Women and Educational Leadership

Margaret Grogan, Charol Shakeshaft

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780470933497
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

This groundbreaking book presents a new way of looking at leadership that is anchored in research on women leaders in education. The authors examine how successful women in education lead and offer suggestions and ideas for developing and honing these exemplary leadership practices.

Women and Educational Leadership shows how the qualities that characterize women's approaches to leadership differ from traditional approaches?whether the traditional leader is a woman or a man. The authors reveal that women leaders are more collaborative by nature and demonstrate a commitment to social justice. They tend to bring an instructional focus to leadership, include spiritual dimensions in their work, and strive for balance between the personal and professional.

This important book offers a new model of leadership that shifts away from the traditional heroic notion of leadership to the collective account of leadership that focuses on leadership for a specific purpose—like social justice. The authors include illustrative examples of leaders who have brought diverse groups to work toward common ground. They also show how leadership is a way to facilitate and support the work of organizational members. The ideas and suggestions presented throughout the book can help the next generation fulfill the promise of a new tradition of leadership.

Women and Educational Leadership is part of the Jossey-Bass Leadership Library in Education series.

Chapter 1
Five Ways Women Lead

You hire people who have capacity; you help them build that capacity and you let them shine. And I get the residual effect of that all the time, but I no longer need to be in the limelight as … the person who made all of this happen because that's not what makes me feel successful. When I have other people who feel empowered, who have a feeling of purpose and desire and direction and want to make things happen with the direction we set as a team, then I feel I've done my job.

Lorraine Darnell (Grogan, 1996, p. 143)

How do women lead? And why do they take on sometimes onerous leadership roles? By now, we have a fairly rich body of literature that lets us step back and understand what women principals, women superintendents, and other women in education do, and why they do it. While we do not argue that all women lead in a particular way, we have understood that there are preferences¹ and approaches which characterize the leadership of many women. In the recently published Handbook for Achieving Gender Equity Through Education, edited by Sue Klein and colleagues (2007), two chapters review the research on women educational leaders P–16. From these comprehensive literature reviews and other research we have been able to identify five themes that illustrate what women leaders in education pay attention to: relational leadership, leadership for social justice, leadership for learning, spiritual leadership, and balanced leadership.

The body of research that examines female administrative behavior suggests several components that are commonly associated with women. Documenting leadership behaviors that predominate among women is not the same as saying that women lead differently from men. In more than fifty studies that compare female and male approaches to leadership, the results are mixed: 100 percent of the qualitative studies versus 14 percent of the quantitative studies identify differences (Shakeshaft et al., 2007). The analysis of findings and methodology does not offer a clear explanation for these differences, but we note that quantitative studies tend to measure or describe leadership differently from qualitative studies. Instruments developed by traditional leadership scholars to examine male leadership often left out behaviors that both males and females use, but that were less valued by these researchers. However, we were able to sort out many interesting points of departure from the traditional male accounts in the literature on women leaders. Based on women's lived experiences of leading schools and districts, the following themes help us to understand what women pay attention to in this field of work. And, more important, they give us an opportunity to consider how educational leadership can be reconceived so that more students prosper.

Relational Leadership

Relational leadership suggests that leadership is about being in relationship with others in a horizontal rather than a hierarchical sense. When interviewed about their leadership, women often talk about accomplishing goals with and through others. Studies suggest that women conceptualize power differently and are likely to seek to expand everyone's power. This approach has considerable impact on organizational behavior and change. Women school leaders historically have been ambivalent about their own power. Early studies of women's reactions to questions about power identified unease with stereotypically male notions of power. Formisano (1987), Carnevale (1994), and Smith (1996) in their studies of women assistant principals, principals, assistant superintendents, and superintendents noted women's discomfort with being described as powerful or as having power. Fennell (2002) reports that women leaders and feminist scholars “have often expressed discomfort with structuralist perspectives of power and sought alternative theories of power” (p. 100). Blackmore (1989) concurs, writing about women who are alienated by the “masculinist portrayal of power, leadership and organizational life which emphasizes control, individualism and hierarchy” (p. 123). Rather than conclude that women were not powerful, Hartsock (1983), Shakeshaft (1989), Kreisberg (1992), Hurty (1995), and many others began to move to redefine the concept as power with rather than power over. These observations are underscored in a variety of studies that ground power within relationships. Among others, Grogan (2000) and Brunner (2000) both identify relational approaches to power in the work of women educational administrators. Women often describe power as something that increases as it is shared. Therefore, it is not surprising that in order for many women to be comfortable with the notion of holding power, power needs to be conceptualized as something that is shared with others and that is not power over but, rather, power with.

Women's conceptions of power are closely tied to the importance they place on relationships. Power used to help others strengthens relationships, while power used to control damages relationships (Brunner, 2000). Thus, power through relationships is more likely to be how women confront change. Cryss Brunner's (1999b, 2000) work on the way women superintendents think about power is a good example. Many of the participants in her studies talk about their leadership this way:

In order to get things done through others you must be able to admire the human resources of your staff and build personal relationships with highly talented people who want to grow, and who want to do their very best. (2000, p. 144)

Similarly, in the quotation at the top of this chapter, assistant superintendent Lorraine Darnell in Grogan's (1996) study of women educational leaders talks about her ability to enable others to do their work well.

