Session Information
26 SES 01 B, School Improvement and Development Through the Lens of Educational Leadership
Paper Session
Contribution
This paper reports on a partnership research project between a large Catholic School System in Australia and the Leadership Research International (LRI) team at the University of Southern Queensland (UniSQ), Australia. The university researchers built on the premise that strengthening leadership contributes to successful and sustained school improvement and focused on a selection of successful or effective schools as deemed by the School System in partnership.
The research project was stimulated by the work of Hallinger and Heck (2010) who maintained that leadership is a catalyst for enhanced student learning outcomes: “studies of school improvement must assess change (i.e. improvement or decline) in the school’s academic processes and learning outcomes over a period of time. . .[and]. . .that school improvement leadership is directed towards growth in student learning” (p. 96). Additionally, this study also noted their qualification that “Effective leadership styles and strategies are highly contextualised. . .school’s culture, or capacity for educational improvement. . .[and]. . .collaborative [school] leadership, as opposed to leadership from the principal alone” (p. 107). Thus, the study explored, How does an understanding of the impact of context, culture, and collaboration contribute to the strengthening of leadership for school improvement?
The study drew on a definition of sustainable school success from previous school-based school improvement case study research (Andrews, Crowther, Morgan, & O’Neill, 2012; Andrews & USQ-LRI Research Team, 2009) where school success was constituted as:
. . .enhanced school achievements in agreed high priority goal areas, based on documented evidence of those achievements and teachers’ expressed confidence in their school’s capacity to extend and sustain those achievements into the future. (Andrews & USQ-LRI Research Team, 2009, p. 4)
And then reviewed the literature around the factors contributing to school success: context, culture, collaboration, system-school alignment or coherence, and effective leadership.
The work of Owens and Valesky (2015) addressed the importance of Complex Adaptive Systems as “dealing with participants in ways that bring about desirable changes in the structure . . . [and] in the character and quality of the social environment in which people work” (p. 98). It was realised that this view of individual schools being part of a school system needed to accommodate the notion of being an organisational system with subsystems where activities they carry out are related to each other. However, as many (Harris & Jones, 2018; Leithwood, 2010) have revealed, all schools are not the same and are required to be responsive to their unique communities as complex adaptive systems within systems.
Method
The study was conducted in two phases with a mixed methods sequential research design (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2018) where quantitative data formed the initial basis for the selection of “successful” schools, and a qualitative data collection of leadership perspectives focused on leadership for sustainable school improvement. Relevant data from the School System Office was used to select the participant schools where “success” was measured of student outcomes using a mix of standardised tests and final year 12 results. This database informed a purposive sampling of schools that were deemed to be successful. As context was an important aspect in this study, the following criteria were used for selection of participant schools: a mix of Primary/Elementary (4) and Secondary/High schools (4); School enrolment (98-1200); Socio-economic status (below and above the ICSEA (Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage) mean (https://docs.acara.edu.au/resources/About_icsea_2014.pdf)); nature of the student cohorts (co-educational and single sex); and experienced and inexperienced principals (new and longer term). All schools were long-established with a strong link to their foundational religious order. In the qualitative phase, each selected school was visited by LRI/UniSQ researchers who interviewed the leadership team and then the principal, followed by an interview with each school’s School System support person. Throughout this data collection, the following questions were used to guide the semi-structured interviews: (1) What is meant by ongoing school success for this school? (2) What evidence is available? and (3) What factors contribute to ongoing school success? Analysis of the data included a cross-case analysis followed by a workshop where principals scrutinised the findings and discussed their understandings of effective leadership for successful school improvement. The guiding questions of the multi-phased analysis were: (1) What emerges in understanding the impact of context, culture, and collaboration contributing to the strengthening of leadership? and (2) What other factors might contribute to the reported outcomes?
