How can school leaders help each other to grow professionally?

In this piece I address the question of how school leaders can help each other to grow professionally by drawing on observations from John Dewey, reviewing some practical approaches, reporting findings from research projects, and referring to a set of principles connecting leadership and learning.

Growth

Growth: the fundamental meaning of education, according to John Dewey (1938). And by growth he meant growing as developing - intellectually and morally - in a form that creates the conditions for future growth. ‘What he (sic) has learned in the way of knowledge and skill in one situation becomes an instrument of understanding and dealing effectively with the situations which follow’ (Dewey, 1938, p44). So in order to grow we have to learn through experience, extracting meaning and understanding from situations, rather than simply surviving or living through them.

I am reminded of the interview question: ‘According to your CV you have held your present position for six years. Has that been six years’ experience, or one year’s experience repeated six times?’ Dewey stresses the importance of continuity in relation to growth and education, suggesting the idea of a forward trajectory, as opposed to a ‘going round in circles’ on the same spot. This is not to deny the considerable achievement involved in simply coping as a school leader in these days of seemingly ever increasing pressure and complexity. But it does return us to the idea of development, and preparation ‘… for later experiences of a deeper and more expansive quality’ (Dewey, 1938, p.47) – the essence of educative growth. The key to growth through experience is reflection, which unsurprisingly Dewey also had things to say about.

Reflection

Dewey distinguished between routine action and reflective action, the former being action guided by tradition, external authority and circumstance (Warwick and Swaffield, 2006). By contrast, reflective action involves ‘the active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it’ (Dewey, 1910, p.6). Reflective action suggests a constant questioning of received wisdom, and an unwillingness blindly to follow prescribed paths or lines of action. Rather reflection, in Dewey’s view, ‘…enables us to direct our actions with foresight…It enables us to know what we are about when we act’ (Dewey, 1933, p.17). He went on to discuss the personal orientations that accompany such an approach, those of open-mindedness, responsibility and whole-heartedness – dispositions that are coherent with professional growth. Another eminent writer on the notion of reflection is Donald Schön (1983, 1987), who distinguishes between reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action. Reflection-in-action involves an on-the-spot questioning of the assumptions underpinning any situation, while reflection-on-action is the articulation of the tacit values and knowledge that spontaneously guide action.

Reflection on action is something that can be done alone, but is often most productive when supported by others - which is where school leaders helping each other grow comes in. How can we help, and be helped by, our colleagues to engage in reflection that is the bedrock of professional growth? Critical friendship is a potentially powerful approach, ideally suited to school leaders mutually and collaboratively supporting one another.

Critical friendship

Critical friendship is a ‘supportive yet challenging relationship … [in which] the critical friend prompts the other person towards an honest reflection and reappraisal, a seeing anew that may be challenging and uncomfortable, yet enhancing. The relationship is neither cosy nor collusive, but rather one that cultivates constructive critique’ (Swaffield, 2007, p.205-6). The richness and the power of critical friendship comes from the melding of both critique and friendship, resting on the corner stones of trust, understanding, respect and commitment. Trust takes time to build, but is essential for the openness and honesty required for critical friendship to be most productive. Understanding includes awareness and appreciation of the context and situation, without which critical friends can operate only on a very superficial level. Respect and commitment are two other ingredients of a mutually supportive relationship.

A critical friend listens, reflects back, provides another perspective, and most importantly provocatively questions the other person, thus facilitating reflection, understanding and insight. The role is interpretative and catalytic, with the critical friend challenging expectations, helping shape but never taking decisions on the other’s behalf, and drawing attention to issues often only half-perceived (Swaffield, 2004). The relationship can be reciprocal, with pairs or groups of critical friends supporting and challenging each other, but at any one time it should be clear who is in which role.

