Leading School Renewal

A Guide for Educational Ground Breakers

Steffan Silcox, Neil MacNeill

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000358391
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Pedagogía
• Categoria: Política educativa

Leading School Renewal explores how school principal leadership behaviour impacts on school change endeavours, and in particular pedagogic renewal, which is a form of educational improvement that is primarily concerned with the growing of the knowledge, skills and beliefs of education in a manner that optimises students' life options. The authors identify attributes of principals who have engaged in school renewal and examine the influences on their leadership behaviours and disposition towards renewing their schools while also acknowledging the influence of site-specific contextual variables. The authors propose that certain leadership behaviours exhibited by school principals are integral with renewing a school's pedagogic focus. They argue renewal is a preferred form of sustainable educational change because it relates to deep-seated cultural changes in approaches to pedagogy, curriculum and school structures. Whilst also maintaining that leadership is at the heart of school improvement and principal leadership practices which are based on a clear sense of purpose, values and beliefs about learning and teaching can transform a school into a learning organisation.

Including a foreword by Professor John Hattie, this book is appropriate for all school leaders and educators who want to learn more about school leadership behaviours and highly effective school change.

1 Defining concepts associated with school leadership and change

Renewing school renewal

Change is exciting when it’s done by us; threatening when it’s done to us.

It is important to note that in the opening chapters of this book we will differentiate between the concepts of school change, school renewal and school reform and then further, examine the extant bewilderment between the concepts of school leadership, pedagogic leadership and school management. We acknowledge Professor Hattie’s timely warning that we need to focus on school improvement, not just the mechanics of change.

Initially, it is important that the concept of school renewal is a term that is differentiated from other forms of school change because the concept of renewal creatively acknowledges what is in situ and then inclusively builds on the physical, cultural, personal and spiritual components of the resurrected creation.

So, what do we mean when we speak of school renewal? Renewal is defined and categorised within more recent historical conceptions of large-scale change where the locus of control resides within the school community. Therefore, we begin in Chapter 1 by differentiating between school reform as a change paradigm and school renewal. The relationship between school change propensity and school leader efficacy is also discussed at this time.

OUR BELIEF 1

The sustainable re-culturing of a school requires a proven renewal paradigm of improvement that can be driven by the school leaders.

We have adopted the definition of school renewal as being a continuous process, and a focus on learning and reflection within, and across the school. It is a focus on a school’s shared covenant of teaching and learning, and trust in its inclusive processes rather than addressing short-term problems and solutions; and although we acknowledge these must be responded to, a renewing school doesn’t lose sight of the big picture. We maintain that school renewal is a moral form of educational improvement that is well suited to thinking school communities. Furthermore, the school renewal process fits seamlessly into the development of sustainability in schools, taking the roots of this concept back to its origins in the renewal of slums and ghettoes in decaying urban sites.

Change for improvement in schools has developed a predictable, cyclic predictability, and as Jukes (2001, p. v) observed: “… there appears to be a furious, top-down, heavy handed, test-driven approach to schooling that is ‘primarily being promoted by politicians, corporate officials, and others with mainly political agendas,’ not by educators”. As a result, we argue that this leads to a great deal of staff and community frustration with the growing perception of the lack of change adeptness of schools.

School renewal is seen as a quantum leap – a paradigm breakthrough – in how we think about and act in relation to change. Low-order change looks at improvement in the efficiency and effectiveness of what was currently done, without really changing or disturbing the basic organisational features of a school. Therefore, school leadership in such a paradigm is very much involved in tinkering at the margins. School renewal as a change process on the other hand seeks to alter fundamentally the way in which a school operates, inclusive of its teaching culture and the goals it pursues, and the structures and the roles of individual groups involved.

At its bottom line, school renewal is seen as an activity aimed at re-culturing the school community to improve students’ learning.

Differentiating school renewal from school reform

Educational reform typically seeks to ensure that the functioning and outcomes of education will be in accord with prevailing expectations of education and it assumes that policies, structures and programmes can be modified or realigned to realise this intention. Typically, educational reform focusses on structural change and curriculum modification. Organisational considerations are the dominant force in educational reform and have been often viewed as detrimental to the educative purpose of schools.

Case Study 1

Architectural determinism: Open-area classrooms

Teachers are by nature adaptive, and they can be seen to change their teaching methods to fit the environments in which they find themselves. However, there is another hidden force at work when teachers make changes, and that is they constantly make adjustments between the change and the pedagogic style in which they feel most comfortable. So, while architects have flights of fancy about what they think modern teaching will look like, the practitioners are often the greatest resistors to un-negotiated architectural determinism. Such was the case with the Open Area Classroom fad of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

Larry Cuban (2004, p. 69) pointed out that the Plowden report in the United Kingdom first promoted the idea of open-area classrooms after World War 2, and then because of the severe criticisms of American education following the Sputnik launch, the Americans were attracted to this idea: “Open classrooms focus on students’ learning by doing resonated with those who believed that America’s formal, teacher-led classrooms were crushing students’ creativity.”

Architects designing new schools in the 1970s were asked to give teachers large open spaces in which to deposit their captive audiences in a way that gave them pedagogic flexibility. Soon. Berlin Walls of pinup boards and white boards broke these spaces into traditional four-walled classrooms. And, teachers agreed not to teach near the dividing walls because of the noise intruding into neighbouring teaching spaces.

