Strengthening the Heartbeat E-Book

Thomas J. Sergiovanni

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 293

Beschreibung

Study after study has concluded that no matter how competently managed a school may be, it is the bringing together of leadership and learning that makes the difference between ordinary and extraordinary performance. Strengthening the Heartbeat offers leaders a clear and compelling way to help their schools achieve extraordinary results. The proven principles outlined in this book can help any school build a culture of leadership and learning. Thomas J. Sergiovanni?a leading thinker in the educational leadership arena?shows how a strong heartbeat is a school's best defense against the obstacles leaders face as they work to change schools for the better. But strengthening the heartbeat of schools requires that we rethink what leadership is, how leadership works, what leadership's relationship is to learning, and why we need to practice both leadership and learning together. Filled with illustrative examples, Strengthening the Heartbeat shows how to build trust that leads to the creation of a vision and the building of a covenant that brings together principals, teachers, parents, and students to honor shared values, goals, and beliefs. When leaders are able to strengthen the heartbeat, their schools become stronger and more resilient. These qualities help leaders to share the burdens of leadership with others, to create collaborative cultures, and to be continuous learners. Leadership inevitably involves change and change inevitably involves learning. Using this book, school leaders will have the tools they need to make their schools the best they can be.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title

Copyright

Preface: Strengthening the Heartbeat

Acknowledgments

The Author

Introduction: Value-Added Leadership Redux

Chapter 1: Mindscapes

Head, Heart, and Hand

From Mindscapes to Action

How Mindscapes Work

Culture

Exposing Mindscapes

Marching Bands and Soccer Teams

Community as a Theory of Practice

Management Mindscapes

Instructional Coherence

Theories of Rationality

Leadership and Rationality

Know Thyself

Chapter 2: Leadership as Entitlement

Leadership as a Practice

Liberating Leadership

Communities of Practice

Reciprocity is Key

Value-Added Leadership

Friendship and Distributed Leadership

Chapter 3: Making Visions Useful

Making Visions Useful

How Roles, Role Relationships, and Role Sets Work

Relational Trust

What About Students?

The Teacher-Student Role Set

Chapter 4: Hope, Trust, Community, and Other Virtues

The Virtue of Hope

Hope and Wishing

Faith

From Hope to Action

Gompers Elementary: A School of Hope

Hope Based on Faith

Some Evidence

Hopeful Leadership

The Virtue of Trust

Trust First

Subsidiarity and Mutuality

The Virtues of Piety and Civility

Bonding and Bridging Community

One Out of Many

Love

Chapter 5: A Teacher-Centered Approach

What Counts

Providence as an Example

Accountability

Chapter 6: Collaborative Cultures and Organizational Competence

Collaboration at Adlai Stevenson High School

Connections

Hallmarks of a Learning Community

Some Findings

Chapter 7: Using Ideas to Back Up Leadership

Choosing a Strategy for Leading and Doing

Competencies for Leadership

Some Examples

The Principles of Learning

Lists of Five

The Power of Ideas

Chapter 8: Styles, Dispositions, and Stages Count Too

The Three Archetypes

Craftsman Leaders Are Critical

What Kind of Leader Are You?

Leadership and Student Achievement

The Stages of Leadership

The Stages in Action

Leading and Learning Together

References

Index

End User License Agreement

Copyright © 2005 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sergiovanni, Thomas J.

Strengthening the heartbeat: leading and learning together in schools / Thomas J. Sergiovanni.— 1st ed.

p. cm. — (The Jossey-Bass education series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7879-6544-8 (alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-119-13322-3 (paper)

1. School management and organization—United States. 2. Educational leadership—United States. I. Title. II. Series.

LB2805.S533 2004

371.2’00973—dc22

2004008930

Preface: Strengthening the Heartbeat

Recently Lesley Iura at Jossey-Bass asked me if I would write a second edition of Value-Added Leadership, a book originally published in 1990. As work began it became clear that over the last fourteen years too much had happened in school leadership and improvement and too much had happened in how I think about those topics. It was time for an overhaul, not a revision. Though Strengthening the Heartbeat: Leading and Learning Together remains committed to value-added leadership, its understanding of how this idea works for school improvement has changed.

