0.4 The art of successful school-based management  (Page 2/36)

In distributed leadership contexts, school based leaders find ways for multiple stakeholders to participate inthe leadership, and thus successful management, of schools. This notion of distributed leadership is most recently articulated byAndy Hargreaves and Dean Fink (2006) in their book, Sustainable Leadership. The principal, as school building leader, interactswith teachers and students. It is at the school building where teachers also provide leadership in the daily interactions withtheir peers, with their students, and with their parents and other stakeholders. And, it is in the daily interactions with studentsthat teachers and principals can encourage students to take on leadership. The literature regarding successful school basedmanagement continues to grow both in breadth and depth and if my graduate students are any indicator of today’s leaders, school based stakeholders yearn for specific and guiding principles forhow to manage today’s learning environments. In very obvious ways it is at school building level where the tug between theory andpractice is most powerful and most often confrontational (Hargreaves&Fink, 2006). Although establishing theoretical context is essential in framing a theory of leadership, principalsoften consider such discussions meaningless in helping them make sense of daily pressures and demands of schooling. What principalswant is a theory of school building leadership that can speak honestly and directly to the challenges of helping teachers andstudents achieve in an atmosphere of standards and accountability (Stronge, 2002).

A Way of Thinking

Over the past few years the author has investigated leadership in the schools from an arts-based researchmethodology. Based on his own experiences, conversations with leaders, and research, he grew to be suspicious that leading was infact more than just good management. Indeed, it was management but also much more. There was this sense of art, not just craft, amongthe very best leaders. For example, the author began to discover that traditional assessment methods for instructional leadershipwere often quite effective in addressing narrowing teaching functions but failed to grasp the nuances, subtleties, and totalityof successful classrooms (Blumberg, 1989; Pajak, 2003). From a very different point of departure, Stronge (2002) also concludes thatschool leader practice has little to no effect on teacher behavior and subsequently student learning. According to Stronge, principalsmanaged to do the craft of observations and provide some evidence of what they saw. They often completed this task with short,drop-in visits. But what was missing from this type of management was the fact that little change in teacher or student behavior cameabout as a result of the observation. In some ways, according to Stronge, principals failed to address the complexity of the teacherfunction. Indeed, leading schools and supporting teachers required school principals to do much more than managing. Successful schoolswere places where craft and art were practiced.