentious issue and there is a need for clear and explicit definitions of the key terms used in order to avoid ambiguity or misunderstanding.

In spite of the problems there is now a very strong consensus that the quality of leadership is fundamental to school improvement, school effectiveness, achieving high performance and bringing about change and innovation. There does appear to be a high correlation between the quality of leadership and organisational success. It is possible to establish a direct causal relationship between leadership, organisational success, and teacher performance and student achievement. At the same time it is important to remember that leadership needs to be underpinned by effective management; the strategic perspective has to be related to the operational.

Leithwood et al. (2006) explain the growing recognition of the importance of distributed leadership (hence middle leaders rather than middle managers) by focusing on the concept of total leadership; that is, the sum total of leadership available in a school, taking into account middle leaders and leadership in the classroom.

The most significant results of this study for our purposes, however, were the indirect effects of total leadership on student learning and achievement, through its direct effects on the three dimensions of staff performance. Total leadership accounted for a quite significant 27 per cent of the variation in student achievement across schools. This is a much higher proportion of explained variation (two to three times higher) than is typically reported in studies of individual headteacher effects.

The key phrase here is ‘total leadership’, recognising that the work of the leader is important. However, there is substantial leadership available in the school that is not necessarily linked to senior role or status. (See Module 4 for a more detailed discussion of the concept of total leadership.) At this point it may be worth stressing that leadership in this programme is seen as collective capacity or potential rather than personal status. In other words, leadership is expressed and manifested in many different ways and contexts and perhaps the most important is the quality of leadership in the classroom, which in turn is strongly influenced by middle leadership. Figure 1.1 illustrates leadership as collective capacity.

Leadership is often talked of as a career-based hierarchy that inevitably diminishes the status and significance of the core function in schools – the leadership of effective learning in classrooms. However, the attributes of effective leaders and managers remain essentially the same; it is the scale and context that changes. It is perhaps worth stressing that the purpose of leadership and management in schools is to enable high-quality teaching and learning in order to close the gap.

Figure 1.1 Leadership as collective capacity

Classroom leadership

Middle leadership

School leadership


Although it is challenging, effective leadership can be learnt, which is why it is so important to build confidence and extend personal capacity.

Consider the leader who is clear about the principle and purpose but is unable to engage with the people. What about the leader who is clear about purpose and good with the people but has no real sense of principle – a case of the end justifying the means perhaps? What about the leader who is engaged with people and principle but has no sense of purpose, or any clear focus or direction? Clearly the permutations could be explored ad infinitum, but what is very clear is that any leader who does not engage with all three elements is likely to be highly dysfunctional.

Activity 1.1

Using the three ‘Ps’ model reflect on leaders you have known. Does the model help to explain aspects of their relative effectiveness or lack of effectiveness?

One way of understanding the relationship between leadership and management is to define their relative contributions in terms of the way in which an organisation functions. It is also worth introducing routine clerical work into the equation, as it plays an important role in the life of every school. See Figure 1.3.

Leadership Management Administration

doing the right

things

doing things

rightdoing things

path

making path following path tidying

engaging with

complexity

creating

clarity

securing

consistency

Figure1.3 Leadership, management and administration

In this part of the model, leadership is seen as having a responsibility for the values by which the school works – ‘doing the right things’ in Bennis’s famous phrase. What the right things are is highly contestable and will be the product of personal values, the prevailing moral consensus in society and the dominant moral hegemony. Management is concerned with translating principles into actual practice – ‘doing things right’.

Defining leadershipThere are numerous models, theories and prescriptions about leadership. A very superficial review of the vast amount of highly significant literature on educational leadership may be distilled to a very simple proposition:

Leadership in education is concerned with:

• principle – the moral basis of the school

• purpose – the core business of the school

• people – social relationships in the school

Successful leaders are those educationalists who can balance and integrate the three ‘P’s – so that they are balanced and mutually supportive – as shown in Figure 1.2

People Purpose

Principle

Figure 1.2 The nature of leadership

We need to consider the implications of individuals in leadership roles who do not possess each of the elements in an appropriate balance. In an ideal world, we would have leaders where each of the three elements overlaps in such a way as to become virtually contiguous. In reality, we will always be in the situation where we hope for the optimum level of integration. It is worth testing this model against those leaders who you admire most – be they religious, historical, political or community leaders. What is it about them that is special from your perspective? However, it would be naïve to pretend that it is in any way easy or normal to find people with these characteristics. That is why consciously developing leadership capacity is so important.


Management Leadership

Improvement Transformation

Control Trust

Accepting Questioning

Conformity Creativity

Systems/structures Relationships/emotions

Standards Values

Analysis Intuition

Continuity Innovation

Training Coaching

Figure 1.4 The language of leadership

It does so by focusing on systems, structures and delivery – in essence ensuring that the ideal and the aspiration are made concrete. Administration is about doing all the basic tasks: the organisational routines and infrastructure.

Leadership is also concerned with setting the purpose and direction of the school, defining the path forward in the very powerful image defined by Covey – articulating what the school actually exists to do and how it should be in the future. Path following ensures that the journey is actually possible. After the dreamers come the builders. Management is about ensuring that the purpose is reflected across the organisation in its day-to-day working and that everything works. The aspiration for an inclusive school requires a great deal of very hard work to deliver a safe and effective learning environment for all. And administrative work again ensures that everything is in place – the path is kept tidy.

Since leadership is fundamentally concerned with the complexity of human relationships, performance, engagement and motivation, it has to be seen as relational. Leadership only exists in the extent to which there is emotional engagement and sophisticated interpersonal relationships. Management is about deployment of staff, the allocation of resources and delivery, with administration providing the consistency to support all these other factors.

Leading and managingFigure 1.4 provides another way of exploring the relationship between leadership and management. The words chosen are obviously significant value judgements, but one of the key elements in leadership development of the individual – and successful leadership in any organisation – is the development of a working vocabulary that supports meaningful dialogue and the development of shared meaning. The precise meaning of any of these terms will be determined by local custom and practice and by the development, over time, of a common value system leading to a detailed and sophisticated common language.


of each is inhibited by the failure to achieve interdependent working. The balance between leadership and management has to be determined by the context – by the needs of the school at any given time. One of the great skills of highly effective leaders is to get the balance right; to find the optimum relationship that the school needs at a given time.

Leadership

Management

Figure 1.5 Balancing leadership and management

There is little point having inspirational, creative and transformative leadership if there is no infrastructure to convert it into practice. A great artist has to be able to draw, a composer to orchestrate. Equally, if management dominates then there will be bureaucratic neatness, efficiency and order, but the school will be static – the means will be more important than the end. In the worst case, a school will be dominated by a culture of managerialism with reductionist and instrumental strategies dominating.

The range of factors that may determine the balance of management and leadership include the following:

1. The context of the school: is it ‘safe’, is learning secure for all, and does it work in organisational and operational terms?

2. Expectations of staff: often it is easier and more comfortable to be managed rather than led. Leaders may be tempted to secure popularity by supporting through managing rather than challenging through leadership.

3. External pressures: implementation of national and local policies and strategies could lead to a culture of passive responsiveness, that is, the management of policy rather than the development of creative and innovative responses to policy.

Activity 1.2

What is the ‘language of leadership’ in your school and team?

Is there an agreed and consistent vocabulary used across the school that places the emphasis on leadership?

What are the implicit and explicit assumptions about leadership and management in school documentation?

What did the last Ofsted report say about leadership and management in the school?

What are the practical implications of your responses to the above questions?

It is perhaps worth noting in passing that the management column in Figure 1.4 contains many words that are associated with so-called ‘left-brain’ thinking. The leadership vocabulary has many words linked with ‘right-brain’ thinking. Although the brain does not actually work as two distinct hemispheres (an important point about effective principalship) but rather in an integrated way, there are clearly thought patterns in which the logical and rational dominate and thought patterns in which the emotional and creative dominate. Another perspective is that the management list is essentially masculine; the leadership qualities are essentially feminine. A diagram such as Figure 1.4 inevitably creates an artificial polarity. The truth, as always, lies between the extremes.

However, the balance between management and leadership is fundamental to organisational success.

Which is worse?

• A school that is inspirationally led but badly managed

Or

• A school that is efficiently managed but badly led

Or

• A school where bureaucratic systems are more important than personal relationships

The situation is clearly dysfunctional when either leadership or management is out of balance. The lack of one compromises the other and the potential


Effective middle leadersThe central finding of the Making a Difference study was that the success of the teams researched can best be explained through the leadership of the team leaders, all of whom demonstrated a particular combination of:

— personal qualities

— leadership behaviour

— professional credibility

— management skills

No two team leaders manifested exactly the same permutation of factors but all could be found to operate a highly effective balance of leadership and management, personal and organisational concerns, relaxation and rigour; in essence, the classic notion of tight–loose leadership and management. The tight–loose approach refers to the sophisticated model of leadership, where some aspects of the work of an organisation are kept under very strict control and formal accountability. Other aspects are ‘loose’ in the sense of greater trust, levels of delegation and opportunities for choice. This relationship can be demonstrated in the model shown in Figure 1.7, which is central to much that was discovered about effective middle leaders in the Making a Difference project. In the model effective leadership and management occupies a continuum from the very tight control of the operational aspects of the role to relatively loose, that is, high trust in terms of personal relationships. Thus there are non-negotiable aspects of every job: health and safety, safeguarding and the implementation of standard operating procedures and agreed best practice. But there are equally areas where choice and discretion are appropriate.

In the context of closing the gap there is an important parallel, where the focus is on eliminating variation but celebrating variety. It is variation that explains why there is such a gap in the performance of young people across England in terms of the range of those who succeed and fail. Eliminating variation is a powerful means of securing consistent good practice. Celebrating variety is essential in enabling the flair, creativity and professionalism of teachers.

4. Self-perception: many people will be psychologically more comfortable with the role of manager rather than leader; the operational is more comfortable than the strategic.

Management/Operation

A = Administration

A

Leadership/Strategic

Figure 1.6 Reconciling leadership, management and administration

Activity 1.3

Where would you position yourself on the management, operational/leadership, strategic continuum?

Referring to the four factors listed above, what could explain your position on the continuum?

What are the implications for your effective leadership and management of where you are situated?

Good management is important, but it is not enough. In particular, it is doubtful that management will create the high performance, creative and transformational culture that many schools need. It is unlikely that effective management will create and sustain the culture of excitement, energy and enthusiasm that is essential to learning. What is even more certain is that time spent in administration and clerical work, by school leaders, could have a significant opportunity cost, however personally tempting it may be in terms of ease and security.

It is important that school leaders know where they are on the continuum shown in Figure 1.6 and the reasons why they are at that particular point. There is no ‘right answer’ here – rather a clear and conscious choice to work in a particular way, recognizing its implications and accepting the long-term issues that may emerge.


In all educational contexts middle leadership seems to focus on the same basic issues:

— clarity about purpose

— confidence about values

— engagement with people

— implementation and delivery

Activity 1.4

Do you recognise and accept the model of mid-dle leadership effectiveness set out in Figure 1.7?

Where would you position yourself in the grey rectangle?

What does your response to this model imply in terms of your personal and professional develop-ment needs?

