Disruptive Leadership in Schools in Challenging Circumstances
Author(s):
Lawrence Drysdale (presenting / submitting) David Gurr (presenting) Helen Goode
Conference:
ECER 2017
Network:
26. Educational Leadership
Format:
Paper

Session Information

26 SES 03 B, Educational Leadership in Challenging Educational Contexts

Paper Session

Time:
2017-08-22
17:15-18:45
Room:
K1.02 Auditorium 2
Chair:
David Gurr

Contribution

All

The purpose of this paper is to explore how school leaders might use disruptive leadership to improve educational outcomes for student in challenging circumstances. The paper focuses on current case study schools of underperforming secondary schools and past case studies from previous international research on successful school leadership. The paper focuses on the extent to which the leaders were disruptive in creating organisational change and improving student outcomes.

 Research questions:

1. To what extent did the principals engage in disruptive leadership to create change?

2. What behaviours and interventions were used by the leaders?

3. How successful were they in improving student outcomes?

 Conceptual Framework

It is generally accepted that we live in a time of uncertainly and transformational change.

Johansen (2012) called this the VUCA horizon of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Within education, Leithwood and Riehl (2003) argued that the external and internal environments were far more challenging than in previous decades and they listed the numerous changes and challenges within schools as well as the challenges in the broader educational context.

Today the world will be even more complex and it is recommended that leaders need to adapt and shape the future if they wish to succeed.

 

One of the solutions is innovation. The term is difficult to define and in a broader perspective, some consider any change to be an innovation. The OECD (2005) defines innovation as: ‘the implementation of a new or significantly improved product (good or service), process, new marketing method or a new organisational method in business practices, workplace organisation or external relations’.

 Innovation is regarded as the force that allows organisations to survive and thrive. Most innovations are described as fitting into four quadrants: incremental, breakthrough, game changer and disruptive.  In the last twenty years, disruptive innovation has become prominent. The term ‘disruptive technology’ (Bower and Christensen, 1996) first appeared in the 1990s and later renamed it as ‘disruptive innovation’ (Christensen and Overdorf, 2000). The term was initially applied to business and later education (Christensen, Horn and Johnson, 2011).  It is now applied widely in business and education. A disruptive innovation is one that threatens to make an existing solution/industry obsolete. New products or services that enter at the bottom of the market and overtime move up and displace established market leaders.  In education Christensen, Horn and Johnson (2011) provide examples of disruptive innovation as personalized, customized and online learning.

 

Disruptive innovation requires disruptive leadership. It is a new way of solving problems and focusing on new approaches that are different from the past. Disruptive leadership is about fostering a culture of creative innovation that provides the framework and motivation to generate new ideas and execute solutions. Disruptive leaders ask themselves if they are part of the future or the past. They must be counter-intuitive, see the extraordinary possibilities before them, and become possibility thinkers, communicators, and leaders is critical on a multiplicity of levels. Empowerment, engagement, and the ability to ideate, innovate, communicate, and collaborate are the benchmarks of organisational success (Bass,2013; Wilkinson & Eacott, ,2013; Matarazzo & Pearlstein, 2016).

 In the paper we explore the behaviour of principals in challenging circumstances to determine the extent they engage in disruptive innovation and demonstrate characteristics of disruptive leadership. We examine current case studies of schools that are underperforming and re-examine previous case studies from an international Successful School Principals Project (ISSPP) to explore evidence of disruptive leadership in helping their school to be successful

This paper addresses the issues of change, innovation and leadership common to educational systems throughout the world and particularly European countries which face  financial,  refugee and performance challenges.

 

Method

The methodology conforms to ISSPP protocols established by International Successful Principals Project (ISSPP). This research has been ongoing since 2002 and has developed uniform guidelines: the multiple perspective case studies using qualitative methods including individual interviews with the principal (three interviews), school council president, parent member of school council, assistant principal, curriculum coordinator, and six teachers; group interviews with two groups of 5-8 parents and two groups of 5-8 students; observation of the principal’s work and the life of the school; and document collection. All interviews were recorded and transcribed. Each inerview was a hour. Analysis was based on establishing themes. The researchers looked at aspects such as personal characteristics and behaviour of the leader, challenges and issues facing the school, context, interventions and student outcomes and school performance. The research was guided by agreement on three precepts: • Multi-perspective data about school leaders will provide richer, more authentic data than has hitherto been available. • Such data is best provided by those with close knowledge of the principal i.e. teachers, students, parents, non-teaching members of the school and other community members. • Collaborative research designed to a set of agreed common protocols across English and non-English speaking countries will provide understandings of and insights into successful principalship and school improvement which will add to existing knowledge. The research will focus on three current case studies of underperforming secondary schools. One school was in a low-socio economic area and was established as a new school in 2011 having merged with three failing schools that closed. The other two schools were in areas of social and economic advantage. One of those schools was threatened with closure because of low enrolments. The principal was challenged to turn the school around or close. The final case study was a school that had been closed in the 1990s but reopened because of parent pressure on the government. It initially reopened as a middle school but because of its innovative programs and leadership was allowed to extend to year 12. All had reputations as being innovative. We also re-visited case studies from previous research form the ISSPP to explore any similarities and differences that emerged. The ISSPP case studies were focused on successful schools and principals while the three current case studies were underperforming schools.