The Concept of Value-Added Leadership

To many readers, value-added sounds like a mouthful. What does it mean in plain English? Actually, the term has two meanings: one from economics and the other from moral reasoning.

Value-Added as an Economic Concept

Economists often ask, “What is the value of something?” and “How can we add more value to what we have?” In the corporate world, value-added is a seminal concept that provides a theory of management devoted to economic expansion. Owning a lot on the busy downtown corner of Smith and Vine, for example, enhances your financial portfolio. Putting a building on this lot to accommodate shops and restaurants adds value. Similarly, improving schools usually involves adding value to what we already have.

Though occasional reformers threaten to nuke the school or to adopt change strategies that jolt the system, in the end the prevailing strategy is to rely on a school’s existing strengths and to build capacity by developing a collaborative culture of continuous improvement. When good teachers, for example, become better because of the in-class coaching that is provided, value is added. When teams of principals and teachers (and sometimes the superintendent too) engage in regularly scheduled learning walks in schools and process this experience with teachers, value is added to the traditional ways that we think about supervision and professional development. Value-added leaders ask: “What is the value to the school, its teachers, and its students when we continue to use a particular strategy?” and then, “How can we develop a better strategy that adds more value?” This question is followed by: “How can we build the capacity of people so that this better strategy gets implemented properly?” When this happens value-added leadership becomes a part of the everyday life of the school.

Value-Added as Moral Reasoning

In moral reasoning, value-added has different but equally powerful meanings. Value-added calls attention to that which is intrinsically important and desirable, as in “What values do we believe should guide our actions?” “What values define us, give us a sense of significance, and provide the norms that anchor our lives in a culture of meaning?” Moral reasoning is concerned with identifying and using the virtues, norms, and codes that bind people to a set of ideas in such a way that their relationships change. They become bonded, closer together, and feel morally obliged to help each other as they embody similar ideas and values. They become communities characterized by sacred ties of reciprocal obligations and responsibilities. In this moral context value-added leadership means the linking of management strategies to virtues, norms, codes, and other values that bring people together for leadership and learning.

The Lifeworld and the Systemsworld

Value-added leadership as moral reasoning is reflected in the life-world of schools. Value-added leadership as a strategy for achieving our purposes is reflected in the systemsworld of schools (see, for example, Sergiovanni, 2000). Both worlds are needed for schools to be effective. But, says the German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas (1987), it is the lifeworld that must drive the systemsworld. It is the stuff of culture, the essence of values and beliefs, the expression of needs, purposes, and desires of people and the sources of deep satisfaction in the form of meaning and significance that are experienced by parents, teachers, and students that define the lifeworld of schools. The systemsworld is important too. This is a world of instrumentalities, of inventing efficient ways and means that can help us achieve our ends. The systemsworld provides the foundation for the development of management, of organization, and of financial structures and strategies that provide the means for us to achieve our ends. Here’s how the questions sort themselves out:

Lifeworld Concerns

Systemsworld Concerns

What are our purposes?

How do we achieve our purposes?

Do they reflect what we believe?

What strategies should we believe?

How do they enhance meaning?

How effective are they?

Are our lifeworld concerns responsive to the needs of students, teachers, and other constituents?

What assessments do we need?

The lifeworld of the school is its heartbeat. This heartbeat is weakened whenever the systemsworld determines the lifeworld—whenever our means determine the ends rather than the other way around. In today’s schools, for example, our purposes, the curriculum we teach, how we spend time, and even how we teach are increasingly being determined by the standardized assessments that distant authorities require us to administer.

Leadership and learning are ways in which we can strengthen the heartbeat so that the school is better able to grow itself on one hand and to serve its purposes on the other. “In sum, the lifeworld is the essence of hope. The systemsworld is the means to achieve hope. Both are necessary for schools to flourish. Schools can be the front lines in the defense of hope by maintaining proper balance. Achieving this balance . . . may be the most important purpose of leadership” (Sergiovanni, 2000, p. xix). And achieving this balance reinforces the heartbeat, increases its resilience, and helps it to bring leadership and learning together. If there were a formula for school success it would be to balance the lifeworld and strengthen the heartbeat of a school as a way to bring together leadership and learning.