Leadership is essential to improvement, change and transformation. However, as has been consistently argued in this module, leadership has to be in a symbiotic relationship with management. Nevertheless, there are some very significant aspects of leadership that need to be highlighted and reinforced because of their potential for making an impact.

The effective middle leader is confident in applying the following leadership strategies:

— Contribute to the leadership of the school through leadership processes, roles and relationships and engagement with whole school issues.

— Ensure alignment and engagement with the school’s values and principles and through dialogue build understanding and commitment.

— Monitor and develop understanding of national and school policy initiatives and apply them as appropriate.

— Provide professional leadership to secure outstanding classroom practice, quality subject teaching and a focus on the learning of every individual.

— Create an ethos that is focused on enhancing the achievement of every pupil and securing equity across the system.

LOOSE

(LEADERSHIP)

PERSONAL

RELATIONSHIPS

TIGHT

(MANAGEMENT)

OPERATIONAL

PROCEDURES

Figure 1.7 Optimising middle leadership effectiveness

The shaded part of the diagram shown in Figure 1.7 represents the area of optimum middle leader effectiveness, in that it demonstrates the ability to reconcile a number of apparently contradictory elements. Effective middle leaders are very successful in reconciling formal control with high trust and in combining a high concern for individual needs with a range of organisational imperatives. What the study found to be remarkable was the ability of these middle leaders to combine the apparently paradoxical elements in a way that is natural and intuitive. They are able to move across this continuum as necessary and appropriate, crucially judging the right balance at any given time or in any situation.

The Middle Leadership in Primary Schools Project found very similar messages in successful primary schools. A characteristic of these schools was that they strove to improve children’s learning and always searched for ways of doing things better in order to achieve this. The project examined their success through key leadership practices:

— innovate and lead change

— set direction and plan

— motivate and influence others

— make good use of professional expertise and knowledge

— value inclusion

— foster teams and teamwork


— Manage the team’s financial and human resources effectively, efficiently and equitably to contribute to the achievement of the school’s improvement planning.

— Ensure value for money through the effective deployment of the team budget.

— Deploy staff appropriately and manage their workload to achieve the effective implementation of the team’s and so the school’s strategy.

— Implement successful performance management procedures and professional learning and development strategies with all staff.

— Respond to health and safety regulations and broader issues relating to the safety and well-being of pupils and staff.

— Ensure that the range, quality and use of all available resources is monitored, evaluated and reviewed to improve the quality of education for all pupils.

— Use and integrate a range of new technologies effectively and efficiently to improve the team’s effectiveness and the quality of learning and teaching.

— Apply the school’s improvement priorities and strategic planning at team level, interpret and begin school planning priorities at team level.

— Evaluate team effectiveness, apply internal accountability and be able to demonstrate impact and evidence of improvement. Use data to inform, monitor progress and inform intervention strategies.

— Develop appropriate levels of strategic resource planning and design budgets that reflect values, strategic priorities and educational needs.

— Deploy and develop staff to create a high-performance culture; challenge and intervene to secure consistent high-quality practice and reinforce and extend models of best practice.

— Use professional development strategies to contribute to succession planning and to secure engagement and commitment. Model professional learning and development.

— Collaborate with other teams and schools to share and extend best practice. Review alternative practice and perspectives on effective teaching and learning. Explore the applicability of new technologies.

— Create a safe, positive and learner-centred environment.

As well as the leadership dimensions discussed above, effective middle leaders will need to be able to demonstrate their engagement with most of the following manifestations of sound management – without which no leadership strategy will ever work. The effective middle leader balances leadership strategies with the following management behaviours:

— Ensure that the team/department is working in a way that ensures optimum consistency in the quality of learning and teaching.

— Develop and update team or departmental policies and practices and ensure they are consistent with school and national policies and initiatives.

— Ensure that the team can work efficiently and effectively on a day-to-day basis so that effective learning and teaching can take place.

— Monitor, review and evaluate the impact of the team’s policies, priorities and targets in order to demonstrate accountability.


Activity 1.5

Please review your response to this module by considering the implications of what you perceive to be the most significant issues for you in your leadership role, for your team and for your school.

Implications for you Implications for your team

Implications for your school

Issue 1

Issue 2

Issue 3

ReferencesCovey S (1999) Principle Centred Leadership, London, Simon and Schuster

Leithwood, K; Day, C; Sammons, P; Harris, A; Hopkins, D. (2006) Seven Strong Claims about Successful School Leadership, Nottingham, NCSL

Covey


Module 2: Leading in a diverse system

The importance of context

. . . the very purpose of a school is to build bridges of understanding between adults and children, school and community. Effective leaders recognise that context matters but that it is not an insuperable obstacle. Indeed, the context can also provide opportunities.

Context is often referred to in terms of the neighbourhood, or catchment area, on which the school draws, but context is more complex and multi-layered than this. It is about place, but also about people, policy and politics. The challenge for school leaders is to continuously negotiate a path through this intricate web of demands and expectations. It requires an acute understanding of how these various forces interrelate, as well as an ability to deal with the complexities and paradoxes that are contained within them.

(Levin et al. 2007)

Successful middle leadership is the product of a series of complex relationships, interactions and perceptions. It is rather like a chemical reaction in that there are many complex variables that can influence the final outcome. There can never be a definitive statement that articulates the precise permutation of leadership behaviours, strategies and qualities that will be most likely to bring improved results and greater impact. There are, of course, certain key leadership principles that do not seem to change over place or time. There is abundant evidence that irrespective of context an explicit values system is essential to successful leadership. Equally, and almost by definition, leadership is concerned with strategic issues, the long-term thinking needed to achieve the core purpose of the organisation. Fundamental to both of these principles is the issue that values and strategy are only implemented and achieved through effective human relationships.

Those elemental propositions seem to apply right the way through any system and education is no

exception. However, the increasing recognition of the importance of middle leadership in schools has highlighted a central issue. Leadership is only effective to the extent that it recognises and respects the context in which it operates. This is certainly true of middle leadership and this will be analysed in depth for the rest of this discussion.

For middle leaders, context can be understood in a number of ways. In terms of day-to -day significance, the prevailing leadership styles of the school leadership team will provide many of the contextual issues for middle leaders. Equally, the school culture and ethos will define boundaries and relationships, as will the recruitment and deployment of staff. The geographical context of the school is also a significant variable in determining the priorities and focus of middle leaders.

The leadership contextIt is worth pointing out that one of the key variables influencing middle leaders is the leadership context in which they operate. In essence this is about the relationship between leadership and management. (See Module 1 for a more detailed discussion.) The issue hinges on the extent to which leadership is actually distributed. So the first contextual issue is the prevailing leadership culture in the school, in particular the level of trust and the levels of delegation and empowerment. In a number of significant ways school leaders create the context for middle leadership. In modelling leadership behaviour they implicitly ‘give permission’ for certain types of behaviour or leadership style. Of course, middle leaders need to be sensitive to the prevailing culture – a key indicator of context. But equally they have to be aware that not all leadership behaviours and styles are appropriate and valid.

An interesting example of the importance of leaders getting their approach right is found in the work by Daniel Goleman on leadership styles. One of the dominant models (and ways of understanding effective leadership) classifies leadership approaches according to six broad styles:

1. Visionary, authoritative – focused on values and future scenarios

2. Coaching – the most effective learning relationship

3. Affiliative – high-quality relationships


4. Democratic – meaningful participation

5. Target setting – outcomes oriented

6. Control – top-down command and control culture

Goleman (2002) famously argues that using inappropriate styles creates ‘toxic organisations’. By this he means that inappropriate leadership behaviour can have a highly negative impact on school culture. He also argues that the most effective leaders:

. . . go beyond a mechanical process of matching their styles to fit a checklist of situations; they are far more fluid. They scan people individually and in groups, reading cues in the moment that tip them to the right leadership need and they adjust their style on a dime. (p87)

. . . it pays to find someone who has the flexible repertoire of four or more styles that marks the most outstanding leader.

(p88)

Effective middle leaders are sensitive to context. They understand the prevailing culture of their school and also recognise their personal impact on the context they work in. Just as school leaders create the context for middle leaders so they in turn create a model of leadership for their teams. In many ways, effective leadership is perhaps best understood as reconciling, integrating and engaging with a range of complex variables. In broad terms, the more leadership is concerned with whole-school issues the more complex and diffuse the variables are. Middle leadership is more specifically focused and classroom leadership more focused still.

Much has been written about the high degree of sensitivity successful leaders bring to the contexts in which they work. Some would go so far as to claim that ‘context is everything’. However, based on our review of the evidence, this reflects a superficial view of what successful leaders do. Without doubt, successful leaders are sensitive to context, but this does not mean they use qualitatively different practices in every different context. It means, rather, that they apply contextually sensitive combinations of the basic leadership practices . . . (Leithwood et al., p8)

Activity 2.1

1. Can you ‘adjust your style on a dime? Can those who lead you?

2. How confident are you in using alternative styles?

3. How responsive and sensitive is the leadership culture of your school?

4. What implicit messages about effective lead-ership do you model for your team?

5. Are you consciously creating a leadership con-text for effective teaching and learning?

Context and learning

The discussion so far has explored context from a particular perspective, the one that, in theory at least, is the most controllable – personal behaviour. Goleman argues that the most successful and effective leader, like the most effective and successful person, is likely to be highly emotionally intelligent, intuitive and empathic, in order to be sensitive and responsive and so create an appropriate environment for learning. The issue of context thus moves from the personal to the organisational and environmental.

Every classroom teacher knows how, on different days, the same class will respond in very different ways according to the prevailing friendships, emotional relationships, issues brought in from home and the community, the time in the school year and even the prevailing weather. The successful teacher reinforces, reconciles and integrates all sorts of complex interactions almost intuitively. The same principles apply to the smallest classroom and the largest school. Leaders deliberately and explicitly address the variables that determine the context for successful teaching and learning.

It may be possible to argue that the movement from leader in the classroom to middle leader, to school leader is a matter of recognising changing contexts and accepting that the variables may become more complex and less amenable to control, but engaging with them is what leaders do. Alternatively this issue may be thought of in terms of expanding horizons. The move from classroom to department or team to whole school involves a steadily receding horizon as the range of responsibilities grows.


This perspective is reinforced and elaborated by research from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD):

Three broad conclusions seem to emerge from the research analysing the factors influencing student learning. First, student background characteristics – especially social, economic and cultural background – frequently emerge as the most important source of variation in student achievement . . . Second, school-related factors, which are more open to policy influence, explain a smaller part of the variations in student learning than student characteristics. Third, among school level variables, the factors that are closest to student learning, such as teacher quality and classroom practices, tend to have the strongest impact on student achievement.

(Pont et al. 2008, p33)

This relationship is defined in Figure 2.1.

Teacher quality/classroompractice

School leadership and policies

Student backgroundcharacteristics

Figure 2.1 The potential for leadership impact

Presenting the model in this particular way helps to emphasise a fundamental issue about leadership and context. In Steven Covey’s words “You take control of that which you can control”. In other words, you focus your leadership time, resources and energy where it is most likely to make impact. According to Pont and her colleagues, leaders in schools can make the greatest difference and achieve the highest impact, by focusing on the quality of learning and teaching and the strategies used by teachers in their classrooms. The next most significant area of potential impact is school policies and strategies, which are obviously central to the work of school leaders. Of themselves they are of only limited potential. It is only when they are implemented consistently across the school that they could make a difference.