Expected Outcomes

For the first school, it is evolving to become perhaps one of the most innovative secondary schools in Australia. Adopting a student centred approach to learning, students help to co-create curriculum, select subjects on the basis of ability and interest rather than what their age is, with the products of their learning at the very highest level of quality. There is flexibility in the school day, high expectations in relation to student and teacher work, and emphasis on meeting the needs of students at an individual level. Systemic measures of student learning outcomes remain lower than expected however. The principal has been and remains the driver of the transformation, The principal’s leadership was clearly disruptive. For the second school, the principal has adopted a student-centred leadership approach, which prioritises student issues and needs. She has focussed on staff capacity building, has a strong instructional leadership focus, encourages and supports staff to solve their own problems, and is actively involved in contributing to and shaping the wider context through regional committee memberships and management of shared services. The school has an innovative culture but the principals leadership is not strongly disruptive. In the third school, the principal: established a clear and agreed vision and direction; empowered and trained a new leadership team; used aggressive recruiting and exiting of staff; adopted a distributed leadership model; focused on teaching and learning and developed an explicit model of teaching; implemented and coaching and staff support program; made the school safe through new discipline and attendance policies; had high expectations such as ‘2 in 1’ approach to learning in which students were supported to try to achieve two years of growth in one year. The school has an innovative culture led by a principal who is exercising disruptive leadership.

References

Bass, C. (2013) Disruptive innovation requires disruptive leadership: Colin Bass reports on some of the challenging thinking that came out of Leadership Week, NZ Business. Sept, 2013, Vol. 27 Issue 8, p40. Becker, I. (2016) Building and sustaining great leadership in disruptive times: possibility thinking, communicating, and doing: a 3Q leadership™ solution, Leader to Leader. Spring2016, Vol. 2016 Issue 80, p24-31. Beveridge, D. (2015) The gift of disruptive leadership, Supply House Times. May2015, Vol. 58 Issue 3, p74-75. Bower. J. L. and Christensen, C. M.(1996) Disruptive technologies: Catching the wave. Harvard Business Review (January–February 1995), pp. 43–53. Christensen, C. M., and Overdorf, M. (2000) Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Innovation. Harvard Business Review 78(2):66-76. Christensen, M. C., Horn, M. B. and Johnson, C. (2011) Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, McGraw Hill, New York Greg, S. (2012) Disruptive Innovation in Teaching and Learning, Centre for Innovative Teaching and Learning, Indiana University , Bloomington, http://citl.indiana.edu/news/dir-sept2012.php Holland, D. D.; Piper, R. T. (2016) High-Trust Leadership and Blended Learning in the Age of Disruptive Innovation: Strategic Thinking for Colleges and Schools of Education. Journal of Leadership Education. Vol. 15 Issue 2, p74-97. Horn, M. B. and Staker, H. (2014) Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools, San Francisco, Calif: Jossey-Bass. Johansen, B. (2012). Leaders Make the Future, San Francisco, California Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. Leading in the digital age The McKinsey Quarterly. Spring, 2016, Vol. 2016 Issue 2, p98, 6 p. Leithwood, K. A., & Riehl, C. (2003). What we know about successful school leadership. Philadelphia, PA: Laboratory for Student Success, Temple University. Matarazzo, J. M. & Pearlstein, T. (2016) Leadership in disruptive times, IFLA Journal. Vol. 42 Issue 3, p162-178. 17p. OECD (2005) Oslo Manual Guidelines for collecting and interpreting innovation data, 3rd edition, OECD and European Commission, Paris. Randall, R. M. (2014). Disruptive Innovation!. : Emerald Group Publishing Ltd. Retrieved from http://www.ebrary.com. Tan, B. H. (2014) Creative Leadership, Training & Development, Vol. 41, No. 1, Feb 2014: 5-7. Tellis, G. J. (2006) Disruptive Technology or Visionary Leadership? Journal of Product Innovation Management, Vol. 23 Issue 1, p34-38. 5p. Wilkinson, J. and Eacott, S. (2013). These disruptive times: rethinking critical educational leadership. International Journal of Leadership in Education, Vol. 16 Issue 2, p135-138.

Author Information

Lawrence Drysdale (presenting / submitting)
University of Melbourne
Melbourne
David Gurr (presenting)
The University of Melbourne
Melbourne Graduate School of Education
Parkville
Helen Goode
The University of Melboutne
South Yarra

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