Linking Leadership to Student Learning

Linking Leadership to Student Learning

Linking Leadership to Student Learning

By Kenneth Leithwood and Karen Seashore Louis

Book Notes by Jane L. Sigford

Chapter One: Leadership and Learning: The Critical Connection

·  Education is widely held to be crucial for the survival and success of individuals and countries in the emerging global environment.

·  US politicians of all stripes have placed education at the center of their political platforms. Loc 506

Educational Leadership Effect

·  Many educators and scholars find the descriptions provided by case studies to be interesting and informative. But descriptions of a small number of cases do not yield explanations of leadership effects for a more general population of schools

·  The second type of evidence has been derived from large-scale quantitative studies of leadership effects on schools and students. Loc 521

·  To date, research of this sort has done little to clarify how leaders achieve the effects in question, and the implications for leadership practice are therefore limited. Loc 541

·  Some evidence suggests that student engagement is a strong predictor of student learning

·  Unplanned principal succession, for example, is a common source of adverse effects on school performance, regardless of what teachers might do.

·  Leadership is second only to classroom instruction as an influence on student learning.

·  To date we have not found a single documented case of a school improving its student achievement record in the absence of talented leadership. Why is leadership crucial? One explanation is that leaders have the potential to unleash latent capacities in organizations.

·  Put somewhat differently: most school variables considered separately have only small effects on student learning.

·  To obtain large effects, educators need to create synergy across the relevant variables. Loc 558

Meanings of Leadership

·  Leadership can be described by reference to two core functions: providing direction, and exercising influence.

·  To be more precise, stability and improvement have a symbiotic relationship.

·  School reform efforts have been most successful in schools that have needed them least. These have been schools with well-established processes and capacities in place, providing foundations on which to build—in contrast to the schools most often of concern to reformers, those that are short on essential infrastructure.

·  Leadership is all about org. improvement. More specifically, it is about establishing agreed-upon and worthwhile directions for the org. in question and doing whatever it takes to prod and support people to move in those directions. .loc 577

Alternative Models of Leadership Reflected in the Literature

Leadership in Nonschool Contexts

·  Research on leadership in nonschool contexts is frequently driven by theories, recently identified with 21 leadership approaches that have been identified and developed. 17 are especially attractive and some have informed research in school contexts. For example:

·  Contingent Leadership—leadership styles, leader problem solving, and reflective leadership. To be most effective according to this model, leaders must match their styles to their settings.

·  Participative Leadership—Addressing attention to leadership in groups, shared leadership, and teacher leadership—Concerned with how leaders involve others in org. decisions. Loc 594

·  Transformational and Charismatic Leadership—How leaders exercise influence over their colleagues and on the nature of leader-follower relations. Emphasize communicating a compelling vision, conveying high performance expectations, etc.

Leadership in Education

·  The instructional leadership concept implies a focus on classroom practice.

·  Often, however, the specific leadership practices required to establish and maintain that focus are poorly defined.

·  Main underlying assumption—instruction will improve if leaders provide detailed feedback to teachers and include suggestions for change

·  Follows that leaders have the time, knowledge, and consultative skills needed to provide teachers in all relevant grade levels and subject areas with valid, useful advice about their instructional practice

·  This rests on shaky ground at best

·  Evidence to date suggests that few principals have made the time and demonstrated the ability to provide high-quality instructional feedback to teachers

·  Importantly, the few well-developed models of inst. Leadership posit a set of responsibilities for principals that goes well beyond observing and intervening in classrooms—responsibilities touching on vision, org culture, and the like Loc 612

Part One School Leadership that Matters for Students

Chapter Two: Collective Leadership

Claims Supported by Evidence in this Chapter

·  Collective leadership has a stronger influence on student achievement than individual leadership

·  Almost all people associated with higher-performing schools have greater influence on school decisions than is the case with people in low-performing schools.

·  Higher-performing schools award greater influence than low-performing schools to teacher teams, parents, and students, in particular.

