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Tri-Level Organizational Change in New Brunswick:

Redefining Educational Leadership through Action Research

Ray Williams

St. Thomas University

Ken Brien

University of New Brunswick

Abstract

Successful educational reform requires both a structural and cultural shift in the existing paradigm of public schooling. The transformation currently underway in New Brunswick’s educational system strives to shift the traditional bureaucratic model of schooling to that of a professional learning community. This reform is predicated on a redefinition of educational leadership across all three levels of a provincial educational system. This paper maps the role of university research in this cultural shift, a role that incorporated the tenets of the learning organization into the research methodology itself.

The history of public education in New Brunswick has included many province-wide, structural reforms. As with many educational systems, most of these reforms were unable to produce the desired improvement in student learning (Fullan, 1993). In 2003, the incoming Progressive Conservative government of Premier Bernard Lord released a comprehensive policy statement entitled Quality Schools, High Results (Communications New Brunswick, 2003). The subsequent reform plan introduced by the Conservatives, known as the Quality Learning Agenda, was a welcome relief to educators after more than a decade of top-down mandates of Premier Frank McKenna’s previous Liberal government. Mandate-based reform had failed to consider the complexity of schools and the reality of classrooms, a failure that Senge et al. (2000) argued has prevented school reform for decades. The failure of reform stemmed not from a lack of passion or positive intentions, but from a failure to examine what Senge referred to as mental models, the underlying beliefs that define our culture and colour our perspectives of reality. McKenna operated from a belief that first-order change (Uline, 2001), a mental model based on structural change, could create a world-class education system that would drive New Brunswick’s economic success. By contrast, Lord realized that success was dependent upon more than a structural reorganization; it required a second-order change that would transform the very culture of schooling. Such a change could not be mandated; it had to be facilitated (Hargreaves, 2003; Rusch, 2005). Political decision-making of the 1990s had shown policy makers that the links between government offices and schools, and between the school office and the classrooms, were tenuous at best because of the loosely coupled nature of public education (Owens, 2004; Weick, 1976). Any success in transforming school culture was dependent upon an approach that teachers could support, one that eschewed the traditional hierarchical bureaucracy in favor of a grassroots learning community model. The importance of this insight was not lost on the current Liberal government of Premier Shawn Graham whose educational policy When Kids Come First (New Brunswick Department of Education, 2007) built upon the cultural shift characterized by the professional learning community (PLC) approach (p. 14).

In 2005, as observers of the school reform process and being acutely aware of the failure rate in typical school improvement efforts (Bishop & Mulford, 1999; Fullan, 1993), we initiated discussions with senior members of the New Brunswick Department of Education. Our evaluation of the research on PLCs indicated that the sustainability of this cultural change at the school level was greatly dependent upon a commensurate change in the culture of the district and provincial levels of the educational system (Barber & Fullan, 2005). As a result, we embarked on a research project that targeted the institutional barriers to the implementation of PLCs at all three levels of the school system: schools, districts, and the province. In this paper, we present reflections on our research journey and on the influence of our work on educational leadership in New Brunswick. In particular, we report on the following elements of our work:

·  Our understandings of leadership in PLCs and the need for a tri-level focus;

·  The development of our research instruments;

·  Influence of our research in redefining leadership at all three levels of our school system

The purpose of this article is to share our research experience and findings and to inform others in their efforts to develop sustainable change and improvement in education.

Tri-Level Study of Leadership in Professional Learning Communities

Throughout this study, we have found that it has been important and helpful to have and articulate a clear understanding of the concept of PLCs. Through working with teachers, administrators, and educational policy makers, we have learned that the term PLC is now widely used in professional discourse. Less clear, however, is the extent to which users of the term PLC understand the full nature and scope of the concept. As DuFour (2004) commented, the term is used by many people to describe every imaginable combination of individuals with an interest in education, with the result that the term risks losing all meaning (p. 6). Our research has emphasized the move towards PLCs as a fundamental change in the culture of the school system. While much educational reform is based upon structural reforms, we support Fullan’s (2002) emphasis on changing culture: “Much change is structural and superficial. Transforming culture … leads to deep, lasting change” (p. 18).

Our understanding of the cultural elements associated with PLCs has been informed and influenced by a variety of sources. While we agree with the acknowledgement of Stoll, Bolam, McMahon, Wallace, and Thomas (2006) that there is no universal definition of PLCs, we support their claim that there appears to be a broad international consensus emerging about the purpose and nature of PLCs. They summarized the literature on PLCs by highlighting five key characteristics: shared values and vision, collective responsibility, reflective professional inquiry, collaboration, and the promotion of group and individual learning. We have also drawn on the work of Hord (2003), who has similarly conceptualized PLCs as schools in which the professional staff operates consistently according to the following five dimensions: supportive and shared leadership, collective creativity, shared values and vision, supportive conditions, and shared personal practice. According to Bryk, Camburn, and Louis (1999), the core practices in a PLC include reflective dialogue among teachers about instructional practices and student learning, a deprivatization of professional practice, and peer collaboration in which teachers engage in shared work. In our work with New Brunswick educators, we have observed their extensive exposure to DuFour’s (2004) three big ideas for PLCs: emphasis on student learning, culture of collaboration, and focus on results. Indeed, the book On Common Ground (DuFour, Eaker, & DuFour, 2005) has been widely circulated and discussed throughout the New Brunswick school system.