The areas of highest significance, but least direct impact and control, are issues to do with the student as a person, his or her family and community life, personal aptitudes and dispositions. A classic example of this is child poverty. Poor children do not do as well in a range of educational outcomes as their economically secure peers. It is highly unlikely that any school leadership strategy would be able to address deeply rooted, profound poverty. This means that it is essential that those areas under the influence and control of school leaders are working to optimum effect to combat the effects of poverty, if not poverty itself. Schools are able, and middle leaders are central to this, to maximise all the positive variables in order to secure optimum outcomes. Middle leaders build positive relationships with parents and carers and they work to identify barriers to effective learning and overcome them. Middle leaders also secure consistently high levels of teaching and learning and they create a high-aspiration and high-expectation culture through their language and behaviour.


The reference to broader social concerns raises the issue of the existence of a fourth, outer, circle in Figure 2.1. This relates to national policies, broad social trends and issues that are generic and contextual but may not impinge directly on the school, the team or the classroom. So perhaps Figure 2.1 needs to be modified to incorporate the information shown in Figure 2.2.

National issues and trends

Student characteristics

School leadership and policies

Classroom practice

Low

High

Figure 2.2 Potential for middle leadership impact and leverage

Figure 2.2 tries to demonstrate that there are varying degrees of potential impact and leverage. Effective middle leaders focus their time and energy where they are likely to make the greatest impact. In essence, this follows the Stephen Covey maxim that effective people “Take control of that which they can control.” Having secured their immediate context, effective middle leaders will seek to extend their influence and engagement by making the maximum difference (impact) through the most efficient use of time and resources (leverage). The areas open to influence and change that are likely to be found in each of the factors outlined above could include the following:

1. Classroom practice:

• Consistent application of school strategies and policies, for example behavior

• Implementation of team approaches and priorities

• Teaching and learning approaches appropriate to the needs of the class

• Engagement with parents and families

• Development of appropriate teaching and learning resources

• Collaborative working, sharing best practice and services

•

•

•

•

2. School policies and strategies:

• Establishing a team culture which reflects the values of the school and is focused on meeting the needs of students

• Closing the gap and overcoming barriers to learning

• Implementation of school values and vision

• Focus on school-improvement priorities

• Staff deployment

• Staff development

• Resource constraints

• Collaboration with other schools

3. 3. Student characteristics:

• Academic potential, special needs – gifted and talented

• Motivation and engagement – attendance

• Family support and engagement

• Health and well-being

• Expectations and aspirations

• Interpersonal engagement

• Safety


4. National policies, issues and trends:

• National educational policies

• Social justice –equity and fairness

• Rethinking community – Big Society

• Social change – the nature of the family

• Economic change patterns of work and employment

• Technological change – the impact of ICT

• Political change educating citizens for a 21st century democracy

• Climate change

Each area of leadership responsibility has to respond to some issues that are consistent despite role and specific circumstances and others that will vary considerably according to a wide range of contextual factors. Therefore, it is essential that leaders take account of their context as it actually is, rather than work on a superficial or generic view.

Activity 2.2

Use the diagram shown in Figure 2.2 to explore your perception of the contextual factors influ-encing the work of your team in your specific context. For each of the four categories identify the factors and issues that are specific to your school context. How do your colleagues perceive the factors? What evidence and data are avail-able to you? Where do you focus your time and resources?

How could your leadership be different in any of these areas and what result could that achieve?

Where and how might you have the greatest impact?

Leadership and context:One of the most complex management roles in the world must be that of Air-Traffic Controller. It is difficult to imagine the sheer complexity and remorseless pressure of bringing aircraft in to land at a busy international airport. It is, of course, essentially a job requiring the management of complexity through acute sensitivity to context. While there is a very clear schedule of aircraft needing to land, there will always be variables caused by the weather, as well as mechanical and

security issues. What the controller has to do all the time is to reconcile and prioritise potentially conflicting demands.

Imagine Figure 2.3 as an air-traffic controller’s radar screen. There are short-, medium- and long-term priorities that will vary according to the demands of time and place. Tragic accidents occur when decisions are taken on the basis of how things ‘should be’ rather than how they actually are.

Long term

Medium term

Short term

Figure 2.3 Strategic awareness and context

The effective leader, and the effective middle leader, in particular, has to be very aware of the need to: a) establish priorities and b) be prepared to change them according to need. At the same time it is essential to maintain an unequivocal focus on the core business and plan and deploy resources in order to secure optimum outcomes for all.

Activity 2.3

What are the short-, medium- and long-term fac-tors on your radar screen that will have impact on the quality of teaching and learning?

How could you prioritise your response?

What are the implications for collaboration with other middle leaders?

In their overview of the leadership of responses to context Levin and his colleagues (2007) point to two central issues:

in summary...

— Context is widely seen as important but our ideas about it often rest on limited evidence or anecdote

— All contexts contain positive elements that could support learning, teaching and leadership.


They go on to summarise the implications for effective leadership:

Visionary leaders

— Extend the horizon of the possible

— Combine optimism with realism in understanding that schools cannot make all the difference, but need others to share the responsibility and help them

— Share, use and intelligently discuss contextual data about pupil achievement and neighbourhood demographics, to push the joint quest for improvement

— Constantly mediate thinking and practice for their staff and students

— Lessen the impact of the negative

— Promote the inherent capacity of staff, students and parents to improve their schools (Levin et al. 2007, p6)

Collaboration and partnership workingThe Coalition White Paper The Importance of Teaching (Department for Education 2010) stresses the importance of collaboration and partnership working as a key element in closing the gap and securing system-wide improvement. The essence of the coalition’s approach can be derived from the following extracts:

2.26 As part of their work, we will expect Teaching Schools to draw together outstanding teachers in an area who are committed to supporting other schools.

2.43 Some of the country’s most successful head teachers have been designated National or Local Leaders of Education. The National Leaders are outstanding head teachers of outstanding schools who commit to supporting other schools. Their schools are designated National Support Schools, because as head teachers working with other schools which may be struggling, they are expected to draw on the established strengths of their own

school in order to support improvement.

5.17 Schools working together leads to better results.

7.6 We will expect schools to set their own improvement priorities. . . We will make sure that they have access to appropriate data and information so that they can identify other schools from which they might wish to learn, that there is a strong network of highly effective schools they can draw on for more intensive support, and that schools can identify other useful forms of external support as necessary.

In very practical terms it seems reasonable to argue for the following potential benefits of collaboration between schools:

— Standards are likely to rise as the result of the dissemination of best practice across schools and between schools. ‘Closing the gap’ is more achievable through collaboration and the ‘deprivatisation’ of successful practice. Middle leaders are obviously central to this process

— There is the potential for significant economies of scale in economic terms – notably in terms of learning resources and materials. Ideally, networks will enable the optimum level of sharing to maximise strategies to support effective teaching and learning.

— Middle leadership is often at its most effective when supporting the development of team members and members of other teams in the same and other schools. Shared continuing professional development (CPD) has the potential to enhance consistent practice, embed improvement and cross-fertilise good ideas and the best practice.

— Strategic planning is more likely to be effective through collaborative governance but will need to be put into effect at middle-leadership level.

— Integration across phases and primary–secondary transfer is likely to enhance the learning experience of pupils through integrated and collective approaches.

— Intervention to support pupils would be more effective with consistent record-keeping, monitoring and use of data.

— Deployment of staff could be more flexible and effective.


— The potential for successful collaboration with other agencies would be significantly enhanced

Activity 2.4

What do you see as the most significant implications of partnership and collaborative working?

What are the implications for leadership development in your school? Are you ready to take on a senior role as a temporary measure?

What about the leadership of your team if you are asked to support a department in another school?

What are the barriers to collaboration? How comfortable would you be with colleagues from another school working with you?

How ready are you to share your best practice and resources with another school?

Activity 2.5




Issue 1

Issue 2

Issue 3

ReferencesGoleman, D, 2002, The New Leaders, London, Little Brown

Leithwood, K, Day, C, Sammons P, Harris, A, Hopkins, D, 2007, Seven Strong Claims about Successful School Leadership, Nottingham, NCSL

Levin B, Macbeath J, Wong K C, 2007. Context as Opportunity, Nottingham, NCSL

Pont, B, Nusche, D. & Hopkins, D, 2008, Improving School Leadership: Volume 2 Case Studies on System leadership, Paris, OECD


Module 3: Leading teaching and learning

Moral purposeThe challenge of Module 1 for middle leaders is surely to translate principle into practice, to make the abstract concrete and to turn aspiration into experience. The challenge in Module 3 is to apply those principles of effective leading and managing to the quality of teaching and learning. It has to be stressed that in most schools for most of the time there is a very high correlation between aspirations and experience. However, the higher the aspiration the more difficult it is to translate it into experience. School leaders therefore need to use a range of strategies to increase the possibility of high levels of congruence between aspiration and experience. In many ways middle leadership is all about the relationship between principle and practice. Middle leaders are uniquely placed to form the bridge between generic policies and actual practice.

The role of middle leaders is thus as much about interpretation and application as it is about articulation. The moral dimension of the role of leaders in any capacity in a school may include:

— the explicit articulation of school values and moral principles

— the interpretation and application of those principles in specific situations

— ensuring that every individual in the school understands the principles and is able to make them personally meaningful

— working to create a consensus around the principles and to ensure their consistent application

— monitoring the life of the school to ensure that aspirations are being translated into actual experience, for example carrying out an ethical ‘audit’ of the work of the team

— affirming appropriate behaviour and challenging inappropriate behaviour

— investing time in monitoring, reviewing and renewing the personal and organisational value systems

Activity 3.1

1. What do your school’s aims or mission state-ment say about effective teaching and learning?

2. How are those principles translated into policies and strategies?

3. How does your job or role description define your responsibility for teaching and learning?

4. What strategies do you use to ensure consist-ency of effective teaching and learning?

Closing the gapIn the OECD international survey of educational performance (PISA) for 2010, quoted in the Department for Education publication The Case for Change the central issue is that:

England had one of the highest gaps between high and low performing pupils and a strong relationship between social background and performance. 13.9% of the variance in performance of pupils in England could be explained by their social background, as compared to just 8.3% in Finland and 8.2% in Canada. For a very long time in this country, the ‘long tail of underachievement’ has been tolerated; sometimes it has been seen as an inevitable consequence of a system which does a very good job for some.

(DfE 2010, p2)

The gap refers to the range of pupil performance that is wider in England than in most developed countries. There is no doubt that there are many factors which explain the gap; some are cultural and historic, others social and economic. As was discussed above, in the school it is the ‘factors closest to student learning’ that have the greatest effect. This relates directly to the quality of teaching and learning and the effectiveness of teachers. In many ways this is the pivotal point of this programme. It is the fundamental purpose of middle leaders to work on the quality of teaching and


learning. Nothing is as important; it’s why schools have middle leaders.

Strategies to close the gap work on many levels, but the area of greatest impact is ensuring the consistent quality of teaching and learning.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) variation in performance within schools is four times as great as variation in performance between schools. The result is that the UK has one of the biggest class divides in education in the industrial world.

