Refocusing School Leadership

Foregrounding Human Development throughout the Work of the School

Robert J. Starratt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136916403
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Refocusing School Leadership departs from the more traditional conceptualization of leadership, looking behind the daily routines of human resource leaders to highlight the assumptions and values and beliefs they bring to their work as well as the values and meanings embedded in the various contexts of school life. Starratt explores how educational leadership is grounded in one's own humanity as well as in a deep appreciation of the richness, complexity, and enormous potential of people, and he attempts to restore the centrality of human development in the work of educating the young—education is not simply about educating minds, but about developing whole persons. Starratt argues for a refocusing of educational leadership on affirming and enabling those talents, dispositions, interests, life experiences, and cultural proficiencies that comprise their humanity to enrich the work of learning.

The vision of the school should speak of the extraordinary possibilities for human achievement in our young people, as well as the talents of their teachers to nurture those possibilities. Starratt's focus on leadership as human resource development will energize the efforts of faculty, staff, and students to improve the quality of learning—the primary work of schools. This book is a valuable resource to prepare aspiring leaders, whether administrators or teachers, to deal with the way schools are currently run and to imagine and create better ways to promote quality learning for all.

CHAPTER 1
The Schooling Context of Human Development

Introduction

This chapter proclaims the obvious: Refocusing school leadership on human development is about dealing with human beings—dealing with them not as cogs in a wheel, not as zombies ready for programming, not as simple items in the budget, but, rather, in their humanity, as individuals with their own experiential biographies, their multiple talents, interests, biases, limitations, and enormous potential. Human beings within the context of the work of schooling can be considered as bringing their human resources to that work, resources still partially and unevenly developed, but nonetheless resources that make the work possible, and possible as distinctly human work. Unlike material resources, humans bring to the work of schooling their larger personal work which is the development of a human life that has meaning and value and purpose. That personal work of building a life needs to be integrated with their engagement in the work of the school. That is where those who lead the work of the school come in. They help to highlight the human value and meaning and purpose of the work of the school as coherent with the journey of personal human development. In other words, through the influence of the multiple leaders in the school, the work of teaching and learning comes to be seen as humanly fulfilling work for both the learners and the teachers. These leaders help to develop the multiple human resources that learners and teachers bring to the work of the school.

Anyone in the school system with responsibilities for directing and coordinating humans in the school is a human resource developer whose challenge is to lead through one’s proactive involvement with the development of the potential of the human resources in one’s charge. These human resource leaders, whether they be teachers, cluster leaders, curriculum coaches, principals, or directors of custodial services, are also human beings with their own personal and professional biography, their own growth trajectory and cluster of talents and limitations. It is assumed that these educators have some minimum understanding of human psychology that illuminates both their own humanity and the humanity of those they work with. As developers of human resources, they need to know their own limitations and biases and recognize when these begin to creep into their work with others. Knowing their own limitations, these human resource leaders can empathize with the struggles of others. Human development often requires struggle, confusion, trial and error, and extra effort. Self-knowledge requires a compassionate understanding of the hard work involved with learning, the painful necessity of letting go of earlier certainties, the risk of trying something new, the zig-zag path of breaking though to a clearer intelligibility of things.

The Drama of School

This chapter places the work of human development within the field of education, in its large human dimension, using the metaphor of drama. Everyday, in any given school, teachers, learners, administrators, and support staff produce the drama called “School.” This drama involves very specific roles—that of teacher, that of learner, that of administrator or staff person. All of these persons have been more or less socialized into playing their appropriate roles in the drama. Each player, however, brings his or her own personality into the playing of those roles and improvises on the roles for greater personal expression. Some completely identify with their roles such that when their roles are challenged or changed by superiors above them, they feel that their whole identity is being threatened. Some young learners, however, take a while to accommodate to their role expectations; they don’t quite know, initially, how to “play school.” For some learners, life outside of school is far more interesting and meaningful. Some tend to play their school roles half-heartedly, or even with some resistance. Still others who come to school from unstructured, chaotic, or toxic home or neighborhood environments carry emotional burdens too heavy to allow for any sustained focus on the playing of school; coping with the drama of their personal lives leaves little or no room for the drama of school. Other learners will find many connections between their home lives and their school lives, with both environments providing adult conversations about issues in public life, as well as involvement with cultural events.