Based on these understandings, it is clear that PLCs differ substantially from the traditional bureaucratic structures that have characterized schooling for the past century. PLCs are predicated on the principles of systems thinking, shared decision-making, and collaboration.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the definition and practice of leadership. In a PLC, it is leadership that is the most essential shared aspect of the system. It depends upon what Lambert (2005) calls leadership capacity, the broad-based and skillful input of every member of the organization. In a high leadership capacity organization decisions result from informed collaboration among skilled individuals and every individual is provided with the opportunity to take part. Members of the organization begin with a process of developing a shared vision for their system, a statement of purpose that drives every decision—large or small, short-term or long-term. This vision provides a focus for leaders as they define the mission, identify the commitments required to achieve that mission, and set the goals that will lead to its fruition. The leadership processes used to generate shared vision, commitment, and responsibility derive from a collaborative culture rather than a structural chain of command. This form of leadership takes time and is less efficient than a chain of command but it greatly enhances the probability of success because it increases the understanding and commitment of those who will eventually be called upon to implement decisions and customize solutions to specific situations.

This form of leadership addresses what the literature argues is lacking in the traditional hierarchical chain of command. It recognizes the need to transform organizational culture in loosely coupled systems and increases the quality of decision-making by reducing the gap between the levels at which decisions are made and implemented. By definition a learning community requires everyone in the system to become a “learner” who continuously seeks new knowledge and skills and strives to improve the system’s capacity to achieve its goals (Louis et al., 2010, p. 20). Shared leadership is more complex than traditional forms such as the transactional or situational leadership (Williams & Brien, 2009). It recognizes the importance of trusting relationships and the existence of systems within systems, each with multiple feedback loops. It addresses the impossible expectations placed on the single individual who is tasked with “running” an organization. It replaces the impersonal command structures of the bureaucracy with moral direction of a collective vision that honours relationships and the situational uniqueness of a school, a district, or a province.

Unfortunately, most educational reforms developed to improve education have been focused at only one level of the system – the school. Since many of the early reforms were pedagogical it was natural that schools would be the primary focus. As the focus shifted to curriculum and technology the involvement of specialists at the district level increased. The increasing importance of second language fluency and the inclusion of special-needs students in schools changed practices and policies at both the district and provincial levels. More recently, the focus on standards and student assessment at both the national and international levels has become the driving force for provincial educational reform. Educators at every level of the system now recognize that, although the school remains the locus for improvement efforts, sustainable reform cannot be achieved if district and provincial levels of the system continue to operate as they always have.

Our review of the literature on PLCs and educational reform indicated the need for change at both district and state or provincial levels to implement and sustain school-based PLCs (Bryk et al., 1999; Fullan, 2000; Giles & Hargreaves, 2006). As practitioners, we also had first-hand experience with education reform and realized that, with the frequent, incoherent and often conflicting attempts at change, such support was often short-lived. Since many of the efforts to improve student achievement continued to focus on the schools, leaders at the district and provincial levels saw little need to examine their own organizational operations. In fact most school reform initiatives resulted in no change to organizational culture at either the district or provincial levels, which maintained their silotic bureaucratic structures. When educational reform failed, the blame was too often placed on schools, and particularly upon the shoulders of school principals who would be cited for a lack of effective leadership (Morehouse & Tranquilla, 2005). The following comments by Barber and Fullan (2005) catalyzed the focus of the research that we chose to pursue:

Our recent work is based on two interacting assumptions. One is in order for educational reform to be sustainable we must focus on tri-level development, namely, what has to happen at the school and community level; at the district level; and at the state level. The second assumption is that we need initiatives that deliberately set out to cause improvement at the three levels and in their interrelationships. (p. 1)

The premise we developed was that, before the PLC model could be successfully implemented and sustained in New Brunswick schools, it must become an organizational model at the district and provincial levels as well. The best way for us to “cause” improvement was to identify the policies and practices that prevented the adoption of a PLC approach at each of the three levels of the provincial educational system.

Developing our Research Instruments

In 2006 we were successful in acquiring funding from the New Brunswick Department of Education and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for a study entitled Institutional Barriers to Tri-Level Educational Reform. Our research mandate was to produce survey instruments to assess PLC readiness at the school, district, and provincial levels of the system. Our study can be classified as action research, using Levin’s (1999) term for the study of operating systems in action and the study between theory and practice. Merriam and Simpson (2000) have listed three criteria that distinguish action research from other social research: (1) the researcher acts as a facilitator and catalyst in the research process; (2) results are meant for immediate application; and (3) the design of the research is emergent in nature, developed as the research takes place rather than being completely predetermined from the beginning of the study. There are also components of Bogdan and Biklen’s (1997, as cited by Merriam & Simpson) definition of action research, which emphasizes the use of action research to bring about social change (p. 122). These descriptions applied to the design and conduct of our study.

As previously mentioned, educators in New Brunswick were still recovering from the negative impact of a decade of centrally mandated large-scale reform. To counteract the aversion to yet another large-scale reform and to reinforce our willingness to “walk the talk” of the PLC approach, we chose to base our research methodology upon the essential tenets of the model we were examining. As we worked with research teams at all three levels of the school system, we practised the principles of shared leadership, collaboration, and relationship building in our interactions with them (Brien & Williams, 2008; Williams, Brien, Sprague, & Sullivan, 2008).

The most vital aspects of our work with each team were centered on building trust. At the first meeting with each team we outlined the purpose of our research: to develop survey instruments, gather data, and generate reports that could be used to inform participants’ professional growth. In particular, we assured the teams that the research reports generated from the data would not be shared with or used by any external bodies for evaluative purposes. As McNamara and O’Hara (2008) point out, much external evaluation of schools and teachers reflects a lack of trust for teachers, leading to a culture of de-skilling, de-professionalization, and disempowerment that is harmful and counter-productive to the improvement of student learning. Instead, the purpose of collecting the data from our instruments was self-reflective and the reports we generated would be used for the professional growth of any school, district or provincial organization that undertook the process of self-evaluation. Any publication of the data or reports would reflect aggregate data or have any identifying parameters removed to ensure confidentiality.