0.4 The art of successful school-based management  (Page 13/36)

In today’s schools, leaders are confronted with the harsh reality that effective teaching and leadershipinvolve experiment, reflection, and refinement and that effective school based leadership supports such practices. Today’s school cultures must be places that allow teachers and leaders torecognize their own humanity and that of their students (Palmer, 1998). Both teachers and students ought to be allowed to fail andleaders must provide for them support in their mistakes. School leadership can begin, thus, to acknowledge that out of thediversity of ideas, great wonders can emerge. Indeed, Steinbeck (1955) reminds us, "teaching might even be the greatest of the artssince the medium is the human mind and spirit”(p.7). Today’s school building leader must have the strength of will and thecommitment to doing what matters most: attending to the needs of the children. The best way to achieve this goal is for schoolleadership to allow for the art that is teaching where authentic learning and caring for each other carry the day. Being clear aboutvalue and the light it sheds on practice is indeed a crucial part of successful school based management.

Element #3:

Shape: two-dimensional area

The Artist’s View:

A shape is a two-dimensional area that is defined in some certain way. By drawing an outline of a circle on apiece of paper, one has created a shape. By painting a solid red square, one has also created a shape. Shapes may be eitherfree-formed or geometric. Free-form shapes are uneven and irregular and usually promote a pleasant and soothing feeling. Geometricshapes on the other hand are stiff and uniform and generally suggest organization and management with little or no emotion.Shape tends to appeal more to viewers’minds rather than to their emotions.

ISLLC Standard #3: A school administrator is an educational leader who promotes the success of all students byensuring management of the organization, operations, and resources for a safe, efficient, and effective learning environment.

A Leadership Perspective:

Schools have a shape, a smell, a look, a feel. As we imagine our elementary school days, we create physical imagesthat capture our learning experiences. Similarly, as we walk into the elementary school just before lunch to smell the bread cookingin the dining hall, we are taken back to some of our favorite (or maybe not so favorite) memories of schooling. Whatever the qualityof those memories, they are certainly vivid. We watch the big yellow school bus traveling down the road and wonder about thechildren in that lovely“monster”of a vehicle. These images are not about instruction. They are about the other things that informour memories and have deeply affected our lives. Even though they are not instruction, they are important to the successful school.They are the shape of schooling.

Management is the shape of schools. We manage budgets, discipline, community relations, and personnel. These arenot the things that should be our focus in schools but they are exactly the matters with which we must deal so that we might teachchildren. And, the degree to which a leader can handle aspects of time management, scheduling, random but daily details, personnelmanagement, parent conferencing, and community relations will determine the level of success for the students at that school. Ofthe management details, supervision of personnel is the most rewarding, demanding, and exhausting. Successful leaders find waysto be instructional leaders by offering supervision, staff development, remediation, and when necessary termination. Butduring the whole process of management, leaders struggle to balance being compassionate and supportive with being clinical and directwith personnel. Both sets of skills are necessary, but it is the rare leader who can do them both well. Effective leaders understandhow to shape the modes of management to support the business of student learning.