Coaching and mentoring

Coaching and mentoring are two other closely related forms of support, whereby school leaders can help each other grow professionally. The terms ‘coaching’ and ‘mentoring’ are often used seemingly interchangeably, and there is much definitional confusion, but the (English) ‘National Framework for Mentoring and Coaching’ (DfES, 2005) identifies two type of coaching – ‘specialist coaching’ and ‘co-coaching’ and distinguishes these from mentoring. The framework recognises significant commonality and overlap among the three concepts, but differentiates them in terms of focus. Mentoring is characterised as support for professional learners through significant career transitions; specialist coaching as being focused on the development of a specific aspect of a practice; and co-coaching as a process involving ‘two or more professional learners to enable them to embed new knowledge and skills from specialist sources in day-to-day practice’ (DfES, 2005, p.3). Whilst I acknowledge the value of support from a more experienced practitioner when getting to grips with a new role or responsibilities, and the help that others can provide in the acquisition or honing of professional skills, these depictions emphasise the instrumental – which is rather a limited view of professional growth. Other writers do cast the coaching and mentoring nets wider, putting emphasis on the developing sense of self, ways of thinking, and collaboration (Bloom et al., 2005; Palmer in Ackerman et al., 2002; Robertson, 2005).

Jan Robertson focuses particularly on coaching partnerships to support leadership, seeing coaching as a means of turning leadership practice into opportunities for leadership learning. Robertson’s conception of coaching partnerships closely resembles the view of critical friendship I outlined above. The dialogue that is at the heart of critical friendship and coaching can be usefully supplemented by observation and shadowing, providing the context and data for the conversation.

Other opportunities

Other opportunities for school leaders to help each other grow professionally could include joint working on a project or event - perhaps something that draws on complementary strengths, and most preferably accompanied by reflective dialogue focused on the learning points. Practice focused workshops, critical incident analysis and sessions structured along the lines of the tuning protocol (Swaffield, 2006) are all ways of a group working collaboratively to address a particular issue presented by one member. In these, as with critical friendship, coaching and mentoring, the learning is often reciprocal even when the focus is on one person and his or her particular concerns.

Professional growth in an educational context

Almost all of what I have said so far could be applied to the growth of leaders in any professional arena. But leading schools is a moral enterprise (Sergiovanni, 1992; Fullan, 2003), so to grow must include a strengthening of the moral purpose which directs school leadership. This broadens the scope of the endeavour, and means that professional growth for school leaders must be explicitly concerned with values, and focus on what really matters – students, their deep learning of moral worth, and schools as learning communities. Too frequently (certainly in contemporary England) school leaders find themselves having to deal with the seemingly conflicting demands of a performance orientated, high-stakes culture, and a deep seated commitment to truly worthwhile education. They must somehow avoid being distracted or seduced by tactical approaches to raising narrowly conceived attainment scores that often have unintended anti-educational consequences.

School leaders can help each other follow their moral compass by being the sounding board that helps the articulation, affirmation and strengthening of values. They can assist each other in finding the path of principled pragmatism, and negotiating the ethical minefields that beset school leadership. It is often other school leaders, experiencing similar demands and decisions on a day-to-day basis, who are most valued as confidants and wise counsellors.

School principals’ views

An appreciation of peers as a source of support and challenge is an issue emerging from a national survey that I am currently conducting exploring the views of English headteachers. This concurs with one of the conclusions of an extensive enquiry into the state of school leadership in England – that ‘school leaders look chiefly to their peers, both within and outside school, for ideas and inspiration’ (Earley et al., 2002: 9). I doubt if these feelings are unique to English headteacher. Indeed, an Australian principal has bemoaned the lack of time ‘for networking, for sharing, learning from and working together with other principals’ (Loader, 1997, p.44-45).

What headteachers and principals value is someone whom they trust, and trust is a precious commodity. As one school leader said ‘I still think there is an element about disclosing more personal things in your management to another colleague head, I think there’s always that element of, you know, where will this go?’ (Swaffield, 2008, p.18). This head went on to explain that she wasn’t doubting the intended confidentiality of colleagues, but that it is easy for things to slip out in an unguarded moment. Another spoke of ‘The desperate need for the safety of just being able to splurge a bit and to have people who know you well enough to say, “I think you’ve got this out of perspective, this is not a big issue, it’s not important” without it sending ripples all over the place and being recorded’ (ibid).