In comprehensive school systems, within-school variation in pupil attainment seems to be much greater than between school variation…a recent DfES study of 2003 data showed that in value-added terms, Key Stage 2 (KS2) within-school variation is five times greater than between school variance, for KS3 it’s 11 times greater and for KS4 it’s 14 times greater.

(NCSL 2005, p3)

Activity 3.2

Do you recognise the issue of consistency as an issue in your own school and team?

How would you explain the current situation? What are the significant variables at work in your context?

The biggest single variable (30 per cent) that explains within-school variation is the teacher. Teaching strategies, professional characteristics and classroom climate explain the often-disturbing variation within schools. Achieving consistency means eliminating variation and that in turn involves identifying the ‘non-negotiables’. These are those aspects of teaching and learning that have been identified as essential to raising performance and achievement.

One useful way of exploring the issue of consistency is to explore it from the perspective of ‘find and fix’ and ‘predict and prevent’. Find and fix can be exemplified as wait until it goes wrong and then repair or replace it. It can often be used to explain catastrophic systems failures and disasters. It is essentially a reactive culture. Predict and prevent is essentially the same as ‘prevention is better

than cure’. It involves moving the culture of an organisation from reaction to anticipation and intervention. There are numerous examples of this approach in everyday life, such as the best way to avoid a heart attack is to stop smoking, not to invest in more cardiac surgeons; and the most effective way to maintain your car’s efficiency is to have it regularly serviced. The best way to close the gap is to prevent children failing. In some contexts this represents a radical shift of culture. One of the differences between high-quality manufacturing industry and the rest is that in the quality environment every worker accepts responsibility for his or her own work. It is not left for someone further down the production line to put right. Perhaps the best examples of intervention strategies are those focused on the early years that have a disproportionately positive impact on long-term achievement and well-being. A very significant issue is that as a system improves so the degree of control needs to diminish; that is, there is a need to eliminate variation but to increasingly celebrate variety:

Systems on the journey from poor to fair, in general characterized by less skilled educators, tightly control teaching and learning processes from the center because minimizing variation across classrooms and schools is the core driver of performance improvement at this level. In contrast, the systems moving from good to great, characterized by more highly skilled educators, provide only loose guidelines on teaching and learning processes because peer-led creativity and innovation inside schools becomes the core driver for raising performance at this level.

(Mckinsey and Company 2010)

The same principle may be applied to individual schools, teams and classrooms. As performance improves so confidence grows and trust can increase.


Activity 3.3

Do you recognise the cultures of ‘find and fix’ and ‘predict and prevent’ in your own experience?

Where is your school on the ‘tight–loose’ (variation–variety) continuum?

What are the practical differences between them in terms of leadership, the experience of learners, the work of teachers and the impact on performance?

The following strategies for closing the gap therefore need to be seen as a menu to be applied in varying degrees, according to the specific context:

— Appoint staff on the basis of their ability and commitment to contribute towards closing the gap and creating a high-performance school.

— Definine leadership and management roles in the context of closing the gap and securing high performance.

— Develop a culture of high performance and a ‘zero-tolerance’ approach to failure.

— Change the school ethos and culture to focus on personal professional responsibility and accountability for pupil achievement. External accountability is replicated in the leadership structure of the school.

— Develop data-informed school policies and teaching strategies to enable evidence-based interventions in classrooms and for individual students. This implies sophisticated data collection and management systems and data literate staff.

— Increase openness and transparency about teaching practices through peer observation and support, middle leaders’ active engagement with classroom practice and increased professional dialogue about effective teaching and learning. Deprivatise practice and create a norm of openness and sharing.

— Create a collaborative culture of openness and mutual support between schools, benchmarking best practice and developing shared resources and strategies.

— Ensure a more appropriate ‘fit’ between individual students and their experience of learning by developing highly responsive personalised strategies – focus on the individual learner.

— Develop standard operating procedures, common protocols and shared criteria to ensure the availability of models of best practice, develop a common language and facilitate monitoring and review.

— Use school-based professional development to consolidate and embed all the above points, to create a culture of enquiry into professional practice (using action research models) and support through peer mentoring and coaching.

— Use pupil voice as a significant source of evidence of quality teaching and learning experiences. Possible applications may include:

• monitoring perceptions of effective learning and teaching

• feedback on learning experiences

• lesson observations by students

• involving students in CPD

• surveys focussing on the learning experience

— Leaders who see their role as challenging poor performance and being prepared to intervene as appropriate

Understanding effective teaching and learningMiddle leaders are pivotal to enhancing the quality of learning and teaching in schools. Indeed it could be argued that the principal reason that we have middle leaders is to ensure the quality of the pupil experience, in particular the consistent focus on achievement for every pupil. One of the most powerful means of securing consistency is to develop a shared language across the whole team. In essence there is a common understanding and high-level dialogue is possible because of a shared vocabulary. This implies that there are very clear, explicit and agreed criteria to define and describe effective teaching and learning.

It is essential that team leaders build a shared understanding of the principles underpinning effective teaching and learning. None of us would trust a doctor who had limited knowledge of human physiology, a pilot who was not aware of the basic laws of physics or an electrician who was unaware of the principles of electrical circuitry. So an


education professional needs to be able to root their teaching strategies in models of effective learning. It is the responsibility of middle leaders to ensure that this understanding is shared and then applied consistently.

Activity 3.4

How would you assess the current level of shared understanding of effective teaching and learning across your school and your team?

What shared model of learning informs your team’s professional practice?

What evidence do you have to corroborate your view?

What documentation is available to support shared understanding of teaching and learning?

In your role as a middle leader what proportion of your time do you spend working with col-leagues on shared approaches to teaching and learning?

The development of a common language with a shared vocabulary and agreed criteria is one of the most powerful means of securing consensus around effective teaching and learning. The process of developing alignment around these issues is probably more important than the actual outcome. The following examples are therefore designed to initiate debate. It is important that the appropriate elements in the Ofsted framework and your school’s own strategies are fed into this process.

The criteria for effective teaching are:

— The culture of the classroom is one of high aspiration and expectations.

— Pupils make significant progress and are expected to perform beyond norms.

— Pupils have a clear sense of what they are learning and how it relates to prior learning.

— The classroom ethos is positive with pupils largely self-regulating.

— The classroom is a friendly and safe place – relationships are positive and trust is high.

— The teacher knows his or her subject. The teaching strategies used are appropriate for the subject content and the profile of the class.

— The teaching is well paced, is inclusive and responds to the needs of individuals.

— The teacher encourages and praises frequently – focusing on effort and engagement.

— Available resources (time, staff and so on) are used in an effective and creative way.

— Assessment is regular and formative. Feedback is focused on improvement.

— Teachers have a shared understanding of what makes a good lesson and can articulate what that means for their practice.

— Teachers have a strong understanding of, and commitment to, the curriculum-designed ethos.

Criteria for effective learning :

— Every learner is unique and effective learning requires responding to learners in terms of their needs.

— Learning is a social process; learning is likely to be most effective when it takes place in an environment of trust and high-quality relationships.

— Learners need to develop skills, strategies and confidence to accept increasing responsibility for their own learning.

— Learning is more effective if there is emotional and physical well-being linked to intrinsic motivation and resilience.

— There are numerous strategies to support learning. The effective teacher is able to draw on a wide repertoire of strategies to facilitate engagement with learning.

— The criterion for effective learning is being able to demonstrate deep learning.

The following criteria for the teaching-and-learning-centred school can serve as a review of the essential elements that are needed to move a school, team or department into high performance, based on effective teaching and learning:

1. School leadership committed to personal, team and organizational learning.

2. Widely distributed leadership based on high trust.


3. Explicit leadership responsibility for learning.

4. Shared knowledge creation, learning focused research and CPD.

5. High quality personal relationships, networks.

6. High levels of student, family and community involvement.

7. Leadership underpinned by systematic management.

8. A culture of enthusiasm, energy and joy in the learning of others.

9. Mentoring, monitoring, modelling and dialogue.

(NCSL 2004)

Activity 3.5

Prioritising the criteria for effective teaching and learning – the diamond nine

1. Arrange the nine items in the order that is most relevant to your team from your perspective.

2. Now ask members of your team to complete the same activity

3. Now work with your team to agree your shared list of priorities.

Leading teaching and learningSouthworth (2006) in the Middle Leadership in Primary Schools Project has identified three strategies that leaders can use to influence the quality of learning in schools. These learning-centred strategies are:

1. modelling – leading by example

2. monitoring – knowing what is going on in classrooms

3. dialogue – talking and listening to colleagues

In analysing effective middle leadership in primary schools, Southworth also stresses the importance of setting-up structures and systems in order to ensure consistent delivery.

As Figure 3.1 shows, the three first elements are closely interrelated. I have added the strategy of mentoring as the unifying force that allows optimum expression of the other three elements.

Modelling

MonitoringDialogue

Mentoring

Figure 3.1 The components of learning-centred leadership

Southworth (2004) defines the three elements in the following terms:

Modelling

Modelling is concerned with the power of example. Teachers and headteachers believe in setting an example because they know this influences pupils and colleagues alike. Research shows that teachers watch their leaders closely. And teachers watch what their leaders do in order to check if leaders’ actions are consistent over time and to test whether leaders do as they say. Teachers do not follow leaders who cannot ‘walk the talk’. (p6)


Monitoring

Monitoring includes analysing and acting on pupil progress and outcome data (e.g. assessment and test scores, evaluation data, school performance trends, parental opinion surveys, pupil attendance data, pupil interview information). Leadership is stronger and more effective when it is informed by data on pupils’ learning, progress and achievements as will as by direct knowledge of all teaching practices and classroom dynamics. (p7)

Dialogue

Dialogue in this context is about creating opportunities for teachers to talk with their colleagues about learning and teaching. The kinds of dialogues that influence what happens in classrooms are focused on learning and teaching. Leaders create the circumstances to meet with colleagues and discuss pedagogy and pupil learning. (p8)

The power of mentoring when linked with coaching provides one of the most significant strategies for leaders to support the development of colleagues. In this context (relating back to its classical origins) mentoring is seen as a long-term developmental relationship that supports personal growth and learning. Coaching is seen as more of a short-term, authoritative intervention in order to support improved performance or changing strategies and behaviours. Coaching can be seen as a key relationship in the workplace describing the relationship between leaders and team members. As Goleman (2002) expresses it:

Coaching’s surprisingly positive emotional impact stems largely from the empathy and rapport a leader establishes with employees. A good coach communicates a belief in people’s potentials and an expectation that they can do their best. The tacit message is, “I believe in you, I’m investing in you, and I expect your best efforts.” As a result, people sense that the leader cares, so they feel motivated to uphold their own high standards for performance, and they feel accountable for how well they do. (p62)

The combination of these four strategies forms a powerful nexus that has the potential to:

— personalise leadership engagement with colleagues

— model practice of the most effective relationships with learners

— demonstrate high-profile consistent commitment to the core purpose of the school

Activity 3.6

Reflect on the extent to which each of the four components of learning-centered leadership, monitoring, modelling, dialogue and mentoring, is a significant part of your personal repertoire of leadership behaviours.

How comfortable are you with this approach to your work as a middle leader?

To what extent do your leaders model this ap-proach?