·  Principals and district leaders have the most influence on decisions in all schools, and they do not lose influence as others gain influence

·  School leaders have an impact on student achievement primarily through their influence on teachers’ motivation and working conditions. Their influence on teachers’ knowledge and skills produces much less impact on student achievement. Loc 689

Approaches to leadership

·  Autocratic—influence rising with hierarchical level of the role

·  Democratic—higher levels of influence ascribed to those in hierarchically lower levels or roles

·  Anarchic—relatively little influence by any level or role

·  Polyarchic—high levels of influence by all levels or roles Loc 725

Effect of Leadership on Teacher Performance

·  Effects of leadership on student learning are largely indirect. Loc 764

·  People in formal leadership positions rarely have a great deal of interaction with students that is directed at lrng.

·  Instead, the effects of formal leaders are felt because, they create the conditions in which teachers are able to perform well in their classrooms.

Collective Leadership Effects on Teachers and Students

·  Strongest relationship is with teachers’ work setting, followed by teacher motivation Loc 799

·  Effect of teachers’ work setting on achievement is significant but the effect of teacher knowledge and skill is insignificant.

·  Socioeconomic status is almost always an important predictor of differences in student achievement across schools and this remained true in our analysis as well. Loc 818 [So what we really have is a racist, wealth gap. Because many of our poorest people in this country are people of color, and the biggest achievement gap is with low socio-economic, what we have is an economic, not racial necessarily, achievement gap. NOTE MINE]

Relative Influence of Collective Leadership Sources

·  Teachers with designated leadership roles were perceived to have the strongest influence among teachers than are staff teams or some individual teachers. Loc 877

·  In schools where we see high levels of student achievement we are likely to see higher levels of influence from staff teams and parent advisory groups. This suggests there may be something about the collective nature of these roles that adds to their influence. Loc 902

In sum,

·  School decisions are influenced by a broad array of groups and people reflecting a distributed conception of leadership.

·  Degree of influence exercised by these people and groups reflects a traditional, hierarchical conception of leadership in orgs. Teachers rate the influence of trad. sources of ldrship much higher than they rate nontraditional sources

·  Among teacher role, the more formalized the leadership expectation the greater the perceived influence

·  Nonetheless, the influence of parents and students is significantly related to student achievement. This result may reflect the well-known effects of student socioeconomic status on achievement.

Responses from teachers suggest that few changes detectable by teachers have actually occurred in schools [!!!!!!!!!!!EMPHASIS MINE} Loc 902

Relationships between sources of Collective Leadership Influence and Student Achievement

·  Teachers in schools whose student achieved in the highest and second-highest quintiles attributed significantly more relative influence to staff teams.

·  Schools in high SES communities tend to build collegial professional practices among teachers and to have a particularly strong focus on student learning.

What Might We Conclude;

1.  Collective leadership has a stronger influence on student achievement than does individual ldrship. At the very least it confirms the assumption that increasing the influence of many actors in a school system will not undermine effectiveness and accountability, but potentially enhance them.

2.  In higher-performing schools, principals and district leaders retain the highest levels of influence, but almost all people are granted greater influence than is the case in low-performing schools. Overall hierarchical control structure of schools remains largely unchanged.

3.  Collective ldrship is linked to stud. ach. Indirectly, through its effects on teacher motivation and teachers’ workplace settings. Found significant but much weaker relationships between ldrship and teacher capacity. Teacher capacity was primarily a measure of prof dev. opportunities—that is opportunities to learn from colleagues in a variety of ways—rather than a direct measure of the knowledge and skills teachers need to foster student achievement. Loc 965

Implications for Policy and Practice

1. School-and district-level leaders should, as a matter of policy and practice, extend significant decisional influence to others in school community
2. District leaders and principals working to extend influence to others should not be unduly concerned about losing their own influence
3. School and district leaders should not overlook the influence they can have on classroom practice through their efforts to motivate their teachers and to align their teachers’ work settings with what is known about effective instructional practice. Loc 982

Chapter 3: Shared and Instructional Leadership

When Principals and Teachers Successfully Lead Together

Claims Supported by Evidence in This Chapter

·  Leadership practices targeted directly at improving instruction have significant effects on teachers’ working relationships and indirectly on student achievement

·  When principals and teachers share leadership, teachers’ working relationships are stronger and student achievement is higher

·  Leadership effects on stud. ach occur largely because effective leadership strengthens prof. community—a special environ within which teachers work together to improve their practice and improve stud. lrng. Prof. community, in turn is a strong predictor of inst. Practices that are strongly associated with stud. ach.