It was our experience in hundreds of schools that the open-area classrooms experiment failed because its pedagogic prerequisites didn’t match teachers’ capabilities at that time; or, for that matter, the students’ requirements for effective learning.

The notion of renewal is grounded in assumptions about the maturation of individuals and society. It speaks of a process of self-renewal through self-criticism with the learning process in mind. Paradigms of educational change, educational reform and educational renewal, result from views as to how the world, human nature and human behaviour are perceived. The renewal paradigm concerns questioning and redefining values about social structure, democracy and freedom, whereas the reform and improvement paradigms, assume compliance with ordained values. Renewal is characterised by teacher responsibility concerning a moral obligation to create and nurture learning environments for their students, as well as themselves.

The renewal approach creates schools that are intrinsically self-renewing in contrast to being reformed or being improved by imposition of externally prescribed and pre-determined goals. The press for renewal is driven by the educational needs of individual students in conjunction with the need for ongoing teacher learning. Thus, renewal is recognised as a bottom-up change process that assumes sustainable change emanates from the classroom and school, but it can still be supported at the district and educational system levels. The challenge in implementing school renewal is to change role expectations with respect to how the school leadership views their work and what they value in it. It is seen as a process of building new cultures of teaching as well as of teacher and student learning.

The adoption of a school renewal approach as both a rationale and process for enabling sustained and clearly directed educational change is proposed as a more viable and morally defendable alternative to the existing reform and improvement approaches.

At its most fundamental therefore, school renewal is viewed as an ethical process of change or reform. However, as indicated, there is a recognised difference between educational reform and school renewal. The paradigms of educational reform and educational renewal result from how the learning and teaching enterprise is viewed. The renewal paradigm requires questioning and redefining values about social structure, democracy and freedom. Educational reform on the other hand, assumes compliance with prevailing values. The reform approach seeks to ensure that the functioning and outcomes of education are in accord with the prevailing values and it assumes that policies, structures and programmes can be modified or realigned to realise this intention. Transforming schools, whether directed towards school reform or school renewal, is inextricably linked to the exercise of school leadership.

It is important to differentiate between the term school renewal as an improvement paradigm as opposed to that of school reform with the most significant difference identified between reform and renewal being the locus of control. School reform refers to a top-down, system initiated, temporally defined processes that needs to be done because something is perceived not to be operating efficiently. School renewal, on the other hand, is characterised by a bottom-up, ongoing school community driven approach to educational improvement. As such, the latter suggests that successful school change of a renewal type dimension depends on the school leader building and maintaining collaborative cultures among teachers while simultaneously engaging the wider school community stakeholders in the process.

Educational reform typically seeks to ensure that the functioning and outcomes of education will be in accord with prevailing expectations of education and it assumes that policies, structures and programmes can be modified or realigned to realise this intention. While educational reform is primarily focused upon structural change and curriculum modification this is often accompanied by a corresponding neglect of the learning and teaching process. Political-system level considerations tend to be the dominant force behind most educational reforms, and they are often seen as being detrimental to the educative purpose of schools.

Case Study 2

Failed reform: Outcome based education in Australia

Change, improvement, development, renewal and reform are all types of change in schools and school systems, and because they are a major public cost there is always a multitude of experts who think that can make schooling more efficient, more purposeful, cheaper, and smaller. Not unnaturally, schools are sitting ducks for cyclic reform as the newly appointed levels of government mark their political and socio-economic territory. Such was the case in the late 1990s when state governments across Australia developed their home-grown versions of Spady’s (1994) Outcome Based Education (OBE).

In broad terms, Spady’s two-part framework was to define what students had to learn, and then redesign the system to give students a maximum opportunity to learn the material (Simonds, 1994, p. iii). This mantra unleashed a reformist trend that was intent on changing the how of teaching and learning in schools, with the undisclosed aim of redefining future societal relationships in Australia. The seven Principles of Learning, Teaching and Assessment (Curriculum Council 1998, pp. 33–36) gave instructions to teachers about how to guide the OBE learning process (Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 The principles of learning, teaching and assessment

P1. Opportunity to learn. Learning experiences should enable student...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Defining concepts associated with school leadership and change: Renewing school renewal
• 2. School leader leadership and the processes of leading a school renewal agenda
• 3. School leader efficacy and change
• 4. Moral leadership guiding school change and vision setting
• 5. System reforms as catalysts for school renewal
• 6. Situational factors and their impact on school leadership and change
• 7. Pedagogic leadership: A view of what real school leaders do
• 8. The pedagogic wars: A challenge for school leaders
• 9. Distributed leadership in modern schooling contexts: Delegation is not distributed leadership
• 10. Schools as learning organisations: Growing organisational, professional and personal capital
• 11. New school leadership: Jettisoning the comfortable present
• 12. Value-adding and student voice
• 13. Profiling school leaders’ leadership standards
• 14. School leaders and psychological resilience and mental health
• 15. Catalytic teachers and the X factor of teaching and learning
• 16. Accountability and public confidence
• 17. Introducing the universal five key steps to sustainable school renewal
• 18. Conclusion: Positioning the future-oriented school
• APPENDIX 1: The pedagogic profile: Assisting teachers’ professional, pedagogic learning
• Index