With the rise of high-quality leadership development programmes, it might be said that the depth of knowledge and understanding of school leaders is set to be the richest it has ever been. This is something certainly worth celebrating.
These programmes are well-intentioned, well-resourced, research-informed and rigorous. They develop leadership at all levels. But there are certain things they do not have an influence over and cannot do.
First, they do not have an influence over the impact of a leader’s experience of “being led” and how it will inform their own practice. Our leadership imagination is a powerful thing and is formed from the way we felt, the moments we shared, and the conversations we had with those who helped us become who we are.
The next thing is that, regardless of the quality of training we receive, it is the quality of the school culture that the leader works within which will have the biggest impact on how they lead.
It is our beliefs, attitudes and thinking drawn from the informal, implicit leadership development opportunities we have engaged in and not the programmes that will have a significant influence over the way we lead. The air we breathe in our own school contexts offers us the most overlooked and untapped resource for helping us to realise our potential. The key to understanding our school contexts and cultivating excellence is to develop a coherent system by which we can comprehend our experiences.
Having used Ron Berger’s celebrated book An Ethic of Excellence (2003) with teachers as part of my leadership role, I am seeing how valuable it has been in my own journey in developing a framework for fostering excellent leadership in schools. This article outlines how I am using his work as a lens.
Archiving leadership excellence
In his book, Berger begins his vision of excellence for teaching by outlining the need for educators to be historians of excellence, gathering libraries of great work from their students (p29).
As a classroom teacher, it has become a bit of an obsession of mine to keep exemplary student work. I gather it in my classroom in a specific cupboard that I open up from time to time to refresh expectations before I repeat a unit of work.
My colleague has folders on top of a large cabinet behind her desk and, fascinatingly, gives these to others to explain a lesson and the outcomes she envisions for her students. It is my colleague’s idea that I think best embodies Berger’s idea of “archiving”.
The simple explanation, curation and showcasing of what has gone before to others to help them have clarity and conviction of what should be achieved.
Just imagine if we didn’t archive excellence. We would miss the opportunity to gather the riches of what has gone before, explore them deeply, consider the mistakes and developments we will make in the years ahead, and build on these the next time we do it. We neglect the rich resources of the histories of our classrooms.
Archiving excellence in teaching can be applied very clearly to leadership. In fact, a form of it is already a common feature of leadership canons – the many biographies that exist documenting the lives of great leaders.
In our schools, though, do we dissect, analyse and curate the stories, the legacies, the work of the leaders who have gone before us in our own contexts and those we have been part of with a careful, evaluative stance?
Perhaps we reflect on them regularly but the problem is that it is often done with a negative tone and critical stance. As new leaders we are keen to deconstruct the leadership of the person who has gone before us to rebuild what we feel is right.
This is not wrong per se. But, if we do not revel in the great work of the leaders who have gone before then we miss a chance to stand on the shoulders of giants. These are the leaders who have made us the leaders that we are and we must ask deeper questions about the quality of their work, consider and extrapolate the excellent elements of their craft and use them. Let me give you some examples of excellence that we might mentally “archive”.
- Interactions with students: How did they treat, care for, and show love to the students in their care? What were the things that they said? How did they say them?
- Interpersonal/conflict moments: How did they handle these? Was it effective?
- Parents and community outreach: How did they work with parents? Was it successful? Which bits weren’t? How can we change or build on what they did?
- Meetings: How did they lead meetings? Were they effective? Did they help us achieve all that we wanted to achieve in each moment?
- Assemblies: Did they have a curriculum for these? What was the structure? Does it enable ethos to be deeply embedded in the life of the school?
A school culture of leadership excellence
Berger writes about how, regardless of the quality of facility or size of the schools he visited, the most effective schools and the ones that embodied most a vision of excellence, were the ones that had strong classroom cultures.
One aspect of his explanation applies directly to school leadership – positive peer pressure and precise praise.
Berger writes about how positive peer pressure is contagious (p36). We often think that the term “peer pressure” is something that is always negative, but as Berger writes, when the culture of a place is focused on doing the right things at the right time in the right way, the influence of our peers can be a critical factor in ensuring we all do our best work as leaders.
The best leaders I have worked for have created a culture within leadership and staff teams where great work is celebrated. They have then described these actions in concrete terms and connected them intimately with the purposes and vision of the school. We should all be proud when our colleagues do great work to support our students to achieve their full potential. As leaders we should point this out and explain it simply within the complexity of school life.
This is important because if we do not draw out the wonderful moments of school life, the grumpy and tiring moments prevail.
I have found that some of the most powerful moments in my leadership development have been listening to our headteacher outline successes, praising the person responsible, and then clearly describing the critical moves they took to make this happen. I found the precision of this praise infectious; I couldn’t help but leave the meeting longing to do the same. Week after week, this attitude had a profound effect on me.
Now, when I lead my teams, I am keen to do the same. Of course, you need to know the individuals receiving the praise as some would prefer it to be shared one-to-one. Regardless, the principle still stands – positive peer pressure and precise praise matter.
Teaching leadership excellence
Berger breaks down the teaching of excellence into three categories (p121). Let’s apply these to school leadership.
1, Leadership as a calling
Teaching is hard. It is uniquely challenging and emotionally exhausting. One of the main things that keeps teachers teaching for decades is the purpose they find in educating young people.
Much like classroom teaching, school leadership most definitely is a calling and the rough must be taken with the smooth. Young senior leaders, like me, who watch their more experienced counterparts and headteachers see this more closely than anyone else: the hard decisions, the relentless pressure, the push and pull from every side to please stakeholders and get results.
Those leaders I admire most approach each day with patience, control, and resolute conviction that this is their purpose – to serve the children of their school and the staff who teach them. To do anything else would go against the way they were made.
The greatest way for headteachers to teach this is to model it each day and help others learn through teachable moments; it most certainly will rub off on everyone around them. More than this though, the most special moments with the exemplary leaders I have worked with are when there has been difficult situation with staff or students and they have explicitly and succinctly connected their purpose with their leadership behaviours and taken the time to explain to me what they did and why.
Regardless of how difficult, it is this calling, displayed in everyday actions, that has inspired me most to persevere.
2, Leadership as a craft
Throughout his narrative, Berger draws on analogies of a carpenter and a builder. He talks about teaching as a craft where those who are new sit under the tutelage of the master for many years.
I rarely hear of leadership being described as a craft, but I am convinced that it is one. As the years pass, I notice quite specific, repeated actions, questions and attitudes that leaders have with colleagues and students in specific situations; I notice how the seemingly strange decisions of leaders come good and right in the end.
There is so much I didn’t understand that they did. I am becoming more and more acutely aware of the way in which some decisions are made in the moment and some are laboured over for months.
It is then I realise that the craft they have been honing over many years is still something I struggle to pinpoint and describe. But that does not mean it is not there.
3, Leadership as scholarship
Berger notes the way in which teachers ought to see themselves as scholars of their subjects and scholars of their craft. In my experience of school leaders and leadership, this view of our roles in schools does happen but it is not as common as it ought to be.
It is often taken that research should be read before a meeting or embedded as part of a presentation or strategy. Although this is important, this view of how we use research in school leadership bypasses the conversation about the evidence and whether it is relevant to the school contexts in which we serve.
Some may say there is not enough time for things like this – there are far more pressing issues and concerns for school leaders than debating the latest evidence. But this view undermines the value of the discussion of research in helping the quality and precision of team decision-making. I would guess that it also stems from a belief that as leaders we are not scholars, but practitioners, and the two are mutually exclusive. This view dismisses our roles as learners who care deeply about growing our knowledge and understanding of our craft for the sake of our community. For that is all scholarship in this context really is – learning to help others learn and understand.
- Robbie Burns is a teacher and assistant vice-principal for teaching and learning at Bede Academy in Northumberland. He has written for a range of publications on primary education and curriculum. Read his blog via www.howthenshouldweteach.wordpress.com and follow him on Twitter @MrRRBurns. Read his previous articles for Headteacher Update via https://bit.ly/htu-burns
Headteacher Update Summer Term Edition 2023
- This article first appeared in Headteacher Update's Summer Term Edition 2023. This edition was sent free of charge to every primary school in the country. A digital edition is also available via www.headteacher-update.com/digital-editions/
Further information & resources
- Berger: An ethic of excellence: Building a culture of craftsmanship with students, Heinemann, 2003.