Another important factor is the understanding of context, and experience of similar situations. ‘You want someone else you can talk with about some of the issues you face in your school, and issues that you face if you’re in a small village primary school are not the same as in a quite large comprehensive school’ (Swaffield, 2008, p.17).

Headteachers that I have interviewed distinguish between the one or two other heads they know well and trust deeply, and the wider group of colleague heads known less well but who nevertheless are valued as sources of information and professional development opportunities. Schmitz and Brown (2006) describe how a group of headteachers worked together and provided mutual support through meetings focused on problem solving, and triads that visited each other’s schools. The participants spoke of renewed energy, increased confidence, and greater knowledge, with consequent positive impact on school improvement. Practical support is welcome in that it saves reinventing the wheel, and as Schmitz and Brown report may have other beneficial outcomes, but it does not necessarily lead to professional growth as conceived in this paper.

Five principles

Through an international project looking at the interrelationship of leadership and learning (MacBeath et al., 2006; MacBeath and Dempster, 2008) we identified five principles for practice, each expressed in terms of a headline with subsidiary ‘prompts to action’. These five principles – a focus on learning; conditions for learning; dialogue; shared leadership; and accountability - provide a framework for thinking about school leaders helping each other grow professionally. I will now briefly discuss each principle and its relevance to our current concern.

The first, ‘a focus on learning’, emphasises that everyone is a learner – a point reflected in the reciprocity encapsulated in the title of this piece – school leaders helping each other grow professionally. The importance of the contextual, social and emotional aspects of learning are recognised, all of which need to be taken into account for professional growth. The first principle also connects leadership and learning, identifying that the capacity for leadership arises out of powerful learning experiences, while opportunities to exercise leadership enhance learning. This takes us directly back to Dewey’s growing through experience with which this paper opened.

The second principle says that we need to create the ‘conditions conducive to learning’, and turns the spotlight on cultures, processes, environment, tools and strategies for learning. I have drawn attention above to factors that assist reflection and critical friendship, and thus professional growth. This principle makes explicit the areas to which we should attend if we wish to nurture learning.

‘Dialogue’ is the third principle, and emphasises not only discussion in order to transfer practice, but also the sharing of values and understandings, the exploration of different perspectives, and active collegial inquiry. As has already been noted dialogue is at the heart of critical friendship and coaching, and it is hard to image school leaders helping each other to grow professionally without it.

The elaboration of the fourth principle, ‘shared leadership’, reminds us that we need structures that enable participation, that everyone has different expertise on which we should draw, encouraging different people to exercise leadership as appropriate, and that we should value and promote collaboration across traditional boundaries. ‘School leaders’ should be interpreted broadly, and we will all grow more if we nurture and recognise leadership in everyone.

The final principle, a shared sense of accountability, points primarily to responsibility to ourselves, our core values, our colleagues and the whole school community, rather than focusing on external agencies. The last prompt is to focus on sustainability, succession and leaving a legacy – all three of which are closely connected with the professional growth of school leaders.

These five principles of leadership for learning provide a useful checklist and aide memoire when considering any practice relating to leadership and learning.

Returning to Dewey

To conclude, let us return to Dewey and his words of wisdom. Here he is referring to pupils, but the sentiment is equally apt for school leaders.

‘What avail is it to win prescribed amounts of information about geography and history, to win ability to read and write, if in the process the individual loses his (sic) own soul: loses his appreciation of things worth while, of the values to which these things are relative; if he loses desire to apply what he has learned and, above all, loses the ability to extract meaning from his future experiences as they occur?’ (Dewey, 1938, p.49)

School leaders have a hugely important role in helping each other grow professionally, a concept that involves much more than amassing information and honing skills. It is about values, and continually learning from experience in order to meet the future.

References

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July 2008

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ms Sue Swaffield, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, England, United Kingdom.