·  The link between prof. community and stud ach. may be explained by reference to a school climate that encourages levels of student effort above and beyond the levels encouraged in individual classrooms

·  Leadership and improved inst. alleviate but do not eliminate the effects of concentrated poverty in schools. Loc 1045

Starting with Instruction

·  Certain inst. practices were consistently associated with stud. ach, including creating academic objectives to establish lrng expectations; using particular strategies for classroom mgmt, and pacing instr. Appropriately, given the content to be taught and the characteristics of the learners. Loc 1094

·  Today teachers often blend aspects of both direct and constructivist approaches, and only a few scholars hold to extreme positions on the direct vs. Constructivist debate. Loc 1094

·  When students in poor and minority dominant schools experience focused instruction, they fare better on standardized tests. Loc 1137

·  Instructional leadership is an idea that refuses to go away, although it has been poorly defined since introduced in 1970s.

·  Research says that the principal is expected to understand the tenets of quality instruction and to have sufficient knowledge of the curr to ensure that appropriate content is being delivered to all students

·  This presumes the principal either is capable of providing constructive feedback to improve teaching or can design a system in which others provide this support

·  Research shows that consistent, well-informed support from principals makes a difference, and accordingly, principals face increasing pressure to deliver better support for instruction. Loc 1149

·  Principals can benefit from support provided through prof. dev. programs. Those who do get support are more likely than others to enact this leadership role consistently. [THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT FOR SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT> NOTE MINE] Loc 1149

Shared Leadership

·  Has greatest impact by reducing teacher isolation and increasing commitment to the common good

·  Experienced informal influence and feedback through prof. discussions encourages a focus on shared practices and goals, and it may foster organizational innovation Loc 1167

Trust

·  Concept of org. trust has been staple of org. research.

·  Key leadership behaviors and specific actions are known to engender trust. More recently, trust has been shown to predict how educators interpret their superiors’ ability to carry out more technical and transformational leadership functions. Loc 1188 [See Book Notes on Simon Sinek’s Start with WHY to see more about organizational trust. NOTE MINE]

·  Trust appears to be precondition for leadership behaviors that will affect instruction, not a direct cause.

Teacher Leadership and Prof. Community

·  If principals are to have an impact on instr. by bldg a positive school culture, they must foster collaborative and effective working relationships among teachers. Here we emphasize the importance of professional community. Loc. 1216

·  Prof. community is more than just support—it is also shared values, common focus and collective responsibility for student learning, reflective dialogue about improvement, and purposeful sharing of practices Loc 1216

·  Although many factors affect whether or not prof. community exists in a school, one highly significant factor is strong leadership by principals. Loc 1216

·  However, direct effect of prof. community on stud. lrng are limited. Most benefits to students accrue because teachers are working together around issues of inst and school improvement. Loc 1236

·  This suggests, we argue, that in schools where teachers work together intensively on instruction and learning, they also create a school climate that is supportive of stud. Lrng outside the classroom. Loc 1236

Additional Evidence: Do principal Behaviors and Attributes Affect Stud. Achievement?

·  Results indicate that ach. Scores in math are significantly associated with focused instruction, prof community, and teachers’ trust in the principal. Loc 1248

·  Both principal instructional leadership and shared leadership have significant effects on teachers’ working relationships (prof community) and on focused instruction. Neither has a significant direct relationship with stud. ach. Loc 1282

·  Student poverty is negatively associated with the prevalence of focused instruction.