Learning-Focused Leadership in Action in Urban Schools and School Systems

• In Event: Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: “Leadership for Learning” in Practice and Scholarship: What Exactly Are We Talking About?

Abstract

Missing from research on leadership for learning is close attention to what is taking place inside of leadership practice at school and district levels that sustains a productive focus on learning improvement . This presentation assembles assumptions and findings from a national investigation concerning the way school and district leadership together create conditions for learning improvement across the school system. In so doing, the presentation highlights the way intersecting learning processes—among students, individual adults, collective adult groupings, individual leaders and leadership teams, and organizational processes (in which the organization is “the learner”)—are simultaneously invoked by learning-focused leadership efforts at multiple levels.

The investigation on which the presentation is based, undertaken over a year and a half, examined, respectively, leadership for learning improvement in schools, the transformation of central offices to support system-wide improvement of teaching and learning, and investment of resources in schools and district level to support learning improvement. Using common sites supplemented by others, substudies (e.g., Portin et al., 2012; Honig, 2012; Plecki et al., 2009) generated insights which, when taken together, shed light on how system elements worked together.

Positioned at the intersection of scholarship on instructional leadership (e.g., Hallinger, 2005; Printy, Marks, & Bowers, 2009), distributed leadership (e.g., Leithwood, Mascall, & Strauss, 2009), and student-centered leadership (Robinson, 2011), this investigation presumes an overarching framework emphasizing the simultaneous attention of leadership at multiple system levels to learning of students, professional educators, and the system itself. Several conceptions of “learning” rooted in socio-cultural and organizational learning theories offer anchoring ideas, with adjustments reflecting the different arenas of leadership work on which the research focused.

Through a largely qualitative research strategy involving repeated visits to seven urban districts in four states, and 27 schools within them, the investigation examined a range of contexts, all making learning improvement a high priority, displaying promising practices , and showing evidence of progress (locally defined) in educating a diverse, impoverished urban population. The research team accumulated hundreds of interviews, observations of leadership events, and archival sources that illuminated the leadership issues under study.

The investigation supports cross-site conclusions, grouped in two clusters. The first offers well developed images of leadership practice at both school and district level that maintain a productive focus on teaching and learning improvement. The second concerns the ways leadership work is itself supported—and led—in a set of nested relationships among a distributed network of individuals and units who collectively give direction to the system’s work and mobilize effort in pursuit of that direction.

This research is particularly able to trace the multiple meanings and forms of a learning focus in leadership practice and its means of exercising influence on learning events. In particular, it offers portraits of what is possible in systems that are improving in the face of adverse circumstances, in which schools and central office are providing mutually reinforcing leadership for improvement goals.

Author

• Michael S. Knapp, University of Washington