For Sergiovanni (2001):

Learning earns the center-stage position because it is a powerful way for schools to adapt, to stay ahead, and to invent new solutions. At the heart of any successful change is a change in culture which makes new goals, new initiatives, and new ways of behaving part of a school’s norm structure. … (p119)


Hargreaves and Fink (2006) make a very explicit link between effective leadership and distributed leadership:

. . . an ultimate goal of sustainable learning and leadership is that, in time, the vast majority of schools will become authentic and assertive professional learning communities that will constitute the strong cells of system wide improvement. Ultimately, leadership that stays centered on learning and that lasts over time is deliberately distributed leadership that stretches across a school or system, is a genuinely shared responsibility, and is taken as much as given. (p139)

In essence, leadership does make a difference to learning and achievement. It will make a greater impact to the extent that it is distributed and, in Leithwood’s terms, the school focuses on ‘total’ leadership; and the absolute focus of total leadership is on the quality of teaching and learning.

Activity 3.7




Issue 1

Issue 2

Issue 3


ReferencesDepartment for Education 2010 The Case for Change

Goleman, D, (2002) The New Leaders, London, Little Brown

Hargreaves, A, and Fink, D, (2006) Sustainable Leadership, San Francisco, Jossey Bass

Mckinsey and Company 2010 How the World’s Most Improved Systems Keep Getting Better.

Sergiovanni T (2001) Leadership, What’s in it for Schools, London, Routledge Falmer

Southworth (2006) Middle Leadership in Primary Schools Project, NCSL


Module 4: Leading people and effective teams

Leading through trustOf all the qualities of an educational leader, trust is probably the most important. It is difficult to envisage any aspect of his or her work that is not profoundly dependent on trust. Indeed it could be argued that it would be impossible for educational leaders to work without trust. Trust embodies the key elements of leadership that we have already identified; trust is fundamental to effective human relationships; trust exemplifies the social basis for moral behaviour and any talk of the future involves a high degree of trust. Consider the extent to which trust is fundamental to the following roles, relationships and strategies:

— enabling effective learning for all

— securing high performance

— building confidence between learners and teachers

— creating an interdependent supportive community

— developing confidence between parents and schools

— enabling creativity and risk-taking learning

— creating high-performing teams

— leading innovation and change

— enhancing personal well-being

In broad social terms trust is an elusive quality:

. . . there has been a decline in the sense of fellowship which holds society together. This has eroded the bonds of trust between us, and children suffer as a result. There are, however, countries in which trust has not declined. In Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands around two-thirds of people believe that most people can be trusted – twice as many as in Britain and the USA.

(Layard and Dunn 2009, p162)

Activity 4.1

What is your experience of living in Britain today?

What are the practical implications of living in a low-trust society?

It would clearly be difficult, if not impossible, to change the culture of any society in the short term. However, there may be a case for arguing that the experience at community and organisational level can be changed.

Leaders should be trustworthy, and this worthiness is an important virtue. Without trust leaders lose credibility. This loss poses difficulties to leaders as they seek to call people to respond to their responsibilities. The painful alternative is to be punitive, seeking to control people through manipulation or coercion. But trust is a virtue in other ways too. The building of trust is an organizational quality. …Once embedded in the culture of the school, trust works to liberate people to be their best, to give others their best, and to take risks.

(Sergiovanni 2005 p90)

In their research into high performing elementary schools in Chicago, Bryk and Schneider (2002) found a high correlation between the levels of trust in a school and its capacity to improve. Schools with a high level of trust at the outset of a programme to improve maths and reading had a 1 in 2 chance of improving. Schools with relatively low levels of trust had only a 1 in 7 chance of improving. Schools in the latter category that did improve made significant gains in their levels of trust as a pre-requisite to raising attainment.


The authors describe trust as the ‘connective tissue’ that binds schools together and this image helps to reinforce the importance of healthy networks, neural and social, to effective learning. They distinguish between three types of trust:

1. Organic trust is based on the unquestioning acceptance by an individual of the moral and social integrity of a community.

2. Contractual trust is based on reciprocity – it is essentially transactional – as in buying a service or product.

3. Relational trust is the product of human relationships and interactions – it is characterised by rich networks and high social interdependence.

In essence, this is all about building social capital, creating learning communities that are exemplified in the strength of social networks, interdependency, engagement, shared purpose, parity of esteem and genuine reciprocity. It will be clear from all that has been written about systems leadership that relational trust is highly appropriate to this context. Bryk and Schneider (2002, p34) argue that relational trust ‘constitutes a moral resource for school improvement’ and that it is expressed through the following components:

• Respect – recognising the integrity of all of those involved in a child’s education and their mutual interdependence.

• Competence – professional capability and the effective discharge of role and responsibility.

• Personal regard for other – mutual dependence and caring leading to a sense of interdependence and reciprocity.

• Integrity – consistency, reliability and a clear sense of moral purpose.

Covey (2006, p19) is unambiguous about the status and role of trust in personal and organisational life:

When trust is high, the dividend you receive is like a performance multiplier...In a company high trust materially improves communication, collaboration, execution, innovation ... In your personal life, high trust significantly improves your excitement, energy, passion, creativity and joy in your relationships...

One of the most powerful indicators of the level of trust in a school is the extent to which leadership is distributed or shared , that is, the extent to which leadership is ‘total’ and seen as collective capacity, or personal to one person or a few individuals. Schools are remarkably inconsistent in this respect. Some are tightly controlled (perhaps for very good reason), others are almost anarcho-syndicalist in their approach. The higher the level of trust the more leadership is available to people despite age, status or role. The potential range of leadership engagement is demonstrated in the model shown Figure 4.1.


Immature

Personal power

Hierarchy

Low trust

Dependency

Mature

Shared authority

Teams

High trust

Interdependency

Control Delegation Empowerment Subsidiarity

Figure 4.1 Leadership, trust and relationships

Figure 4.1 shows the stages in moving from the immature organisation based on control to the fully mature one based on subsidiarity. The movement away from control is characterised by a growth in trust.

Control is exemplified when one person is responsible for all decision-making, when power and authority are exercised without consultation, when individuals ‘carry out orders’. It usually serves to create dependency, passivity and alienation.

Delegation is how most organisations work. Individuals are given limited amounts of authority and responsibility within highly defined levels of tasks and outcomes.

Empowerment means that high levels of authority are devolved – what has to be done is usually defined but how it is done is left to those who have the responsibility. This implies control over resources, methods and decision-making.

Subsidiarity means that power is fully distributed across the organisation. Just as in a federal state (like Germany or Australia) a wide range of powers are discharged at ‘local’ level without reference to the centre. Teams are able to work largely autonomously and there is very high consensus and alignment on values that reinforce common purpose and interdependent working.

Hargreaves and Fink (2006) offer an alternative model in which their equivalent to subsidiarity is described as Assertive Distribution:

Be even more steadfast about and passionate about shared purpose and values. Stimulate wide-ranging debate about important proposals. Involve resisters early. Include and listen to minorities.

Use processes that surface thoughtful divergence and disagreement. Demonstrate the value of learning from difference.

(p138)

What is described here is a sophisticated, mature, culture that is open and confident. It is worth considering the extent to which this high-trust, distributed, approach is found in teams and, most importantly, in classrooms. In many ways the school has to create the culture that allows teams and classrooms to operate in a mature, high-trust environment. Of course it has to be remembered that the model offered in Figure 4.1, like all such diagrams, tends to over-simplify and caricature reality. In most schools there will be people across the continuum, who will change according to circumstances so they may be high trust in one context but in need of more direction in another. The same applies to any classroom. Some children can be left to get on with their learning; others need more intervention, support and direction.

Activity 4.2

Please refer back to Figure 4.1.

Where would you put your school on the con-tinuum of low–high trust?

Why is your school at that particular point?

What are the implications of being at that point?

Now repeat this exercise for your team and for your classroom.

What are the issues that emerge in terms of effective leadership and the development of a trust-based culture?


Creating a high-performance culture Creating a high-performance culture is a key leadership imperative for middle leaders. In many ways it can be argued that the pivotal function of middle leaders is to secure high performance – however defined. Middle leaders are the ‘hinge’ between policies and strategies and the actual, concrete experience of children and young people in classrooms and every other dimension of school life. With the emphasis on outcomes-based accountability that dominates models of performance in the English system, it is probably fair to say that people are employed to perform – however different and complex the outcomes across a school may be.

Perhaps the dominant factor in securing consistent and sustainable high performance is the personal performance of the middle leader and her or his focus on the performance of the team and the individuals in that team. There seems little doubt that the language and behaviour of middle leaders is a very significant variable in creating a high-performance team. The Ofsted (2009) study Twenty Outstanding Primary Schools highlights the importance of effective teams:

A common factor in all the schools is a very strong emphasis on team working. The evidence suggests that this is indispensable for sustaining excellence. The ingredients take time to build up. They include a common sense of purpose, shared values, trust, and openness; willingness to share practice and learn from each other; readiness to inject new ideas and take risks. Pupils gain the benefits through a consistent approach, from the quality of teaching and learning and the richness of curriculum, and from the strong values and ethos. Staff feel professionally invigorated by such an environment and staff turnover tends to be low. However, such schools produce future leaders, and they have sufficient momentum to survive changes of key staff. (p38)

Components of a high-performance culture

The components of a high-performance culture may be summarised in the following criteria.

Aspirational, shared values and clear purpose

The school and the team have a clear and unambiguous sense of direction which is known, understood, agreed and acted on.

Focus on improvement, explicit expectations

There is an unremitting focus on improvement on previous best in every aspect of the school’s work, in particular the expectations on children. The school provides detailed and explicit definitions and criteria to support high-performance teaching and learning.

Data-rich decision taking

The school is rich in relevant data that serves as the basis for targeted interventions and support strategies and these strategies are applied at team level.

Clear targets

Improvement planning focuses on very explicit outcomes, which are used to inform all aspects of school management and leadership – notably performance management, staff deployment, monitoring and review and improvement planning.

Job-related development strategies

Senior and middle leaders work with colleagues to support effective professional development. They do so by particularly focusing on consistency in applying school policies and securing effective teaching and learning.

Coaching to improve performance

Coaching is probably the strategy that has the highest impact in securing change in performance. The analogies with sports coaching are entirely appropriate. The focus is on intervention strategies based on diagnosis against agreed standards with sustained support to build confidence and so enable change.

Team-based learning and working

This is probably the best way to secure high performance. A group working with common purpose , high trust, complementary skills and mutual confidence will usually outperform any other group.


Emphasis on high-quality working relationships

Emotional intelligence ‘makes the world go round’. Leaders with high interpersonal skills have a fundamental advantage in securing and sustaining high performance. Emotional intelligence is the key to commitment, engagement and sustainability.

Recognition and celebration of success

High performance must be recognised, celebrated and consolidated. A culture of celebration can serve to motivate and inspire. It also gives leaders an opportunity to reinforce and prioritise high performance.

Activity 4.3

Creating a high performance culture– an audit

For each of the following components of high performance consider the extent to which your team and/or your school is ready, willing and able to make progress. How valid are your judgements – are there alterna-tive perspectives? What are the implications of your scores?

