What distinguishes principals in self-renewing schools from those in schools where it's business as usual? Outstanding principals go beyond merely involving teachers in decision making—they encourage teachers to continuously engage in identifying best practices. These self-renewal efforts result in the types of learning organizations described by Senge (1990), Watkins and Marsick (1993), and others.
We studied 13 principals from 13 school districts in the Midwest, Southwest, and Southeast. Outstanding principals had been recommended to us by school administrators and university colleagues in each geographic region of the United States. Our sample included urban and suburban as well as male and female principals. We observed the principals; interviewed them, their teachers, and other staff members; and analyzed school documents for evidence of empowering and self-renewing leadership behavior.
- provide a supportive environment that encourages teachers to examine and reflect upon their teaching and on school practice;
- use specific behaviors to facilitate reflective practice; and,
- make it possible for teachers to implement ideas and programs that result from reflective practice.
Providing a Supportive Environment
- Encouraging justification of practice. Many of the teachers we interviewed commented that principals allow them to teach in the manner they feel is most appropriate. Autonomy, however, does not come without responsibility. Teachers have to justify why they are using specific methodologies.In one school, a group of teachers went to the principal because some of them wanted to use a phonetic approach while others preferred a whole language approach to reading. The principal replied, “Each of you needs to be able to justify what you're doing. You don't all need to be doing the same thing.” What was important to him was not which approach they use but that they do their own thinking and that students learn. Other principals had similar philosophies. The implication is that teaching cannot be standardized—it is individual and context-specific. Teachers must study their own practice and learn from it as much as from formal research.
- Providing alternative instructional frameworks. Principals also help teachers develop other perspectives through creative use of staff development opportunities. For example, one principal scheduled an in-house workshop in the morning with a repeat session in the afternoon. This permitted half the teachers to attend each session, with enough aides and special area teachers available for classroom coverage. Other principals also manipulate school schedules to provide more staff development opportunities for their teachers. In addition, they share professional articles at meetings and by placing them in teachers' mailboxes, generally with a personal note.Perhaps the most extensive way in which principals provide alternative frameworks is by framing ideas as possibilities: “Maybe you could try this way; give it a thought.” One teacher whose principal periodically attends their team meetings commented, “He jumps right in and makes suggestions. Now whether we do it or not is our choice. It's not like, `Because I'm here and said this, you have to do it.'”
- Encouraging risk-taking. Many of the principals in our study encourage teachers to take risks. For example, one principal fulfills teacher resource requests not “to be nice to them, to get them what they want,” but to encourage them “to start making more decisions for themselves.” Outstanding principals view unsuccessful tries as learning opportunities. When risks don't work out, this principal remarked, “I'll sit down with the person, and we'll talk about what we're going to do next and why.”Another teacher observed that a favorite saying of his principal was, “We're not working on a project; we're working on improving ourselves.”
- Creating teaming structures for collective responsibility. Many of the principals create organizational structures that reduce isolation and increase teaming. Teaming leads to a sense of collective responsibility for one another and for students and provides an emotional and instructional support network. One teacher observed that when she had tried everything she could think of with a student, simply having team members with whom she could share these frustrations helped. Her colleague summed it up this way: One person doesn't own a child. You may be able to work well with a child in one area of his or her life, and somebody else needs to give you some ideas to work with in another area.... It's not only team teaching, but it is collaborative consultation.
Thus, teaming provides teachers with a support group that recognizes individual limits. Simultaneously, teaming expands individual limits by providing opportunities for teachers to share ideas, strategies, and students.
Facilitating Reflective Practice
- Asking questions. Principals ask challenging questions that prompt teachers to reflect on their practice. One teacher noted that sometimes a simple “Why?” from her principal is enough: “If I haven't done any research, I'm not going to be able to present a valid argument.”Principals also ask questions to help resolve issues of school policy and practice. In one school, for example, several teachers were involved in a scheduling dispute. The principal called them all together and asked each individually, “Did you get exactly what you wanted last year? What other time is good if you can't get this time?” Rather than imposing a solution on teachers, this approach places the responsibility for developing solutions and resolving conflicts upon those involved.
