Improving Schools Using Systems Leadership

Turning Intention into Reality

Ian Macdonald, Clive Dixon, Tony Tiplady

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351369237
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

It is easy to underestimate the impact that school organisation has on the behaviour, effectiveness, engagement and creativity of the teachers, staff and students who work within it. It also has a marked effect on the well-being of staff members, and how families and the community relate to the school. Attempts to improve school organisation are often short term "initiatives" that only cover only one or two aspects of what it takes to organise a school effectively.

Improving Schools Using Systems Leadership, in contrast, provides those involved in the design and delivery of educational services with a coherent and easy-to-follow framework to help run an effective organisation. Based on theory, real data on education improvements at school and regional level, and case studies, this book demonstrates how Systems Leadership can be used to improve school organisation. It integrates models of leadership, teamwork, capability, structure and systems to help make them more effective in improving the learning outcomes of students and also sustain this improvement over time.

This book explains how Systems Leadership can and has been applied in schools to bring clarity to the purpose, structure and systems within a school and have a major impact on its success. As such, it is an essential text for school leaders and managers looking for practical tools to help improve the working lives of the people within their organisation, and hence their effectiveness.

CHAPTER

1

From headmaster to school leader

This chapter discusses the changing nature of leadership in schools. Although it relies heavily on the Australian context, the reader will note similarities with trends and practices in other countries, particularly through the developed world.

The professionalisation of school teaching in the second half of the twentieth century impacted on the work of school leaders and the developing field of educational leadership. The headmaster in the 1960s was literally the head master or head teacher. With few limited resources, the headmaster demonstrated the most effective pedagogy to teachers, provided them with the lessons they should teach, showed them how they should assess and ensured that this happened by observing lessons and testing students.

The headmaster had a high degree of authority over how the school operated. The boundaries of the school were closed, with community and parents having limited involvement in decision making. While some might look back at these times through rose-coloured glasses, the good old days were only as good as the capability and intentions of the people in those roles.

The arrival of the “principal” in the 1970s was a sign of changing expectations. In Australia it was an indication that the influence of the British education system was declining, and educators were paying more attention to trends in education in the United States and other nations. In Western countries the work of teachers was becoming increasingly professionalised and the teachers who previously were trained in teachers’ colleges now enrolled in universities to complete four-year degrees in education. Moving from training in teaching methods to a broader tertiary education reflected the significant change in the nature of teacher education and the role of teachers.

Different ways of thinking about classroom organisation and the role of the student in learning emerged. It was a time of exploration, when the desks were unscrewed from the floor and new buildings and furniture and a wider variety of resources were delivered to schools to facilitate new pedagogies. The role of professional development became more important in developing teachers’ skills to meet these new expectations. This formed the basis of a mythology that professional development is provided by experts and occurs out of school hours and at a location outside of the school.

In the 1970s and 1980s the direction of a school depended largely on the preferences of the principal, and school performance depended on the capability of the principal and individual teachers. Apart from the visit of a supervisor in the form of a school inspector or superintendent there was no objective means of determining the performance level of students or the improvement in student learning over time. Growing teacher professionalism encouraged teachers to take more responsibility for their work and be less dependent on school leaders. Teachers began to develop their own units of work from common syllabi and there was a growing recognition of the needs of individual students.

In these circumstances pedagogy in any classroom depended on the preferences of the teacher. There was little consistency in pedagogy from one school to the next and there was no guarantee of consistency from one class to the next, even in the same school. A child’s success depended largely on whether he or she was allocated to a class with a capable teacher. In the Far North region this situation was referred to euphemistically as “creating your own adventure”.

During the 1980s and 1990s principals were required to be less directly involved in teaching and learning. The idea of the self-managing school with the promise of greater local autonomy also meant increased reporting requirements. Paradoxically the additional autonomy which, it was argued, would allow school communities to make better decisions and be more responsive to local needs came with additional work and more compliance measures. Different versions of the “self-managing school” emerged in jurisdictions across the developed world.

The annual visit by a principal supervisor in the 1960s to review and report on every aspect of school operations was replaced with a host of accountabilities and reports to various sources outside of the school. The derivation of the word “reform” – that is, forming again – proved to be true. Stability was replaced with a cycle of reform and restructuring which seemed to the people who worked in schools to cause ongoing disruption for little gain.