1. Aspirational, shared values and clear purpose

Low confidence 1 2 3 4 5 High confidence

2. Focus on improvement with explicit expectations


3. Data-rich decision taking


4. Clear and explicit targets and outcomes


5. Job-related professional development


6. Coaching to enhance performance


7. Team-based working and learning


8. High-quality working relationships


9. Recognition and celebration of success



Understanding the effective teamThe concept of the team has long been seen as axiomatic to effective leadership. As soon as it is conceded that the leadership of a school is a job that is too big for one person then the team becomes significant. However, in schools, perhaps more than in many other sectors, teams are often more of a pious aspiration than the key social relationship in the organisation. Genuine teams are rare in schools, although the label is freely applied. More usually they are groups with aspirations.

A team is a group that meets a range of specific criteria. It is not enough to designate a group as a team in order to bring about change any more than it is to expect that the switch from ‘Senior Management Team’ to ‘School Leadership Team’ will lead to a significant change in working priorities and relationships.

While labelling is important, because language is a key determinant of culture, it is not enough.

Schools are rare in organisational terms in the lack of flexibility they have in creating teams. Many commercial organisations are designed around teams that are created for specific purposes and then disbanded. In such teams there is a very high correlation between the purpose of the team and its membership, that is, the team is designed. Very often in schools the membership of teams is determined by longevity and experience rather than aptitude and ability. Crucially, and for very good reasons, leadership teams invest very little in their own development. They are task- rather than process-focussed. Team leaders inherit their teams with little or no scope to change or develop the members. There are few opportunities for the team to develop as a team and limited time and space to explore potential and build capacity. The challenges that face schools require an investment in the capacity and sustainability of leadership in schools. One person cannot possibility encompass all the knowledge, skills and qualities that schools need to function. While the role of the leader remains vital, it may be that it is through teams that leadership is best expressed in the school. This implies an acceptance of the concept of shared leadership and teams offer a powerful vehicle for putting this into effect.

If it is true that leadership behaviour is a crucial determinant of school culture and climate then effective teams would seem to be essential for the following reasons:

— They model best practice for the rest of the school.

— They maximise the leadership and management effectiveness of the leadership team.

— They demonstrate, in a real way, the school’s commitment to the development of every individual.

— They build leadership capacity and potential.

— They offer the potential for greater creativity and better utilisation of skills and knowledge.

In essence, any team has to exemplify all that the school aspires to be. It has to model, demonstrate and exemplify the values and vision of the school so that others can understand how principle is translated into practice. This is a highly challenging remit, a counsel of perfection, but it is also pragmatic. If the leadership team does not convert the abstract into the concrete, who else will? If there is an effective leadership team in a school then there is the possibility of creating other teams throughout the school.

Criteria for team effectiveness

The effective team needs to develop criteria for its own effectiveness and to consider which of the following are relevant and appropriate to its particular situation. Indeed, one of the key characteristics of the effective team is that it devotes time to establishing its own working protocols and criteria for effectiveness. This of itself is a powerful team development exercise and a source of consensus building and learning.

Alignment

The team has to develop a common sense of values and vision which act as the keystone of its activities. Meetings need to regularly revisit the core principles of the school and to ensure that it is a values-driven organisation. There needs to be high consensus in the team – not a spurious ‘collective responsibility’, not an all-embracing hegemony but a clear and shared sense of purpose which is known, shared, understood and articulated. The effective team has an agreed purpose and is clear about the principles by which it will achieve that purpose. It has a


shared sense of internal and external accountability, responsibility to each member of the team and those that the team exists to serve.

Design

The team needs an appropriate balance of types and behaviours. Belbin’s team styles inventory remains a useful model with which to explore the dynamics of the team in terms of team roles rather than organisational roles. Depending on the specific tasks, a team needs a portfolio of behavioural types:

— co-ordinating, synthesising, integrating

— challenging, questioning, checking, reviewing

— creating, proposing, initiating

— supporting, nurturing, caring

— acting, applying

The dominance of any one of these types will lead to an unbalanced team that will probably spend more time ‘storming’ than ‘performing’. High-performing teams are designed so that the membership is appropriate to the task, the ‘chemistry’ is adjusted to ensure that the team is ‘fit for purpose’ and that form follows function. Thus it may be helpful to distinguish between structural teams that exist for organisational maintenance and task teams that are created for a specific purpose.

Review

This is one of the defining differences between a group and a team. The effective team will invest time and energy in reviewing both what it does and how it works. It is this latter aspect that requires the greatest change from historical practice. In practical terms it means that the team is open about its working relationships and explores strategies to improve them. The team will regularly review:

— the quality of working relationships

— the engagement of all members of the team

— its effectiveness and efficiency in getting things done

— the extent to which it models appropriate working practices

— how far it is focussed on the vision and values of the school

A highly effective team will regularly ask itself the questions:

— How well are we doing?

— How can we improve?

— Are we as good at developing our relationships as completing the task?

Relationships

The team is emotionally intelligent, ,that is, it works to achieve a sophisticated level of interpersonal relationships as the primary means by which it works. This implies that the team is conscious and deliberate in working to optimise individual and collective effectiveness. The team works in this way for both practical and moral reasons. Human relationships are at the heart of moral leadership, effective learning and organisational life. Effective teams are characterised by openness and candour about their working relationships; there is challenge, a willingness to discuss difficulties in working relationships and personal and professional honesty. The working style of an effective team is relaxed and supportive and every member accepts the responsibility to be engaged and to engage others. The team also cultivates the interpersonal skills that are essential to effective problem solving and decision making: listening, questioning, building and proposing, clarifying and summarising and celebrating success.

Learning

The team is conscious and deliberate about the individual and collective learning of its members. The team’s normal working procedures are used as the basis for developing knowledge, skills and experience. This is done through the review process, the opportunities to develop new skills and the coaching and mentoring, which characterise the relationships between team leaders and members. Roles are regularly rotated; there are opportunities to lead projects and to exercise authority. Crucially, the team creates time and space to develop high-order review and reflection and seeks to capture the knowledge it creates. The team is not frightened of theory; it will use theories and models to review its own practices and explore new ways of working. Most importantly, the whole team works to ensure that there is shared understanding of the team’s tasks and its internal processes.


Trust

The combined impact of the factors listed above creates a climate of high trust. This is reflected in the lack of formal control exercised over team members in their work with other teams in the school. A high degree of mutual respect ensures that relationships are based on reciprocity rather than hierarchy – as shared values rather then bureaucratic controls. There is a very high level of lateral communication. The team works through the creation of networks, both internal and external, and this is perceived by the team leader as a strength rather than a threat. The team is able to work through formal and informal networks and so enrich its ability to gather information and create consensus.

Activity 4.4

The components of effective team working

Classify each of the components of effective teams A, B, C or D according to the extent to which it is:

• A: Well established in principle and practice in your team

• B: Emergent practice in the team

• C: Not yet a feature of team practice

• D: An issue for the team

What are the practical implications of your scoring?

Component Score Implications

1. Clarity of purpose

2. Shared values

3. Appropriate membership and team roles

4. Monitoring, review and evaluation of team performance

5. High-quality interpersonal relationships

6. Shared learning and collaborative development

7. High levels of trust

8. Modelling effective and efficient working

autonomy. The challenge to transform schools has to be firmly rooted in the transformation of working relationships and structures and teams are central to this process. The effective team can improve performance and creativity. In fact, everything that has been written here applies as much to the learning of young people as it does to their teacher. Teams probably provide the most powerful way for the full potential of middle leadership to be realised.

Professional learning and developmentMiddle leaders can often have the greatest impact when they perceive their leadership as supporting the learning and development of their colleagues. Indeed it can be argued that one of the characteristics of high-performance leaders is that they focus on building capacity in their team.

Schools are staffed by one of the most sophisticated workforces in the country. The long-established principles of professionalism point to a school working as a federation of teams, in a genuinely collegial way, rather than as a bureaucratic hierarchy. The personal accountability of the head teacher remains an issue for the development of a genuine team culture. However, in the current climate, the leadership of a school has to be founded in interdependent relationships rather than personal


There are numerous strategies to support team-based learning, but this section will focus on three that are particularly relevant to middle leaders because they are highly cost- effective and build on existing relationships and roles in the team. The three approaches are action learning, mentoring and coaching, and reflective practice. This section can only provide an overview of each. There are extra materials on the National College website in the leadership library. Many schools use these approaches as part of a whole-school strategy so there are plenty of practical examples available. The Middle Leadership in Primary Schools Project offers a number of case studies that exemplify the strategies that can support middle-leadership development.

• Leaders are mostly identified through performance management reviews, but the school does occasionally make direct overtures to teachers they believe have the potential to become good middle leaders.

• Trainee middle leaders are asked to carry out an initial self-audit on what they perceive to be their strengths and weaknesses. Following this audit, an action plan is constructed in collaboration with a senior leader.

• The middle leader is then buddied up with an experienced leader within the school and programme of development activities begins. Activities include working alongside each other in a variety of settings and delegation of specific tasks and responsibilities. Coaching and mentoring feature strongly throughout the programme.

This programme has had an impact on learning and teaching in a number of ways. The middle leaders involved have gradually moved from learning collaboratively with colleagues to playing a leading role in developing learning across the school.

Action learning

Action learning is an action-orientated problem-solving model that works through collaborative approaches. It is based on the principle of ‘learning by doing’. It combines a focus on shared problem solving, personal and group learning and is a powerful vehicle for improving performance, developing practice and supporting innovation. Because it works through genuine issues it is perceived to be both relevant and developmental. It requires a systematic and disciplined approach and, most distinctively, the active intervention of a coach or adviser to provide support and insure the integrity of the learning process.

The key characteristics of the action learning approach are:

— working in real time on genuine problems or issues

— observing, reflecting on and understanding the implications of behaviour, actions and strategies

— analysis, drawing conclusions and planning the next stage of the process

— designing the next appropriate strategy and implementing it

— team-based working – balanced teams of four to eight people

— genuine and challenging problems

— working through questioning and listening

— creating time and space for reflection on task and process

— supported by mentoring and coaching

— shared commitment to action

— celebration, consolidation and preparation for the next stage

Action learning may best be thought of as a double helix, with one strand focused on task, activity, design and implementation and the other focused on reflection, engagement with theory, learning processes and personal relationships.

Mentoring and coaching

In the context of team learning and development, mentoring is offered as the most appropriate model because of its focus on support and learning. For the purposes of this discussion, mentoring is defined as


a sustained, one-to-one relationship based on trust, in which the mentor actively supports the learner to build personal and professional capacity to enhance effectiveness. In this context, coaching is seen as a more specific and targeted intervention to support the development of particular strategies or skills. However, the terms are often used interchangeably and the important issue is consistent use in a specific context.

The characteristics of effective mentoring or coaching may be defined as:

— the clarification of the learner’s situation and priorities

— agreement of criteria for effective performance

— supported reflection and review

— feedback on actual performance based on observations, analysis and reflection

— implementation of strategies to support problem solving or to enhance performance; for example, skill building, setting challenges, providing advice, demonstrating techniques or removing barriers

— feedback on progress, recognition and reinforcement of success, introduction of alternative strategies if necessary

— consolidation and challenge

Reflective practice

Reflective practice is central to both action learning and mentoring and coaching, but it is also an essential element of all professional practice and a fundamental component of effective management and leadership. It is not overstating the case to assert that it is impossible to learn without reflection. Reflection is not about withdrawal from the day-to-day life of the team, school and classroom. In fact, it is about being totally involved but learning from that involvement – ‘learning in action’ in the classic phrase.

