Is your child's school run by Managers or Leaders? | Jax Aitchison

Jacqueline Aitchison, host · [00:58]the first quote that really struck me was one by Nikki Giovanni, and she said, it's not who you attend school with, but who controls the school you attend that matters. And that one stuck with me because it, it does emphasize the importance of the leadership in the school and the job that they have to do to manage change within that environment, and, and the last eighteen months has really shown us how important it is to be able to manage that change well. But when I started really digging into the topic and getting the research done, another quote struck me, and this one was by Philip Jackson, and he said that the path of educational progress more closely resembles the flight of a butterfly than the flight of a bullet, and I thought that was spot on because, it really does reflect some of the chaos that we deal with, or what feels like chaos that we deal with almost on a daily basis. but if I get into the, the, the writing and the readings that I've gotten into, essentially, effective change in education is just not possible without effective leadership. The quality of the leader determines the success of the change, and while those statements might be quite simplistic, they are no less true because of it. There is no doubt that accomplished educational leaders such as Salman Khan and Sir Kenneth Robinson have made inroads into revolutionizing much-needed educational reform, but these reforms appear really as hotspots of improvement in the greater tapestry of erratic and unsustained educational change that really has tended to define for many countries the past several decades. But based on the initial statement above, it's clear that successful educational renewal is really at the mercy of high-quality leadership. Research that seeks to define high-quality leadership, however, and educational leadership in particular, Quickly devolves into a quagmire of subjective interpretations, resulting in a situation where the Wallace Foundation tells us that those who have sought to make the case for greater attention and investment in leadership as a pathway for large-scale educational improvement have had to rely more on faith than fact. Consequently, research into leadership styles that best reflects the nuances of the education sector specifically is very limited compared to that of the corporate sector, which generally results in corporate leadership styles being used as templates for change management in the education sector. I argue that it is the role of the leader seeking educational renewal to have a robust understanding of the differences between educational leadership and educational management, how culture and vision play a role in change management, and how the transformational leadership style of distributed leadership is favorable when seeking educational reform.

Jacqueline Aitchison, host · [04:13]Although the terms leadership and management are frequently used synonymously, the quantity of research conducted on the concepts over the previous two decades indicates a growing recognition amongst organizations of the importance of understanding the difference between these two concepts. School leaders in particular tend to conflate these roles because they understand that both roles involve deciding what needs to be done, creating networks of people to accomplish the agenda, and ensuring that the work actually gets done. But then they become enmeshed by the complementary nature of these roles by trying to fulfill both of them at the same time. Whether this is because school leaders frequently reach the position of leader as a result of being promoted through the educational ranks, where there is little exposure to the type of leadership development typically seen in a more corporate setting, or maybe simply due to insufficient training within the educational leadership sector, school leaders often struggle to create sustainable change because they do not recognize the sufficient distinction between management roles that cope with complexity, which bring order and predictability to a situation, and leadership, which is essentially learning to cope with rapid change. When you consider the differences between these two concepts, we see that educational leadership and educational management are not simply different configurations of a broadly similar general form of activity, but actually they are categorically different. And therefore, they have significantly different impacts on the ability of an institution to operate and manage change effectively. Fundamentally, two of the studies that I reviewed are in agreement that the two roles are very different, that management takes responsibility for the proper functioning of the institution, whereas leadership focuses more on the influencing of others for the purpose of achieving goals. Managers produce standards, consistency, predictability, and order. Leaders produce the potential for dramatic change, chaos, and possibly even failure. School leaders tend to create confusion by attempting to manage as well as lead.