Content of the Book

The Introduction reviews the value-added approach—recapping its basic principles and the nine dimensions and two corollaries that support its practice. Readers have a choice. They may revisit the concept and note the links provided between Value-Added Leadership and Strengthening the Heartbeat or they may go to Chapter One and pick up the heartbeat theme directly.

A strong heartbeat is a school’s best defense against the obstacles leaders face as they seek to improve schools. Chapter One notes that this strengthening will require a new understanding of leadership, how it works, the nature of its relationship to learning, and why we need to practice both leadership and learning together. Key to this understanding will be the unveiling of the collective mindscapes that dominate our thinking about leadership, learning, and culture—the metaphors we use, our theories of practice, and other seminal issues that shape our reality. Leadership, Chapter One argues, requires the reconstruction of these mindscapes that define our work. Once these mindscapes from the head are shared, they begin to program the minds of people in such a way that a collective image of reality is created. If properly reconstructed, this reality can provide the instructional coherence, the organizational coherence, and the leadership coherence that schools need to succeed.

Chapter Two pushes us beyond shared leadership to leadership as an earned entitlement. Those with the necessary competence and commitment, for example, are entitled to lead. Leadership as entitlement is best understood within the context of reciprocal role relationships. Roles are not just markers that help define what a person should do, they are definers of covenants too. Roles as covenants work when we feel morally obliged to meet our responsibilities even when we do not want to or even whether we are getting something in exchange or not.

The theme of Chapter Three is making visions useful. For visions to work, they need to be turned into action statements. These action statements provide pathways for what needs to be done and become standards for evaluating effectiveness. When schools are able to do this they become transformed from ordinary organizations to communities of responsibility.

Adlai Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois, is used as an example of how a school can turn visions into action statements that not only detail what each constituent group needs to do for the school’s visions to be realized but obligates them to embody these action statements in their practice. The roles theme is revisited in Chapter Three. A covenant of obligations, it is argued, raises the stakes from management commitments to moral commitments. When a moral threshold is reached, teachers, parents, students, and administrators accept their roles and the elements that define them. Roles come from expectations that serve as a compass pointing the way and a beacon lighting the way. Expectations are not only received but also sent. Leadership under these conditions uses roles, role relationships, and role sets as the motivation for various constituent groups to work together to make visions a reality.

One way to strengthen the heartbeat of a school is by relying on virtues. Chapter Four examines four powerful leadership virtues: hopefulness, trust, piety, and civility. These virtues help transform school cultures and enable schools to achieve academic success within a caring environment. Using the Gompers Elementary School in Detroit as an example, the virtue of hopefulness is examined. Gompers succeeds because it has become a community of hope. But for hope to be a tool for school improvement it needs to be understood as something different from wishful thinking. Chapter Four concludes by examining the importance of relational trust in providing the social capital and other supports that are needed for schools to succeed. The importance of trust is widely accepted—but surprisingly trust is not as evident in practice as it should be.

Strategies for change typically begin with vision first and get around to building trust later. But effective strategies begin with trust first, then move to strategy and action. When it becomes time for implementation, the proper relationships have already been established. Yet in most schools when it becomes time to implement a school improvement initiative, everything stops while trust issues are dealt with. In the first case trust is used to forge new initiatives for improving effectiveness. In the second case efforts are on trying to mend fences as a way to improve relationships and trying to get people on board to improve their effectiveness. The power of several other virtues in bringing about change is also examined in Chapter Four.

If someone you knew said that they believed in a teacher-centered approach to schooling, it’s likely that you would respond, “Wait a minute. I thought schools should be student centered. Isn’t schooling all about the kids?” Chapter Five concedes that it is indeed all about the kids—but points out that a student-centered school only works when this centeredness is built within a larger framework of teacher-centeredness. The research on what counts in bringing about school improvement has produced evidence suggesting that little happens without a teaching staff that is highly motivated, competent, and committed. Chapter Five provides an argument for teacher-centeredness by suggesting that rarely does leadership directly affect school results variables. Instead, the more common pattern is indirect leadership that changes certain mediating variables in positive ways. Teachers account for a large chunk of these mediating variables. It is how these variables are affected that determines what the learning results for students will be. When it comes to improving student achievement, leadership has a stealth quality to it.