According to the literature, women superintendents enact this relational leadership by using decision-making strategies that allow them to really hear the input from others. A participant in Brunner's (2000) study talks about a superintendent she admires who always brings her ideas to her administrative team for their input. “[I]t's not as if the decision has already been made, and she's simply going through the motions of asking for input and asking for involvement on the part of the other people” (p. 147). The superintendent actually folded others' ideas into her decision-making. Another participant in the same study makes the point that it is more important to do the project well than to worry about who gets the credit. She says,

I think, as women, we have always known that we have to work with people to accomplish anything. A mother who runs a household doesn't always get the credit for what the children accomplish, but her preparing and planning helps these accomplishments to happen. (p. 144)

Leaders who build strong relationships are described as collaborative and caring as well as courageous and visionary (Regan & Brooks, 1995). These authors stress the importance of listening from the heart. One of the principals in their study, Susan, talks of the four-year journey of creating a cultural awareness program in her school. She describes being prompted to do this by a curious conversation she had early in her principalship:

“How do you like being the principal of the Hazard School?”

“I like it very well,” I said. “The community is so diverse—I find it very rich.”

“Rich?” said another woman, sounding perplexed. “I thought that some of the kids that go to that school are poor.” (p. 51)

Susan was unfazed by the outsider's misunderstanding and narrow perception of the children. Rejecting the stereotypical deficit view, she identified with the students and saw them as offering each other wonderful opportunities to break out of the cycles of racism and classism that had plagued the school and community. She established a strong community within the school to celebrate their cultural roots and engaged the wider community in efforts to underscore the value of their diversity.

This horizontal leadership approach stresses the involvement of the many in the activities of the organization. It extends beyond the leadership team to teachers and the wider community. A principal in Grogan's (1996) study juxtaposes two views of leadership:

Not everyone is comfortable with a collegial kind of approach…. I'm real tired of listening to people that are very directive and very top down. [They] talk about how they include everybody, and they don't mean that a bit. I mean they can spout it all, and I've watched them, and you give them an opportunity to demonstrate it, and no way in the world do they mean it. But with me, it's the only way I know how to operate. And it's based on the belief that I'm dealing with professionals and a sincere interest in having parents in the community directly involved in what goes on in the school. If [parents] weren't there, I'd go out and chase them in. They're not threatening; they belong there for crying out loud. (p. 144)

A final example of the relational approach to leadership found in many women's leadership stories comes from Grogan and Blackmon's (2001) study of a woman superintendent's efforts at coalition-building in her district. Superintendent Blackmon spent the first month on the job meeting with everyone she could in the district. She asked school board members to draw up a list of all the people who had complained about something the district was doing in the past, and she talked to those people. She had teachers draw up lists of parents and students she needed to talk to, and she sent an open invitation to the community at large to come and visit her. This was not only a beginning exercise; she became known as someone who was on the ground, and in the buildings. She invited diverse groups to come and talk to her and to one another, and she encouraged them to find common ground. Her deliberate attempts at coalition-building reflected the kind of networking approach that contrasts sharply with the idea of command and control.

Relational leadership is about facilitating the work of others who share the power and authority to collaboratively craft direction for the district. Perhaps the most important understanding that connects women leaders to others is the passion many women have for substantive change that addresses injustice in education.

Leadership for Social Justice

The history of women and work, as well as the social context of women's lives, provides a strong overlay to the motivation of women in education. Women are likely to report that they entered the field of education because they wanted to “change” the status quo. Studies of teachers indicate that women, more than men, identify educational careers as social justice work, even if they don't use that explicit language. Women, more often than men, talk about having entered teaching to change the lives of children, to make the world a fairer place, and to change institutions so that all children have a chance.

Commitment to social justice is documented in a number of studies that isolate social justice as an initial motivator as well as a continuing mission (Sanders-Lawson, 2001; Shapiro, 2004; Smith-Campbell, 2002; Strachan, 1999, 2002). These studies describe behaviors that are compatible with moral leadership (Sergiovanni, 1992), servant leadership (Schlosberg, 2003; Sergiovanni, 1999), value-added leadership (Covey, 1990; Sergiovanni, 1994), and synergistic leadership theory (Brown & Irby, 2006). In the research, women leaders often talk about why they seek and accept leadership positions. Many women of color and many white women are motivated by a strong desire to transform the learning conditions and opportunities for those who have been least well served by current educational policies and practices.

Jane Strachan (2002) and Valerie Hall (2002) describe women principals and head-teachers in New Zealand and the United Kingdom, respectively, who are grounded in an ethical approach to leadership that strives to create more equitable learning conditions for students. These women “[s]ought to achieve equity through personal, political, societal and institutional transformation” (Strachan, 2002, p. 117). Strachan paints a vivid portrait of one of the participants in her study, a principal named Jill, who was fully devoted to improving the lives of at-risk students in her building. Jill's staff comment that she would never become principal of a school of privileged students because she has “a social mission in teaching…and [is] passionate about things that are important to her, for example, the struggle of low income families and the consequences of that for their education” (p. 119).

Similarly strong examples of this kind of leadership are found in narratives of black women talking about their leadership in Sanders-Lawson and colleagues' (2006) stu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• The Jossey-Bass Leadership Library in Education
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Five Ways Women Lead
• Chapter 2: Our Status: Women School Administrators
• Chapter 3: A New Way: Diverse Collective Leadership
• Chapter 4: A Closer Look at Collective Leadership in Practice
• Chapter 5: Beyond Gender?
• Conclusion: Generating the Power of a Diverse Collective
• References
• Index
• Titles in the Jossey-Bass Leadership Library in Education Series
• End User License Agreement