Jacqueline Aitchison, host · [09:33]In an effort to understand how leadership can predict, manage, and respond to changes, the previous two decades have seen the emergence of chaos theory being used as a framework to make sense of school systems. Chaos theory refers to a branch of mathematics that focuses on sensitive complex systems, where one minor change in the condition of a system can have substantial consequences. It has been adapted across a multitude of disciplines, including education, In an attempt to describe how a nonlinear complex system, such as a school, small and seemingly random changes are not so random after all, because they occur within an underlying non-random order, even though their effects can be system-wide. The new science of chaos has alerted us to the butterfly effect, to the very considerable impact that tiny fluctuations in a non-equilibrium system can have on its output. It's already generally recognized in the literature that it is the function of leadership to bring about qualitative change in the system. The theory suggests that the creative input of a single individual who is prepared to stand his or her ground can be enormously effective. However, we should be cautious of our application of the butterfly effect, and how we seek to use this as a basis to develop implications for educational leadership. It is potentially problematic because it focuses on the central idea of a unilateral leadership, which is really reminiscent of the whole great leader or trait theory style of leadership. This does not align with the more current theories that promote shared vision, team learning, and the leveraging of the potential residing in individuals. We have to remember that a school is not a corporate enterprise, nor is it a set of mathematical variables that can be clinically manipulated in an attempt to predict outcomes, as these studies sometimes attempt to do. These mathematical models fail to recognize that a school comprises stakeholders, parents and teachers, who have deep emotional investment in the operations that impact that investment or the children. Maintaining systems within a school is therefore messy, and the variable of emotional investment not found in corporate entities or mathematical equations frequently makes both daily operations and potential responses to change unpredictable.

Jacqueline Aitchison, host · [13:28]The style generally advocated for is a distributed leadership style as a basis of educational leadership that has proven to be effective in enacting sustainable change. The ability to build strong collaborative teams featured at the core of this leadership style is a consistent characteristic of high-performing school leaders, and a substantial body of empirical evidence points towards a positive relationship between leadership distribution and organizational improvement. However, the concept of educational leadership as an act of influencing others which necessitate actions that achieve goals, and that this is a delegated responsibility for a system in which others participate, introduces an interesting consideration. If we consider that distributed leadership emphasizes leadership by expertise rather than leadership by role, and that whoever influences others is doing the leading, that implies that leadership capabilities are required throughout the system for effective change to occur. If we ask who is doing the leading at any given time within a truly distributed system, where the influencer is leading and responsible for the system or mini-system within the greater system, the answer may include teacher leaders, team leaders, and potentially even student leaders. If this is the case, there is the potential for the previous challenge of the conflation of roles to abound on a large scale. Then the role of the educational leader is to curate the culture and vision of the school so as to ensure that the primary objectives of the vision are being met without the dilution of wayward individual leadership styles that are in conflict with the organizational culture or any role confusion. This way, the future forward thinking that defines distributed leadership is maintained, and the main mark of a principal at the end of his or her tenure is characterized by how many good leaders the principal leaves behind who can go even further.

Jacqueline Aitchison, host · [15:43]The literature explores the butterfly effect as seen in chaos theory as a tidy way of attempting to make sense of modern school systems where unpredictable events and unintended consequences are frequent occurrences. The implication for the educational leader seeking reform is that a comprehensive understanding of complicated and complex systems is required, as well as where and how these can be correlated with systems theory so that in amongst the unpredictability of leading a nonlinear system such as a school, the vision and culture of improvement and change can be maintained within a stable environment that is conducive to change. A leader who is not able to retain the big picture and visualize the systematic working of the entire complex system, including how unintended consequences affect the system, is a leader who is swept up in the system itself. Such a leader is at best ineffectual and at worst a hindrance to any progress at all. Many principals do not know how to improve performance in their schools because they are simply not trained or equipped to do so, which begs the question, what professional development is required so that educational leaders are sufficiently equipped to effect reform within their institutions in the current educational climate? Ultimately, the more comprehensively educational leaders can be trained as high-quality leaders who understand the differences between school leadership and school management, the vital differences between complicated and complex systems, and how to apply these differences, the better these leaders will be equipped to lead their organizations to a place of readiness for change, to do the work of reform, and to sustain impactful progress in the education sector.