In every school on almost every day, one can hear the familiar question at least one student asks a teacher: “Why do we have to study this stuff anyway?” Often two things are implied in that question. First, the question implies a pent-up frustration with having to go to school at all, with having to surrender their autonomy over their own lives and their right to own themselves. Instead, they must conform to a daily regimen of doing what adults and state authorities impose on them. The second part of the question implies something like the following: “If we have to sit through this, can’t you at least help us see how this history lesson, this story, this science lesson has some recognizable relationship to the world as we experience it? Can’t you give us a reason why learning this stuff has some possible value and significance for our self-understanding or our meaningful interaction with our immediate world?”

A wise teacher might respond somewhat like the following: “You are busy with your family lives, with learning how to make friends and get accepted, figuring out how you fit in, how you make sense out of the circumstances of your life, what the world wants from you and what you want from the world. You find yourself living in various worlds, all of which you take for granted, not realizing how they sustain you and help to make you who and what you are. Neither do you understand how those worlds work. Understanding how those worlds work will enable you to make your way in those worlds, and over and above your mere survival in those worlds, enable you to make a contribution to those worlds and find, thereby, your fulfillment as a human being.

“Think of two examples, playing soccer and playing the piano. Well, why would you want to be a soccer player or a piano player? Both involve activities that are interesting as well as challenging, a source of fulfillment, fun, and self-expression; they involve potential careers, a way to make a contribution to a team or an orchestra. Being good at either sports or music can be very satisfying, a way of involving yourself in something quite worthwhile, something of value to you and to others. To be a good piano player and to be a good soccer player, you have to know how the score or the game is played; you have to know what the limits and the possibilities of the instrument and the game involve; you have to practice the skills and study the great examples of musical and athletic performance. In order to enter into and belong in the musical world or the athletic world, you have to participate in the requirements of membership. You not only have to perform music as it was written and to play the game according to the rules, you have to respect the integrity of the music and the integrity of the game.

“As human beings, you already belong to the biophysical world of nature that influences your health and physical growth; to the cultural world of language and arts, styles and customs, manners and morals—all of which enable you to express yourself and communicate with others; to the social world of families and friends, neighborhoods, towns and cities, a world where people both compete and cooperate, a world where people belong to various communities that both support and rely on them. To participate in the drama of those worlds, to be a player in those worlds, a real somebody rather than a spectator, you have to know how they work, what their limitations as well as their possibilities mean for living your life. Believe it or not, the stuff we study in this school is intended to help you make some sense out of these worlds you already inhabit, these worlds that give you life as human beings.

“As human beings, you are on a journey to become somebodies, to make something of yourselves as human beings, to make a contribution to the world, to fix things that are broken and invent things to address new problems. When we take up new stuff in class you should ask what lessons it has to teach you about and for the human journey you are on, about and for the collective journey we are all on. The more of ’this stuff’ you allow to get inside you, and you get inside of, the bigger, deeper, richer human being you are going to become. And if I as your teacher do not help you to understand why we’re studying this stuff, then you should keep asking until we both figure it out.”

That answer addresses the basic justification for the academic curriculum studied in school. That curriculum and the pedagogy that engages it is intended to reveal the intelligibility of the natural, the social, and the cultural worlds to the young learner and connect the learner’s journey toward self-understanding of his or her membership in those worlds. Membership in those worlds helps learners to identify themselves as cultural persons, as social persons, as biophysical persons; it situates them inside those worlds, enabling them to see those worlds as the context within which they will improvise and negotiate who they are and who they want to be as human beings.