Figure 4.2 shows the components of reflective practice and how they interact.

— Reflection is most effective against a norm, alternative perspective, model of best practice or any challenge or stimulus that helps to clarify current practice.

— One of the central characteristics of successful practice is gathering evidence or data to justify and illuminate any conclusions. Data can take a multitude of forms; what is crucial is that it is valid and trustworthy.

— Once data has been assembled against agreed criteria it then becomes possible to review the evidence and begin to formulate judgements and draw tentative conclusions.

— The penultimate stage is concerned with generating alternative responses to the conclusions drawn and beginning to formulate the most appropriate way forward.

— The final stage consists in translating all that has gone before into practical and specific actions that will make a difference.


Purpose andoutcomes

Evidence anddata

Review andjudgements

Consideration ofalternatives

Implementationstrategy

Figure 4.2 The components of reflective practice

It will be very obvious that the components of reflective practice are central to action learning and any model of mentoring or coaching. However, they should also be central to team meetings and professional development activity or change process. It is equally self-evident that the main features of reflective practice are found in the effective classroom.

Activity 4.5




Issue 1

Issue 2

Issue 3

;


ReferencesBryk, A S & Schneider, B, 2002, Trust in Schools, New York, Russell Sage

Covey, Stephen M R, 2006, The Speed of Trust, London, Simon and Schuster

Hargreaves, A & Fink, D, 2006, Sustainable Leadership, San Francisco, Jossey Bass

Sergiovanni, T. (2005) Strengthening the Heartbeat, San Francisco, Jossey Bass

Layard, R and Dunn, J. A Good Childhood, London, Penguin

Ofsted, 2009, Twenty Outstanding Primary Schools


Module 5: Leading change and continuous improvement Understanding change There is a very strong case for arguing that in the final analysis leadership and management are all about change. In many ways education is driven by change. Learning involves change and the world that young people are being prepared to live in as citizens is constantly changing. And one of the hallmarks of being a professional is recognition of a moral duty to be constantly seeking to improve the quality of the service offered. Change is axiomatic to educational philosophy, policy and practice and both effective learning and teaching are essentially processes that require a culture of continuous improvement.

A helpful starting point may be to see change as a process – essentially, as the dynamic that drives nature, history, societies and our own lives. If you think of your own life to date, it probably is not a smooth, logical progression towards a clearly identified outcome. Our lives tend to be rather messier than that. Where you are today is the result of a complex interaction of multiple variables, some of which you were able to control – others that were totally unpredictable and outside your knowledge, let alone control. Equally our lives are made up of choices that were emotional or moral and sometimes flew in the face of reason – or so it seemed at the time. Sometimes change is very limited in its implications and impact; sometimes it is massive.

It would be nonsense to pretend that we are the victims of change. We sometimes make a deliberate choice and are aware of the consequences of that decision. In personal terms we make and live with choice about career and lifestyle. However, things are rather different in organisational terms – others may make the choice and the variables influencing change are exponentially more complex.

Thinking again of your personal and professional experience of change and changing, it is probably fair to say that:

— Change can’t always be controlled.

— Change is often unpredictable and irrational.

— Change is rarely logical, neat and linear.

— Change is often the product of multiple competing perceptions.

Activity 5.1

Think of your last holiday. Did you plan every detail in advance? Did it work out exactly as planned?

Think of your last team improvement plan. Did it work out exactly as planned?

Think about your own career. Are you now ex-actly where you planned to be five years ago?

How much change?In recent years educational policy has been subject to a wide range of innovations and initiatives. This is probably a reflection of the high complexity of the educational process and the very high significance attached to education by all other organisations. However, at times it does become clear that the system is not working in the way that it should. At this point, change becomes not only necessary but also morally essential.

I discern two legitimate reasons for undertaking new educational practices. The first reason is that current practices are not actually working...

The second reason is that conditions in the world are changing significantly. Consequent on these changes, certain goals, capacities, and practices might no longer be indicated, or even come to be seen as counterproductive.

(Gardner 2006 p10)


The issue is one of securing consensus that education practices really ‘are not actually working’ and agreeing that the context is changing. These issues are addressed in The Case for Change, the document that sets out the evidence base for the proposals contained in The Importance of Teaching – the coalition’s White Paper. The evidence that by one set of criteria the English system is not working, as it should, is robust and consistent:

England’s schools can be better. Over the past 15 years, a number of major studies have examined systematically how well students perform in literacy, mathematics and science in different countries of the world at different ages. These studies have begun to expose how well different education systems are doing – and have cast the education debate in this country in a wholly new light. In the latest round of tests of 15 year olds (PISA), England was 17th in reading, 24th in mathematics and 14th in science – ahead of countries like Spain, the USA and Italy, but still well behind, for example, Finland, Hong Kong and Canada.

(Dept of Education 2010, p2)

This analysis leads to a moral proposition growing out of the data:

So, not only can our education system be better and more equitable, but also our country needs it to become so. Across the globe, governments have recognised the urgent need to improve their education systems. Those that are performing at the highest levels now made significant reform a priority some time ago.

(Ibid 2010, p4)

Activity 5.2

What is your response to the evidence put forward in The Case for Change? Does your experience confirm or challenge its conclusions. What evidence base would you offer as an alternative?

Of course there are many levels of change. Just as in someone’s personal life there are degrees of

significant change, with bereavement and divorce being the most profound and many others being relatively superficial, so it is professionally. For many years the prevailing orthodoxy has been school improvement and that approach has undoubtedly had a significant impact on the performance of individual schools and across whole systems. However, it may be that improvement is taking a very long time to achieve significant and sustainable system change. It may also be that the traditional strategies based on school improvement have led to a period of diminishing returns. In other words, everybody has to work harder and yet appears to be achieving less in relative terms. This is the classic ’impact–leverage ratio’: how much difference do you actually make for what input?

Improvement remains an important and significant approach. Every teacher, team and school needs to be committed to improving every aspect of their work on a continuous and sustained basis. But then, perhaps, there comes a point where this incremental approach is insufficient to deal with the challenges. At that point it may be that innovation is called for, that is, the introduction of radically different approaches that represent a profoundly different approach. The problem with innovation, however, is that it often occurs in isolation and so its impact might be limited. Therefore, at some point it may be necessary to think in terms of transformation, that is, rethinking every aspect of the system or process. The relative impact and leverage of different levels of change is illustrated in Figure 5.1.

Leverage

TRANSFORMATION

INNOVATION

IMPROVEMENT

H

L

L H Impact

Figure 5.1 The relative impact and leverage of different levels of change


Marshall provides a powerful model of the profundity of the change that transformation involves:

We cannot restructure a structure that is splintered at its roots. Adding wings to caterpillars does not create butterflies – it creates awkward and dysfunctional caterpillars. Butterflies are created through transformation.

(Marshall 1995, p1)

In these terms, improvement may be seen as ensuring the caterpillar is healthy, but in reality we should be primarily concerned with the butterfly. Sometimes, however, the caterpillar is so demanding, or caring for it is so habituated that it’s easy to forget about the butterfly. (An important road in my life is the A46 between Leicester and my home near Lincoln. The majority of the road is dual carriageway but a 20-mile section has been two-way. That section is currently being converted into dual carriageway. The important issue is that the road is not being improved, nor are a few innovations being introduced but rather the whole route has been reconsidered with villages by-passed, new junctions built, and so on. In other words, the existing road has not been improved – the journey has been transformed.)

Activity 5.3

Do you accept the distinction made in this section between improvement, innovation and transformation?

Can you provide examples of each from your own team or school?

What are the practical differences between them in terms of leadership behaviours and strategies?

The components of successful change There are countless models of the components of successful change leadership but perhaps the most compelling are those of Michael Fullan because they are derived from numerous examples of successful change in education. Any of his studies provide a powerful synthesis of the components of successful change. Fullan (2006) argues:

In my view there are ten key elements for addressing turnaround situations in a way that promises continued success and at the same time makes turnaround part and parcel of changing the whole system.

(2006:44)

Fullan’s ten key elements

1. Define closing the gap as the overarching goal

This component stresses the centrality of clarity of purpose and the need to focus on the essentials. Securing access for every pupil to quality teaching and learning so as to embed equity across the system has to be the dominant issue for most education systems, schools, teams and teachers.

2. Attend to the basics: literacy, numeracy, well-being

For Fullan these three elements are the basis for any reform or change strategy; if they are not in place then every approach will be compromised. They are, of course, mutually enhancing and reinforcing and provide the foundation for personal, social and academic success.

3. Tap into people’s dignity and respect

Enabling change and turning schools around requires a positive culture based on mutual regard and respect and the willingness to recognise and engage with negative forces in the life of schools.

4. Ensure the best people are working on the problem

The focus here is on readiness and capability, deploying people to best effect so that those with the knowledge, skills, motivation and commitment are given a task despite their role or status.

5. Change by doing rather than planning

Fullan’s maxim here often appears counter-intuitive, but the principle is a fundamental one: bring about change through action that is coupled with review and effective learning, rather than waiting for the plan to be right. This approach sees change as a process, not an event.


6. Build capacity

Successful change is significantly determined by the available expertise: knowledge, skills and capability. This implies a deliberate strategy to develop the necessary resources in terms of the repertoire of leadership and management strategies.

7. Develop sustainable leadership

This is about leadership that can sustain innovation and change over the long term, that is, going beyond the quick fix and immediate response into strategic engagement.

8. Build internal accountability linked to external accountability

Successful change is rooted in the acceptance of personal responsibility from a moral perspective and from the nature of working relationships and shared commitment to deliver agreed results.

9. Sustain positive pressure

This is about sustained moral, professional and personal drive to maintain focus and engagement with the core purpose.

10. Build public confidence

Change can lead to anxiety and uncertainty. Successful change leadership is open, transparent and highly responsive.

(For a much more detailed discussion of the factors influencing the successful leadership of change please see the extension materials developed by Michael Fullan.)

Activity 5.4 Understanding the strategies for successful change

For each of Fullan’s criteria please provide an example from your own experience or from talking to colleagues on the programme or at school. What are the practical implications for your approach to leading change?

Fullan’s criteria. Your experience and examples

Define closing the gap as the overarching goal

Attend to the basics

Tap into people’s dignity and respect

Ensure the best people are working on the problem

Change by doing rather than planning

Build capacity

Develop sustainable lead-ership

Build internal account-ability linked to external accountability

Sustain positive pressure

Build public confidence

Leadership and change Leadership, at its deepest level, is about change. One of the primary arguments for effective leadership is the need to sustain improvement and thereby change and innovation. However, there is a danger that change will be seen as a self-legitimating activity. The ‘buzz’ of change is often seen as valid in its own right and the excitement of innovation will brook no opposition. There is no doubt that change can be emotionally exhilarating and intellectually exciting, but at the same time there has to be a deep and rigorous justification for change to avoid the accusation of ‘change for change’s sake’ and to secure commitment through consensus and engagement rather than control and compliance.


There are numerous formulations as to why education should change; it is the extent of the change that is contested. However, this option may not be available to us:

I discern two legitimate reasons for undertaking new educational practices. The first reason is that current practices are not actually working...