School leadership in the 1990s was embodied in the “administration team”. More middle managers were funded in schools to deal with the growing complexity, and studies in leadership and management expanded. Working in teams and engaging in collaboration were easily accommodated in the lexicon of educators because these concepts aligned to their mythologies associated with classroom management and pedagogy. A stronger focus on student outcomes caused significant dissonance because it challenged mythologies of teachers and principals who cherished privacy of practice.

In the role of a professional “manager”, principals were likely to be trained in program management. Annual action plans and strategic plans for a longer term were developed in set formats and key performance indicators were developed to measure and report progress. In response to community expectations and the corporatisation of education departments, new systems were introduced to replace the “in house” approaches to health and safety, child protection, governance, assessment, planning and reporting.

Principals were required to work more broadly in the community and to engage with other agencies for the benefit of their students. Schools provided opportunities for parents and caregivers to be more involved in their children’s education, and in most systems across the world, parents played an increasing role in school governance through school and district councils that approved or endorsed the decisions made by the professional educators.

In some countries, teaching is a highly unionised profession and teachers’ unions have a high degree of influence over education policy and how it is implemented. The purpose of unions is to provide better conditions and remuneration for their members. They argue that what is good for teachers must be good for students; for example, additional funding should be used to reduce class sizes so that teachers can provide more individual attention to students. While this argument seemed logical, it may have related more to the working conditions of teachers than concerns about student outcomes.

In Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement (2009) John Hattie concludes that class size has a minimal effect on student learning outcomes. The resources from this high-cost strategy could have been better used on strategies that cost less and result in a high-effect size. However, if a strategy requires teachers to change their practice, then teachers’ unions may resist them.

From the 2000s the work in schools was impacted significantly by technology. Testing programs allowed the achievement of every student in a particular year level to be compared with other students across a nation and internationally. Intranets and specialised systems provided databases with point-in-time information on students, staff members and most aspects of school operations. Faster, more widespread communication meant reduced response times, greater oversight of operations, increased scrutiny by the media and exposure to intrusive social media. The boundaries were broken down and the privacy of schools and classrooms disappeared.

Developments in information and communication technology challenge traditional teacher-directed pedagogy and as a subject in its own right, Information and Communication Technology competes for a place in an overcrowded curriculum. Principals and teachers are faced with more complex technical aspects in their work, and demands to interact and work with a wider range of stakeholders require sophisticated social processing. A school may be one of the few remaining not-for-profit institutions that engages with a significant cross-section of people in a community.

An occupational health, safety and well-being survey conducted annually since 2011 by the Institute for Positive Psychology and Education Faculty of Education and Arts at the Australian Catholic University reported that in regard to Australian principals:

The two greatest sources of stress that have remained consistently high over the length of the survey have been

I. Sheer Quantity of Work, and

II. Lack of Time to Focus on Teaching and Learning.

(Riley 2017)

The issue of well-being is covered in more detail in Chapter 2 of this text and further discussion of the expectations of teachers and principals is included in Chapter 13.

Significantly, there are no commonly agreed or coherent organisational theories or models that apply across the whole field of educational leadership. Developing school leader capability is described as “professional development” and more recently “professional learning”. In general, school leaders learn through experience and a succession of activities provided through conferences, workshops, systemic training, programs, courses and work-related projects.

In many countries, professional standards set out what principals and other school leaders are expected to know, understand and do to achieve proficiency in their work. These are intended to guide reflection on current practice and enable users to develop their leadership knowledge and skills through their day-to-day practice. The methodology for this approach is often expressed in terms of reflection, inquiry and collaboration.

In an article titled “A Brief History: The Impact of Systems Thinking on the Organization of Schools”, Siegrist et al. (2013) trace the development of our understanding of organisations and how this relates to schools. The authors emphasise the difference between treating an organisation as a machine rather than properly recognising the complexity of social systems.

This aligns with the views of Macdonald, Burke and Stewart (2018), who emphasise the importance of a social process in bringing about change. Siegrist et al. argue that the process of working from the parts of the role to develop the competencies expected of principals and teachers is inadequate because it does not take into account how those parts interact. Siegrist et al. go on to say:

Principal competencies are all products of analysis. By observing outstanding principals and breaking down their behaviours, it is assumed that exemplary practices can be identified, taught, and replicated by others. Of course, this is not true, but it sounds rational. Herein exists the deceit of the current analytical mental model.