What is sought in learning “this stuff” is increased cognitive and affective clarity about the physical, social, and cultural markers of one’s identity (male or female, tribal or cosmopolitan, Christian or Muslim, citizen or foreigner, farmer or computer engineer). That cognitive and affective clarity, however, is not an end in itself, but is a means of choosing to be this kind of individual pursuing some of the values and ideals illuminated in the academic and social learning in school. Schools need to connect much of the academic curriculum to the curriculum of community where learners build a variety of interpersonal relationships that cross neighborhood, family, ethnic, and cultural boundaries. School learning builds those human capacities that enable them to find fulfillment in the contributions they make to the larger society. In other words, in the learning process, humans pursue not only understanding—the true—but also fulfillment— the good, their good.

Depending on many local circumstances and how the players interpret it, the drama of school can be a comedy, a tragedy, a melodrama, a mystery play, a miracle play. For educators and learners, the drama of school can become a metaphor for life. Learners learn as they produce learning, as they act it out. In the drama of school, learners learn to perform themselves. Teachers learn as they teach learners how to play their roles as learners. They learn to improvise on their role as teacher in order to reach the underperforming, unmotivated learner. They learn how to stretch their own humanity to establish communication with the young learners who come from different cultures, who bring physical or emotional handicaps to the learning tasks. They learn to connect with the lifeworld drama of each child, imaginatively and empathetically walking in their shoes in order to understand what talents and abilities as well as challenges and heartbreaks they might bring to the learning tasks.

Administrators, likewise, try to connect with the personal and professional talents and interests of those they work with, to reach the person inside the teaching or support staff role, to be able to communicate as one human to another, to establish trust built on respect for the basic dignity of all parties. The drama of protecting each person’s basic self-esteem is seen as a prerequisite for all other working relationships between administrators and staff.

When these basic relationships are neglected or frustrated, then the playing of school becomes a tragic-comedy. The play turns into the negotiation of self-interest, into isolated individuals seeking to project their own personal plot onto the stage of school, or groups of people trying to gain control or power over the plot, or groups of people showing up for the play everyday who are simply going through the motions, whether to gain a paycheck, a diploma, or avoid being suspended. The drama then becomes truly a “make-believe” performance, draining the drama of all deeply human consequence. Nevertheless, in this make-believe drama everyone seems to be in on the secret. When the public becomes aware of the fabrication, they justifiably complain about the waste of tax money.

Human resource development in schools—either as a student, a teacher, an administrator or support person—is about making the play come alive, bringing everyone into the action as important players whose lives are entangled in the complex communal effort of sense-making that involves world-making. The plot is about turning learning into life, turning learning into creative action, experiencing learning as a self-birthing. That birthing is taking place in relationship to discovering the world of nature, the world of culture, the world of society as something that brings us into being and that we in turn bring into being.

In the play of school, learners study nature to recognize how it is their communal habitat, how their bodies depend on nature to provide the air they breathe, the food they eat, the clothes they wear, the dwellings that shelter them. Truly, nature is in them and they are in nature. They eat nature, clothe themselves with nature, warm themselves with nature. Nature provides the vitamins and proteins, the calcium and carbon and other minerals that build their bodies and enable them to lead healthy lives. Coming to full human maturity requires that they understand nature in all its complexity in order to understand how their own bodies work, and how they can heal and maintain healthy bodies. Further, they need to understand nature in order to learn how to exercise an appropriate stewardship over the resources nature provides, as well as to protect the delicate ecosphere of life itself. In this learning about their relationship with nature, they not only discover one essential source of self-identity, they discover the responsibilities of membership in the world of nature.