The second reason is that conditions in the world are changing significantly. Consequent on these changes, certain goals, capacities, and practices might no longer be indicated, or even come to be seen as counterproductive. (My emphasis)

(Gardner H 2006, p10)

The rationale for change will vary according to context and perception but certain issues seem to dominate every agenda:

— the need to secure equity across the whole system

— the importance of securing consistently effective teaching and learning

— the importance of securing a curriculum that ensures access to knowledge and understanding


Activity 5.5

Readiness to lead change

Rate yourself for each category; 1 = low confidence, 6 = high confidence

1. I have a clear understanding of the forces influencing change in education.

(1 2 3 4 5 6)

2. I am clear and confident about my educational values.

(1 2 3 4 5 6)

3. I am personally comfortable with change and innovation.

(1 2 3 4 5 6)

4. I am able to provide confident, authoritative leadership.

(1 2 3 4 5 6)

5. I have a clear personal vision for education in the future.

(1 2 3 4 5 6)

6. I am able to influence others to share my vision and values.

(1 2 3 4 5 6)

7. I am comfortable with complexity and ambiguity.

(1 2 3 4 5 6)

8. I am able to offer sophisticated interpersonal leadership.

(1 2 3 4 5 6)

9. I understand futures thinking and strategic thinking.

(1 2 3 4 5 6)

10. I work in an organisation that has a culture that celebrates change, growth and learning.

(1 2 3 4 5 6)

What are the issues and implications of your scores? What action do you need to take?

Activity 5.7




Issue 1

Issue 2

Issue 3


ReferencesDepartment for Education, 2010, The Importance of Teaching (The White Paper)

Department for Education, 2010, The Case for Change

Fullan, M, 2006, Turnaround Leadership, San Francisco, Jossey Bass

Gardner, H, 2006, The Development and Education of the Mind, Abingdon, Routledge

Marshall, S.P. (1995) http://www.21learn.org/publ/systhesis/synthesis_four.htm


Module 6: Developing your own leadership

Growing as a leaderIn recent years we have seen an enormous growth in leadership development – but there has not always been a commensurate growth in the focus on personal growth. If anything, the personal element has tended to be marginalised by the technical or rational needs of leadership. Effective leadership includes accepting responsibility for personal growth and well-being as much as technical efficiency. In fact, the two elements are totally interdependent.

Growing as a leader starts with recognition of the importance of the inner life that helps us to engage in the public arena. This inner life may be understood as mental models or maps. They are the constructs by which we understand the complexity of the world and the ways in which we process it. Think of your daily journey to work – the chances are that you drive there. With a bit of encouragement you could probably talk someone through that journey – the bottlenecks, the fast stretches. You probably can tell the time by where you are – for example “The Shell Garage means 10 minutes to go.” We all have mental maps of regular journeys and of our homes, offices and classrooms. Mindscapes help us to understand where we are geographically (and just think of the total sense of disorientation if you do not have a mental model of a place) and also, and more importantly, our social and professional situation.

You grow as a leader by developing and changing your mindscape in the same way that you changed in your relationship with your parents, partner and your own children over time. We grow as human beings by developing our mindscapes. We need to develop our personal mindscapes in order to enrich the professional elements of our mindscapes. It might be that in recent years our mental maps or mindscapes have become too concerned with getting from A to B. To be effective leaders we need to explore the highways and by-ways; to find the alternative routes that will enrich our lives. We need the occasional diversion and to question the routes we have followed for years. Crucially, we have to relate leadership development to personal development.

EffectiveLearning

Personal Growth

Leadership Development

Figure 6.1 Developing leadership effectiveness

(Adapted from West-Burnham 2009, p10)

In Figure 6.1 the relationship between the various elements of leadership effectiveness is presented as an interaction between three variables – growth as a leader requires all three to be developed and nurtured. In the model that is proposed in this section, neglecting one of these elements will compromise the other two. Senge (2004) and his colleagues reinforce this perspective:

…if you want to be a leader, you have to be a real human being. You must recognize the true meaning of life before you can become a great leader. You must understand yourself first.

(p186)

…In this sense, the cultivated self is a leader’s greatest tool…It’s the journey of a lifetime.

(p186)

That’s why I think that cultivation, ‘becoming a real human being’, really is the primary leadership issue of our time, but on a scale never required before.

(p192)


Effective leaders are effective people and as Bennis and Goldsmith (1997) express it:

…the process of becoming a leader is much the same as the process of becoming an integrated human being…leadership is a metaphor for centeredness, congruity and balance in one’s life.

(p8)

Thus it might be argued that leadership development is a process of ‘Self-Invention’ (Bennis 1989, p50) that is directly linked to the creation of personal authenticity. Guignon (2004) describes this as:

…centering in on your own inner self, getting in touch with your feelings, desires and beliefs, and expressing those feelings, desires and beliefs in all you do…defining and realizing your own identity as a person.

(p162)

This all points to leaders (in the best possible sense) ’getting a life‘. That means balancing personal development and fulfilment with professional growth and learning and, crucially, being aware of and increasingly confident about controlling the learning process. This implies that leaders, like any balanced human beings, engage in a range of activities that enhance their personal fulfilment, well-being, physical and psychological health and happiness.

Personal effectiveness is a product of personal understanding, in particular a level of self-awareness that nourishes and nurtures personal confidence, capability and sustainability. This is what Howard Gardner refers to as intrapersonal intelligence, which is sometimes referred to as ‘meta-learning’ – the ability to become profoundly reflective and change and grow as a result of that reflection. You may find the extension resource for this module - Leadership Development and Personal Effectiveness – is helpful in developing strategies that balance leadership development with personal effectiveness in order to stress the importance of personal authenticity as the heart of effective leadership. This resource offers a structured and integrated approach to personal planning and sustained development.

Activity 6.1

Using the model in Figure 6.1 please reflect on your perception of the relative strength of each of the three dimensions in your life. It may be help-ful to use the diagram below to identify particular strengths in each circle or to develop your own model, varying the size of the circles according to your perception of their relative strength.

What conclusions do you draw about the relative significance of each of the elements?

Leadership learningLeadership learning is a complex process with many interacting variables. Because it is so closely related to personal learning and development it is essential that leadership development is seen as a personalised approach, in which the individual is able to take on responsibility for the effectiveness of his or her personal leadership journey.

The second section of this resource asked you to review the components of effective learning and leadership development. We hope that you have been able to work through this programme, learning through the interaction of research, theories of effective leadership and your own experience and practice. At this stage of the programme it is important that you begin to reflect on both what you have learnt and how you have learnt it.

Please return to the section of this resource where we set out the learning strategies underpinning this programme and the principles underpinning effective leadership learning. At this stage of the programme it is important that you reflect on how you have learnt as much as what you have learnt – in particular to be very confident about the learning strategies that have been most useful to you in helping you grow in confidence and understanding.


Please read through this section and reflect on both the principles and the practice of leadership development set out there. Now use Activity 6.2 to focus on your confidence and development as a learner.

Activity 6.2

• What criteria do you use to judge your effectiveness?

• How rich is your personal portfolio of learning strategies?

• Are you comfortable experimenting with new approaches and strategies in your learning?

• Do you have a long-term mentoring relationship as part of your professional development strategy?

• How confident are you in reflecting on your practice?

• How comfortable are you in getting feedback from others?

• What strategies do you use to identify your developmental agenda?

• Are you comfortable with risk taking and failing?

• Are you open to challenge?

• How successful and effective is your leadership learning?

Would your mentor agree with your judgements?

Well-being and balanceThe terms ‘well-being’ and ‘balance’ imply a deliberate personal strategy that seeks to ensure that all dimensions of a fulfilling life are met. School leadership is socially, emotionally and physically demanding work. It is therefore essential that leaders invest time in their own personal development and growth.

. . . high levels of wellbeing mean that we are more able to respond to difficult circumstances, to innovate and constructively engage with other people and the world around us. As well as representing a highly effective way of bringing about good outcomes in many different areas of our lives, there is also a

strong case for regarding wellbeing as an ultimate goal of human endeavour.

(www.nationalaccountsofwellbeing.org p1)

As well as issues to do with personal and professional effectiveness, there is a case for leaders modelling appropriate strategies, for example ’Do as I do‘ rather than ’Do as I say’.

In order to achieve a sense of well-being and balance leaders need:

— time and space for self

— self-awareness, personal reflection

— time with others

— life style changes

— friendship, social relationships

— creativity

— to fill the reservoir – develop personal resources that nourish and nurture

Resilience and sustainabilityThere is increasing interest in, and concern about, the issue of sustainability in leadership. Put simply: ‘How do leaders keep going?’ We know that leadership is central to organisational improvement and transformation, but there is increasing evidence that the ‘cost’ of leadership can be very high. Leadership can exact a high personal, social and professional price. There has been an enormous growth in the quality and provision of professional development for school leaders. Training and development are now more widely available than ever before, but most of it focuses on the technical and the organisational aspects.

However, there are other dimensions to sustainability that I believe we are neglecting. These may be best understood as personal efficacy, that is, the development of the whole person, recognising that leadership is more than an aggregation of technical skills and that it requires the engagement of all aspects of the person. There are dimensions to leadership that call on every aspect of the person in a way that some management tasks do not. Leadership development needs to be as much about the affective as about the formal. I would argue that there are three dimensions to a model of personal efficacy:

1. vocation: a sense of spiritual and moral purpose


2. a high level of emotional intelligence, interpersonal and intrapersonal

3. the ability to engage in deep and profound learning

It is important to stress that these dimensions are interdependent and that each is fundamental to the development of the others. It is only when all three dimensions are being developed and interacting that the full potential of leadership can be realised and sustained. As Ken Robinson (2009) states:

When people are in their Element, they connect with something fundamental to their sense of identity, purpose and well-being. Being these provides a sense of self-revelation, of defining who they really are and what they are meant to be doing with their lives.

(p21)

If this aspect of life is compromised then overall leadership efficacy is diminished and the personal well-being of the leader is at risk. This could result in a loss of leadership effectiveness, burnout and dysfuctionality and, in extreme cases, a personal or professional crisis. Robinson defines ‘The Element’ as the ‘meeting point between natural aptitude and personal passion’ (ibid), that is, reconciling vocation and engagement with learning and development. Sustainability and resilience are improved because people are ‘doing the thing they love and in doing it they feel more like their most authentic selves’ (ibid)

It is not part of our tradition to go into these areas. The emphasis has been on the role rather than the person, the technical skills rather than the personal qualities. It is not enough to develop technical competence. There has to be equal regard given to the personal, as leadership is about the whole person. To compromise this is to compromise leadership effectiveness and personal integrity.


References Bennis, W, 1989, On Becoming a Leader, London, Century Business

Bennis, W, and Goldsmith, J, 1997, Learning to Lead, London, Nicholas Brealey Publishing

Guignon, C, 2004, On Being Authentic, London, Routledge

Robinson, K, 2009, The Element, London, Penguin Books

Senge, P, Scharmer, C O, Jaworski, J and Flowers, B S, 2004, Presence, Cambridge MA: SoL

West-Burnham, J, and Ireson, J, 2005, Leadership Development and Personal Effectiveness, NCSL

West-Burnham, J, 2009, Developing Outstanding Leaders, NCSL

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