Systems Leadership always starts with identifying the work that is required to achieve the purpose of the organisation. Organisations operate in a context and work is performed in a context. Systems Leadership is valued by principals because it helps them to understand this context and consequently their role and provides them with the tools and models to do the work to improve their school. A significant benefit is a common language based on the common understandings developed through using Systems Leadership. Team members can achieve clarity in understanding the work they need to do and how they can work together to achieve their purpose.

McKinsey: the world’s best-performing schools

In September 2007 McKinsey & Company published “How the World’s Best-performing School Systems Come Out on Top”. It reported research into twenty-five school systems, including the ten best-performing school systems in the world.

The experience of these top three school systems suggest that three things matter most:

1. Getting the right people to become teachers; and

2. Developing them into effective instructors; and

3. Ensuring that the system is able to deliver the best possible instruction for every child.

Although these may seem obvious, they were not as evident in practice and certainly not easily put into practice.

The McKinsey report described the performance of school systems in stages of poor to fair, fair to good, good to great and great to excellent. Challenging the notions that one school is the same as the next or that every school should independently determine its own approach, the research argues that to improve performance, there are strategies which should be used at all stages of performance, and there are also different interventions required at each stage.

Our research suggests that six interventions are common to all performance stages across the entire improvement journey: building the instructional skills of teachers and management skills of principals, assessing students, improving data systems, facilitating improvement through the introduction of policy documents and education laws, revising standards and curriculum, and ensuring an appropriate reward and remuneration structure for teachers and principals.

Plans to improve school performance fail when the strategies do not match the developmental stage of the school. Not all schools are at the same stage of development and to improve they need to do different work. If a school system is working from poor to fair then the emphasis should be on structured, systematic approaches to get the basics right. If a school system is working from great to excellent performance, then the emphasis is on teachers and school leaders collaborating and creating opportunities for innovation.

This is consistent with our proposition that organisational structures and systems impact on the behaviour of staff, students and community members. However in contrast to this approach the current situation is that change is expected to occur quickly with limited understanding of how it affects the people who work in schools. Everyone working in schools is busy but not necessarily effective and the next change comes before the last one is completed, causing fatigue, disassociation and counterproductive systems and behaviours. Principals are consumed by the churn of busy work at the expense of the productive work of their role. Social boundaries have broken down to the extent that the day-to-day issues which beset our society find their way into these special places called schools where our children go to learn.

While the public conversation is about teacher quality, there is rarely a shared understanding of what “teacher quality” means. We should clarify the work teachers and principals need to do in a school to ensure student outcomes continue to improve. Teaching should be developed as a system, which incorporates the most effective pedagogies and provides the scope for teachers to apply their judgement, capability and creativity to maximise student learning. While governments promote “autonomy” (a poorly defined concept, often used as a matter of convenience) as the answer to improving school performance, the emphasis should be on developing systems to allow people in schools to do the work required.

Despite the various programs, policies and changes in Australia, achievement standards of students in international testing programs have declined and limited improvement made in the National Assessment Program of Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) and in closing the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students.

The release of results of the NAPLAN each year is followed by predictable commentary. The reporting authority typically recommends that the good news stories of improvement in isolated schools should be examined, so that other schools can do similar things and also improve. State governments manipulate the narrative and point to incremental improvements or more impressive results in specific areas. Academics from faculties of education in universities downplay the importance of the NAPLAN as “point in time” information and warn parents that there is too much emphasis on testing, causing anxiety in students. Teachers’ unions agree there is too much emphasis on testing, and proclaim that it increases the stress levels of teachers and the solution to poor performance is increased funding. The representatives of governments argue about funding levels, where the responsibility for funding lies and the proportion of funding appropriate for private and public schools.

In our view these arguments ignore the real issues and provide no way forward to improve student outcomes. The regular media blitz shows no real understanding of the drivers for all students to achieve their potential. Inadvertently, this misunderstanding actually reinforces assumptions that children from poor background...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Praise
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 From Headmaster to School Leader
• Part 1 Understanding the Concepts and Tools of Systems Leadership
• Part 2 Implementing Change
• Part 3 Results and Outcomes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index