Flourishing in Schools: Examining School Leadership From a Positive Organizational Perspective

• In Event: Leadership Development in Primary and Secondary School Settings

Short Description

Presenters will share insights into the work of school leadership from a strengths-based, appreciative, and positive perspective, offering findings from their research with principals across Canada on cultivating conditions for well-being in school organizations. They will provide a conceptual model shown to have resonance for encouraging and sustaining flourishing in schools.

Detailed Abstract

Purpose of the research: In 2016 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization released a report which outlined the imperative of organizing schools for student happiness and well-being. The report claimed that to do so was a step toward achieving aspired levels of growth, peace and prosperity across our communities (Kim, 2016). We agree with this position and offer from our own findings that this imperative must also include a deliberate focus on the well-being of those who work, teach and lead in the schools (Authors 1 and 2, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016; Author 3, 2015). A significant finding from our research is that the school principal plays a tremendous role in creating conditions where teachers experience a sense of thriving. However, although we know from positive organizational research that deliberately cultivating models of positive leadership can transform individuals and culture in the workplace (Cameron, 2012; Dutton & Spreitzer, 2014; Quinn, 2015), there has been little positive organizational research on leadership conducted in educational contexts (Hoy & Tartar, 2011). Given the paucity of research on positive leadership in schools, there is an associated lack of understanding about how to develop in new principals, and foster and support in acting principals, the capacities and competencies needed for cultivating ans sustaining wellbeing, for themselves and for others, in their work. Therefore, our ongoing research project examines school leadership to better understand how to foster and support leadership that encourages and sustains a culture of flourishing for all members of the learning community.

Context and theoretical framework: Increasingly, wellbeing is becoming an important consideration as an element of improvement for success in organizational contexts (Cameron, 2012; Lencioni, 2012; Seligman et al., 2009). For example, research shows that attending to positive capacities, such as positive relationships, happiness, resilience results in benefits such as improved engagement, higher levels of wellbeing and happiness, and fewer sick days and leaves from work (Bakker & Schaufeli, 2008; Harter, Schmidt & Keyes, 2003). Research on school improvement has been predominantly focused on aggregate performance measures and the correlates for effective production of qualities associated with enhanced learning achievement levels and increasing the life-chances of student cohorts (Sackney, 2007; Townsend, 2007). These are important measures of schooling, however current trends in school reform tend to use these for a reductive approach to education characterized by a narrow focus on test scores (Chapman et al., 2011; Darling-Hammond, 2010, 2013; Harris & Chrispeels, 2006; Lodge & Reed, 2003; Ravitch, 2010; Trilling & Fidel, 2008; Wagner, 2008). Our research reflects an increasing international awareness of the need for attention to broader measures of success in school (Hayward, 2007; Kim, 2016). Indeed, schools are systems to be managed; but schools are also living systems (Capra, 2002; Hargreaves & Fink, 2006), and we join with others to encourage a focus on the life-giving attributes of flourishing school organizations to gain insights for improvement beyond the instrumentality of successive school improvement efforts and the wide-range of strategies to re-order schools to increase efficiencies and better meet socio-economic demands (McKenna & Bilosovo, 2007; Palmer & Zajonc, 2012).

Our research is framed within the research literature in positive psychology (Ben‐Shahar, 2008; Carr, 2004; Diener, 2009; Keyes, Frederickson & Park, 2012; Seligman, 2011, 2002; Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000) and positive organizational scholarship (Bakker & Schaufeli, 2008; Cameron, Dutton, & Quinn, 2003; Dutton, & Heaphy, 2003; Lillius et al., 2008), linked to our ongoing research on learning communities in schools.

Methodology: To answer our research questions, and aligned with the reflective and interpretive nature of our research design and our intention to engage in positive and generative research, we have used qualitative research strategies: case studies, expert panel focus groups and forum-workshop conversations and interactions. We have used generative and appreciative processes in our research design to meaningfully engage with participants for data collection purposes and to provide enriching experiences for them as they have participated with us in this inquiry.

Findings and significance: Through our research, we have developed a conceptual model of flourishing in schools that we are testing with principals in the field. We find that this model has resonance for the school leaders at all levels of the school district as a reflection tool for personal professional growth, as a learning instrument for developing and improving personal and systemic capacities to foster and encourage flourishing among others, and could be useful as an assessment instrument for determining the overall sense of wellbeing at a personal, school and system level.

The model reflects a holistic attention to what it means to flourish in schools with three large domains of attention: subjective wellbeing, leaderful mindsets; adaptive community. Each of these domains is supported both by the findings in the research literature framing this research as well as the narratives and descriptions of flourishing provided to us by our participants. Running throughout each of these domains, supporting, animating and enlivening each of them, are three professional virtues that are well-researched in education and educational leadership, trust, compassion and hope.

In the proposed presentation we will present the conceptual model and give an overview of the insights from our work with school principals as we have engaged with them. We will offer extended understandings of the work of school leadership from a strengths-based, appreciative and positive perspective and will identify the associated benefits and potentials with this shift in attention. Our research is pan-Canadian with diverse perspectives from a range of participants who function within different school systems and communities. This research: a) establishes a positive perspective on research of leadership in school organizations; yielding new knowledge about organizational climates and cultures for flourishing in learning communities; b) provides new insights and applications of flourishing intelligences that have been developed in partnership with participants; c) provides an empirical framework for the development of new tools aimed at fostering, assessing and sustaining flourishing leadership in schools

Participants

• Sabre Cherkowski, University of British Columbia

• Benjamin Kutsyuruba, Queen's University

• Keith D. Walker, University of Saskatchewan