Understanding Communities of School Leadership: Changing Dynamics of Organizations

125 Pages·2023·2.914 MB·English

by  Joseph F. Murphy

SpringerBriefs in Education
Joseph F. Murphy
Understanding
Communities of School
Leadership
Changing Dynamics
of Organizations
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Joseph F. Murphy
Understanding Communities
of School Leadership
Changing Dynamics of Organizations
Joseph F. Murphy
Peabody College
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, TN, USA
ISSN 2211-1921 ISSN 2211-193X (electronic)
SpringerBriefs in Education
ISBN 978-3-031-23758-4 ISBN 978-3-031-23759-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23759-1
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
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Contents
Part I An Emerging Perspective of Schooling
1 Unpacking the Concept of Communities of School Leadership ...... 3
References ..................................................... 11
2 Rationale ...................................................... 17
References ..................................................... 21
3 Change Forces ................................................. 27
References ..................................................... 34
Part II Remolding Schools
4 The Changing Nature of School Organizations and Change
Forces Sense of Failure .......................................... 41
4.1 Changing Environment 1890–1920 ............................ 41
4.2 Convergence (1920–1990) ................................... 42
4.2.1 Core Values/Purpose ................................. 42
4.2.2 Learning and Teaching ................................ 43
4.2.3 Organizational Architecture and Governance ............. 44
4.3 Convergence (1990–2030) ................................... 47
4.3.1 Organizations ....................................... 47
References ..................................................... 48
5 Organizational Blueprints ....................................... 53
5.1 Leadership Work ........................................... 57
5.1.1 Creating Structures and Time .......................... 65
5.1.2 Supporting Learning .................................. 67
5.2 Professional Organizational Culture ........................... 75
References ..................................................... 77
v
vi Contents
Part III Difficulties in Reaching Stabilization
6 Barriers ....................................................... 89
6.1 Norms .................................................... 104
References ..................................................... 108
7 Dangers ....................................................... 117
References ..................................................... 123
Part I
An Emerging Perspective of Schooling
Chapter 1
Unpacking the Concept of Communities
of School Leadership
We start with the knowledge that throughout most of the last century, with its
focus on hierarchical forms and institutional dynamics, “leadership … tended to
be constructed as associated with ascribed authority and position” (Crowther &
Olsen, 1997, p. 6): “leadership traditionally has been perceived to reside with school
administrators where power flowed downward to teachers” (Yarger & Lee, 1994,
p. 226). On the schooling scene, this has meant that (1) educational leadership has
been defined in “hierarchical and positional conceptions” (Darling-Hammond et al.,
1995, p. 103), in terms of roles and the “positional authority” (Crowther, 1997,p.5)
of principals and superintendents; (2) “the system has not been organized to treat
teachers as leaders” (Institute for Educational Leadership, 2001, p. 3); and (3) the
leadership literature, in turn, “has focused almost entirely on those in formal school
leadership positions” (Spillane et al., n.d., p. 7). These understandings gave rise to
views of leadership that were tightly connected to domains of responsibility, with the
assignment of “school-wide leadership to principals and classroom leadership roles
to teachers” (Clift et al., 1992, p. 878; Crowther et al., 2002).
The significant point here is not that teachers were unconnected to leadership but
that such leadership was rarely acknowledged outside the realm of the classroom,
teachers’ role-based field of authority and influence as traditionally defined (Barth,
1988a). Because the work of teachers in terms of role and authority “has been seen
as being composed of interactions with students in classes” (Griffin, 1995, p. 30),
the expectation has been hardwired into the structure and culture of schools “that
the only job of teachers is to teach students and to consider the classroom, at best,
as the legitimate extent of their influence” (Urbanski & Nickolaou, 1997, p. 244).
“The formal authority of teachers in schools remains carefully circumscribed. Tradi-
tionally, they have exerted extensive control over teaching in their classrooms and
departments, but their formal influence rarely extends beyond that” (Johnson, 1989,
p. 105).
This preoccupation with the hierarchical organizational systems with its tenets
of separation of management (leadership from labor, chain of command, and posi-
tional authority) has led to the crystallization of (1) forms of schooling in which
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 3
J. F. Murphy, Understanding Communities of School Leadership,
SpringerBriefs in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23759-1_1
4 1 UnpackingtheConceptofCommunitiesofSchoolLeadership
“teachers are routed into traditional roles” (Kowalski, 1995, p. 247) and “teacher
leadership is clearly not a common contemporary condition” (Barth, 1988b, p. 134)—
models in which “few people have viewed these educators as a group in the same way
as other leaders, i.e., principals” (Hatfield et al., 1986, p. 20); and (2) a profession
in which “teachers, even those who are already leaders, do not see themselves as
leaders” (Hart & Baptist, 1996, p. 87). As a consequence, historically “there were
almost no mechanisms by which teachers [could] emerge as leaders for the purposes
of leading work on teaching, even when they [had] been acknowledged as exem-
plary classroom teachers” (Little, 1987, p. 510). Thus, teachers have been forced
into “dependent roles” (Creighton, 1997,p.5).
Not surprisingly, teachers have generally not been featured in school reform initia-
tives, except in the “cog-in-the-wheel role” (Griffin, 1995, p. 30) of implementing
policy from above. They have been afforded very limited “opportunit[ies] to effect
policy or restructure schools” (Manthei, 1992, p. 15; Lynch & Strodl, 1991) or to
“participate in decision making about school improvement” (Wasley, 1991,p.3)—
“to effect meaningful change outside their classrooms or departments” (Johnson,
1989, p. 104). While the need for leadership has been a central ingredient in the
school change and school improvement literature, consistent with the analysis above,
historically that leadership has been associated with those in roles with positional
authority over teachers (Heller & Firestone, 1995; Smylie et al., 2011). Indeed, it is
proposed that much of the reform activity has actually solidified the traditional roles
of administrators as leaders and teachers as followers (Suleiman & Moore, 1997).
We commence also from the proposition that “teacher leadership is essential
to change and improvement in a school” (Killion, 1996; Whitaker, 1995, p. 76),
that “genuine, long-lasting school change initiatives must derive from and involve
teachers” (Kelley, 1994, p. 300), and that without teachers’ “full participation and
leadership, any move to reform education—no matter how well-intentioned or ambi-
tious—is doomed to failure” (Lieberman & Miller, 1999, p. xi). In short, we argue
for the necessity of challenging the underlying assumptions about existing roles for
teachers and school administrators (Barth, 2001; Sergiovanni, 1991a, 1991b).
The scaffolding on which we construct our understanding of leadership is forged
from “multiple sources and persons” (Crowther, 1997, p. 7). It arises in part from
the stockpile of material on leadership roles but is inclusive of more than traditional
administrative roles (Miller, 1992). That is, we advance beyond the view of “edu-
cational leadership as the domain of either a particular stratum of the educational
system or the individuals within that stratum” (Crowther, 1997, p. 6). Our scaffolding
is erected from our best understandings of leadership as (1) an organizational prop-
erty, (2) a function or process, (3) an outgrowth of expertise, (4) an activity of a
group, and (5) a dynamic of community, understandings that move us away from
what O’Hair and Reitzug (1997) label “conventional leadership” (p. 65) and that
permit the concept of teacher leadership to be positioned on center stage in the
school leadership play—insights that promote “a new type of leadership” (Katzen-
meyer & Moller, 2001, p. 82) or “a new paradigm of leadership—one that recognizes
the central place of teachers” (Crowther et al., 2002, p. 27).