- Critiquing by wandering around. Peters and Waterman (1982) popularized the concept of “management by wandering around” (p. 67). If principals are to ask questions that facilitate reflective practice, they need to know what is occurring in teachers' classrooms. “Wandering around” helped our principals stay informed. One teacher commented that her principal was “everywhere,” using his visibility to interact with teachers. “He really picks our brains,” she said.The principals in our study also use their time in classrooms and hallways to relearn the local context, which increases both their opportunities to ask questions and their knowledge of what questions to ask. While Weick (1982) has argued that the purpose of management by wandering around is to “remind people of central visions and to assist them in applying them to their own activities,” our principals' questions, by contrast, helped teachers clarify personal visions, which ultimately strengthens the organizational vision.While in some contexts the frequent presence of the principal in classrooms might make teachers uncomfortable, this was not the case in the schools we observed. Teachers interpreted the principals' presence as a sign of support rather than as an intrusion. As one teacher commented, “That shows me he's interested in what's going on in my classroom ... in what I'm doing with the kids.”
- Challenging program regularities. Knowledge of local context also makes it possible for principals to go beyond questioning to challenging program regularities. For example, after observing two reading classes—one ability-grouped and the other for learning disabled students—a principal initiated a conversation with teachers about tracking and then issued a challenge: “We're working in the same place. Why don't we bring two teachers down [to join the two LD teachers], keep these kids on task all of the time, and we'll get a lot further than we are.” The result for students was the alleviation of an exclusionary tracking relationship, which has been found to undermine social aspirations and feelings of self-worth (Oakes 1985).
In another instance, the principal's actions went beyond challenging a program regularity. When the principal came to the school, she found a culture that embraced corporal punishment. She responded by prohibiting it: Now that I look back on it, I took the one piece of power they had. The teachers said the best thing about paddling in the hall was that everybody down the hall heard it.... It was significant when I asked them to put the paddles away, because they had no idea what they could do to motivate kids in a positive way. They had no alternative. While the tendency might be to criticize the principal's autocratic decision, when core values are at stake, principals (or teachers) may not have a choice other than to respond in a manner compatible with their core beliefs. In this case, teachers responded by developing a more humane discipline policy.
Enhancing Possibility
Another type of behavior through which principals promote self-renewal is giving teachers the opportunity to implement ideas and programs. Principals in this study enhance possibility by providing resources in the form of money, materials, time, and opportunity.
Teachers and principals have an explicit understanding of the relationship between resources and self-renewal. As one principal observed, “When I believe that teachers know how to teach, then I believe I need to provide them what they need to teach with.” Teachers noted that rather than issuing a flat “no” when money was not available, the principal worked with them to identify potential resources. “It forces you to sit down together to talk about programs that you might want to do if you could dream,” explained one teacher.
According to teachers, funding was frequently obtained through grant writing. When they were unsuccessful in obtaining grants, schools would “find the money somewhere.” Many schools regularly look for funding from local businesses and state incentives, or they creatively administer the regular school budget.
The “possibility thinking” stimulated by grant-writing appeared to be something that principals consciously promote. One teacher indicated that in her selection interview, the principal had asked her, “If I gave you $500 to spend in the next 10 minutes, what would you buy?” After giving the teacher an opportunity to reply, the principal had asked, “Now I'm telling you I don't have the money; how are you going to get it anyway?”
One principal used a teaching slot to which the school was entitled to restructure two elementary teachers' roles. As a result, they could more extensively share their special interest and expertise in science and language arts by working with students throughout the school, while the new teacher taught half-time in each of their classrooms.
A Focus on Teachers and Their Practice
Traditionally, principals have been placed in hierarchical domination over teachers, the assumption being that hierarchical superiority equals expertise (Sergiovanni 1992). It logically followed that it was the principal's responsibility to tell teachers how to teach.
By contrast, principal behavior in the self-renewing schools we studied motivates teachers to examine their teaching in order to determine which practices are appropriate. Dominant sources of teaching expertise in these schools shifted from principals and formal research to teachers and their practice. The role of principals changed from dispensing information to facilitating processes in which teachers could discover knowledge.