The title of Chapter Six is “Collaborative Cultures and Organizational Competence.” Given this title it is no surprise that the Adlai Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois, is used as an example of how to build an effective collaborative culture. The strength of Stevenson’s culture relies on the deliberate efforts of designated leaders to build collaborative cultures as well as the conditions that are needed for them to function. But Stevenson and other places with successful cultures do not rely on leadership pushed from the top. Leadership bubbles up from the bottom too. That is, teachers willingly, voluntarily, and consistently help each other to be more effective, share their practice, and function as communities of practice.

Communities of practice bubble up from the bottom and collaborative cultures trickle down from the top. Designated leaders deliberately shape the nature of collaborative cultures. Teachers come together as communities of practice because they want to and because they believe that this level of collegiality is best for them and for the students they serve. Stevenson’s ability to bring the trickling down of collaborative cultures and the bubbling up of communities of practice together serves as an archetype for leading and learning together.

Idea-based leadership, argues Chapter Seven, provides a more powerful foundation for leadership in a school than does mandated leadership, leadership based on position, or leadership based on personality. While all four have legitimate roles to play, it is ideas that belong at the center. When ideas back up leadership, a source of authority with moral overtones is created. This chapter shows how idea-based leadership works and describes eight basic competencies that leaders must have in order to successfully use idea-based leadership.

Like it or not, the fact is that leadership training and other efforts to improve leadership behavior can take us only so far. Leaders also bring to their work certain personality characteristics that may be more immutable than most of us think. Chapter Eight examines this issue and discusses three leadership archetypes: artists (great visionaries), craftsmen (great at getting things done), and technocrats (great at scripting whatever they touch). These archetypes were identified by Canadian researcher Patricia Pitcher. She found that it was the craftsman leader who had the most to do with effectiveness in organizations. Included in Chapter Eight is an inventory that will help you to reflect on your own approaches to leadership and on the approaches of your colleagues. Chapter Eight also includes a discussion of four stages of leadership (bartering, building, binding, and bonding) with each matched to different situations.

Acknowledgments

The basic idea behind this book is that schools should invest in developing a culture where leading and learning together is a core school improvement strategy. As is the case with many good ideas, today’s interest in bringing the two together has its origins in practice. Dozens of outstanding school leaders might be mentioned as pioneers. The work of Anthony Alvarado, Elaine Fink, and others at District 2 in New York, Lucy Calkins from Teachers College, Columbia, Lauren Resnick from the University of Pittsburgh, Deborah Meier and her colleagues from District 4 in New York City and now Mission Hill in Boston, Melody Johnson from Providence, Rhode Island, Richard DuFour, Dan Galloway, and others at the Adlai Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois, as well as the work of scholars such as Richard Elmore are particularly important. This book is based on a simple premise. Strengthening the heartbeat of a school is important. This strengthening is best done by investing in leading and learning together. This investment, in turn, will lead to higher levels of student achievement.

Special thanks to my assistant, Ruby Dehls, who with deft hands managed this project from beginning to end.

San Antonio, Texas

June 2004

Thomas J. Sergiovanni

The Author

Thomas J. Sergiovanni is Lillian Radford Professor of Education and Administration at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas. He received his B.S. degree (1958) in elementary education from the State University of New York, Geneseo; his M.A. degree (1959) in educational administration from Teachers College, Columbia University; and his Ed.D. degree (1966), also in educational administration, from the University of Rochester.

From 1958 to 1964, he was an elementary school teacher and science consultant in New York State and taught in the teacher education program at the State University of New York, Buffalo. In 1966, he began nineteen years on the faculty of educational administration at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he chaired the department for seven years.

At Trinity University, Sergiovanni teaches in the school leadership program and in the five-year teacher education program. He is senior fellow at the Center for Education Leadership and the founding director of the Trinity Principals’ Center. A former associate editor of Educational Administration Quarterly, he serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education and Catholic Education: A Journal of Inquiry and Practice. Among his publications are Moral Leadership: Getting to the Heart of School Improvement (1992), Building Community in Schools (1994), Leadership for the School House: How Is It Different? Why Is It Important? (1996), The Lifeworld of Leadership: Creating Culture, Community, and Personal Meaning in Our Schools (2000), The Principalship: A Reflective Practice Perspective, 4th ed. (2001), Leadership: What’s in It for Schools? (2001), and Supervision: A Redefinition (2002).