In the play of school, learners study the world of culture as the source of much of their own humanity. In that world they come to know themselves and the places they inhabit through the medium of language and symbols. Through the stories passed on through the culture, they come to know examples of heroism and courage, villainy and cowardice; they come to appreciate the gifts of gender and friendship, they explore symbolic expressions of human feeling in music, poetry, dance, color, and design. Within the world of culture they explore the tensions between autonomy and conformity, the richness as well as the constraints of traditions, the need for and the constraints of community. In other words, the world of culture provides all the necessary nutrients for their growth into a full humanity. They learn how to use the artifacts of culture to express their unique personality, the common bonds that unite them to various communities, as well as engaging in resistance to aspects of the culture the suppress their dignity and self-respect.

In the playing of school, learners rehearse the world of society that nurtures and constrains their social selves. In that exploration, they come to know where they came from, the ancestry that has struggled to create more opportunities for them, the tribal and ethnic ways of self-expression, of acting responsibly, of carrying out the performances of everyday life. They learn how social life is organized and governed, how the informal rules of the neighborhood apply, how human work is organized, how an economy and a polity comes to support the large-scale, common needs of communities. They also learn about people who are different than themselves in language, customs, traditions, yet who share a common humanity with them. They explore how democratic politics works—for good or for ill; they discover what rights individuals enjoy and what social responsibilities accompany those rights. Through these learnings they are coming to birth as socially competent human beings who understand the benefits and the responsibilities of membership in society.

The teacher guides that learning away from either a one-sided relationship to nature as an exploiter, a consumer, or tourist; or away from the opposite relationship, as an accident of nature, totally biologically determined, a totally dependent bundle of genetic material (and hence a non-human organism). Neither should their learning focus on a one-sided relationship with culture that requires a passive acceptance of culturally conditioned and culturally required responses; nor on the other hand, a relationship of a detached critic and exploiter of culture. Neither should their learning result in a one-sided relationship to society where one is an insignificant pawn of social history, social class, tribal rivalries; nor, on the other hand, should their learning imply a relationship of freedom from all social attachments, or a freedom to exploit social attachments for one’s own selfish gain. Rather, the teacher guides the process of continuously being born as a human being through the learning of the lessons of mutuality, the lessons of responsible stewardship of nature, of culture, of society, as well as the enjoyment and celebration of the gifts of nature, culture, and society as sources of their common life together.

Educators themselves have been born into the human family and nurtured in the world of nature, culture, and society. They know what it means to construct oneself out of the sources of life provided by nature, culture, and society. Learning for them has been the process of understanding the mutuality involved in membership in these worlds, membership that gifts their humanity and at the same time carries the responsibility for maintaining and, indeed, improving those worlds. Having been nurtured by the study of and involvement with these worlds, educators are prepared to accompany succeeding generations in their process of being born to their full humanity.

Because educators are such important human resources of the educating process, those leaders collectively responsible for human resource development have enormous responsibilities to initiate and support the best human beings available to carry on the work of bringing future generations of young people to their fuller birth as autonomous human beings who can carry out their responsibilities as members of the worlds they inhabit. That work involves teachers’ own growth into the full mastery of their professional practice, their commitment to and negotiation of the organizational life of the school, their bringing the power of their talents and gifts into the collective power of the educating community to bring to birth the dynamic energies and talents of the young. The work also involves the exercise of the special moral virtues of educators, namely their authenticity as unique and gifted human beings; their attentive presence to the individuality of young learners, as well as to the complex and fragile work of learning; their responsibility to create multiple opportunities for learners to encounter the intelligibility, the fascination and the challenges of the worlds of...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• CHAPTER 1 The Schooling Context of Human Development
• CHAPTER 2 Working Within the Geography of Human Development
• CHAPTER 3 Foregrounding Human Development in Professional Development
• CHAPTER 4 Human Resource Leadership Within Its Organizational Setting
• CHAPTER 5 The Politics of Human Resource Development
• CHAPTER 6 The Moral Dimension of Human Resource Development
• CHAPTER 7 Leaders of Leaders of Human Resource Development
• CHAPTER 8 The Organic Interpenetration of Human Development Throughout the Work of Schools
• References
• Index