Expected Outcomes
Participants acknowledged indicators of school success as the quantitative markers of external testing results but also valued student and staff wellbeing, and the community perception of the school. Factors identified as contributing to this success varied across the schools reflecting the context and the culture of the school and their interrelatedness, and the principal’s leadership experience and expectations within their current context. Responses related to their perspectives about effective leadership included: focus on the importance of learning; building relational trust; a strong vision for school improvement articulation; and building staff capacity. Overall, each principal expressed in their personal and professional ways, A Visionary Commitment to Action with a notion of presence as one who is ready, fresh, supported, and trusting characterised by image, impression, and connection within their context. Of note, was the manner in which the effective principal manoeuvred and managed the dynamics of interrelationships in the school community, both within schools and with the school system personnel. The principal’s effectiveness was enhanced by a collaborative, contextual, and collegial relationship between themselves and school system personnel. This study highlighted the imperative of collective responsibility for school improvement in the development of an organisational culture of collaborative leadership building on the skills sets and emotional intelligence levels of collaborative leadership in situ. Finally, a model theorising the Effective School Leader in Action: A System-School Relationship was developed. It is anticipated that this model might be suitable for adaptation in many schools and might be of assistance in developing strong ties between principals and their system support personnel. Of extended interest will be the explicit detail of the culture, the context, and the degree of collaboration experienced in each site of study and how further consideration of such emergent understandings might contribute to the strengthening of leadership for school improvement.
References
Andrews, D., & USQ-LRI Research Team. (2009). A research report on the implementation of the IDEAS Project in Victoria, 2004-2008. Toowoomba, Australia: Leadership Research International, University of Southern Queensland. Bryk, A., & Schneider, B. (2003). Trust in schools: A core resource for improvement. Educational Leadership, 60(6), 40-46. Cranston, N., Ehrich, L. C., & Kimber, M. P. (2006). Ethical dilemmas: The bread and butter of educational leaders' lives. Journal of Educational Administration, 44(2), 106-121. Creswell, J., & Plano Clark, V. L. (2018). Designing and Conducting Mixed Methods Research, 3rd Ed. Sage. Crowther, F., & Associates. (2011). From school improvement to sustained capacity: The parallel leadership pathway. Corwin. Davis, B., Sumara, D., & D'Amour, L. (2012). Understanding school districts as learning systems: Some lessons from three cases of complex transformation. Journal of Educational Change, 13, 373-399. doi:10.1007/s10833-012-9183-4 Deal, T. E., & Peterson, K. D. (2016). Shaping school culture (3rd ed.). Jossey-Bass. Ford, J., Harding, N. H., Gilmore, S., & Richardson, S. (2017). Becoming the leader: Leadership as material presence. Organizational Studies, 38(11), 1553-1571. doi:10.1177/0170840616677633 Fullan, M. (2005). Leadership and sustainability: System thinkers in action. Corwin Press. Gu, Q., & Johansson, O. (2012). Sustaining school performance: School contexts matter. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 16(3), 301-326. doi:10.1080/13603124.2012.732242 Hallinger, P., & Heck, R. (2010). Collaborative leadership and school improvement: Understanding the impact on school capacity and student learning. School Leadership & Management, 30(2), 95-110. Harris, A., & Jones, M. (2018). Why context matters: A comparative perspective on education reform and policy implementation. Educational Research for Policy & Practice. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1007/s10671-018-9231-9 Mitchell, C., & Sackney, L. (2016). School improvement in high capacity schools: Educational leadership and living systems ontology. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 44(5), 853-868. Murphy, J. (2013). The architecture of school improvement. Journal of Educational Administration, 51(3), 252-263. Owens, R. G., & Valesky, T. C. (2015). Organizational behavior in education: Leadership and school reform (11th ed.). Pearson Education, Inc. Schein, E. H. (2010). Organizational culture and leadership (4th ed.). Jossey-Bass. Senge, P. (2011). Schools that learn: A fifth discipline fieldbook for educators, parents, and everyone who cares about education. Doubleday. Sutton, P. S., & Shouse, A. W. (2016). Building a culture of collaboration in schools. Ph Delta Kappan, 97(7), 69-73. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/0031721716641653 Uhl-Bien, M., & Arena, M. (2017). Complexity leadership: Enabling people and organizations for adaptability. Organizational Dynamics, 46(2017), 9-20. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.orgdyn.2016.12.001
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