Challenges When Preparing School and Intermediate-Level Leaders Within a Territory

• In Event: 51.060 - Learning to Improve Professional Development for Distributed Leadership in Chile's Public School Sector

Abstract

Objectives and Perspectives
Leadership at the school district level is critical to systemic change (Leithwood and Azah, 2017). In Chile, as in other parts of the world, educational policy has increasingly given more responsibilities to districts for school improvement. The Center offers a professional development course for educational leaders working at the intermediate (district) level that aims to develop a systemic perspective to school improvement with an emphasis on the role of the intermediate level in generating conditions for a focus on instructional leadership at the school level.
Using case study methodology (Yin 2003), in the current paper we report on three districts that presented contrasting ways of managing new challenges generated when programs at the school and district levels are not explicitly aligned to develop new work configurations that enable systemic collaboration.
Methods
Data sources include field notes produced from 2016-2018 as we meet twice a year with district level leaders analyse the PD program for their school leaders. Individual and group interviews (N = 15) with actors at the district and at the school level were also conducted. Data were codified using the conceptual categories of change management proposed by Hargreaves and Ainscow (2015).
Results
Findings exemplify how capacity building at different levels of the system generates new relations that create tensions, challenges and opportunities that amplify or diminish the leadership capacity at the other level.
Case A exemplifies a bottom up approach. In this case, only school-level leaders had attended the Center’s professional development courses. Relations between school leaders and district leaders centered on the completion of tasks that emerged from a strong external accountability culture (Firestone, 2009). When school leaders began to question this type of relation, an opportunity for the design of new forms of joint work was created. District leaders turned to our Center for support in meeting this challenge.
In Case B, leaders at both levels had participated in our professional development courses and shared the purpose of promoting a culture of school improvement. The district level leader tried to impose a top-down approach to promote this culture, creating tensions and resistance among school leaders. In this case separate opportunities for leadership development enabled a shared pedagogical language, a condition that is necessary but not sufficient to achieve school-district collaboration with a shared purpose.
Case C exemplifies leading from the middle. Leaders at both levels had participated in our professional development courses, sharing a vision for a strong student learning culture (Firestone, 2009). In this case the district leader positioned herself as a leader from the middle, who learns with the teams with genuine humbleness. Leadership development at both levels allowed for new forms of relationships, creating professional learning environments that enhanced the mutual transfer of knowledge.
Significance
These cases evidence the need to explicitly address in professional development programs how to create opportunities for joint work and reflection across the school and the district levels (Armstrong, 2015). Professional development can create a third space that brings together the expertise that is distributed across the system (Zeichner, Payne, y Brayko, 2012).

Authors

• Monica Cortez, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso

• Daniela Berkowitz, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso

• Barbara Zoro, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso

• Fabian Campos, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso