Leading and Managing Instruction: Adopting a Diagnostic and Design Mindset - Page 1

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This paper is based on work undertaken as part of the Distributed Leadership Studies (www.distributedlead ership.org) with funding from the National Science Foundation (RETA Grant # EHR – 0412510), the Spencer Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, and the Institute for Education Sciences (Grant # R305E040085). All opinions and conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of any funding agency.

The key role for school leaders in improving instruction is to diagnose problems and design solutions, rather than to implement externally developed designs.

There is no shortage of talk and text about school administration, especially about school leadership. Recipes, prescriptions, and approaches for “effective” school administration are plentiful. Ideas come and go at a fast pace and some occasionally cling, at least for a bit. Still, many commentators, for good reason, wonder about the connections between school-administration research and development work and administrative practice in schools.

While a managerial imperative dominates school principals’ work (Cuban 1988), a leadership imperative appears to dominate writing on school administration. Management is about efficiently and effectively maintaining current organizational arrangements and ways of working. Leadership involves influencing organizational members to achieve new, hopefully desirable, goals; more often than not, this involves initiating change. In day-to-day life in the schoolhouse, leading and managing work in tandem and are often wrapped up in the same organizational routines (Spillane & Diamond 2007). Hence, research and development work on school administration has to be about both leadership and management. More important, it has to be about leading and managing instruction – the technical core of schooling. This facet was overshadowed by leader and principal development research, especially by work on developing formally designated leaders such as principals, until about a decade ago. However, it remains the leader’s critical responsibility to diagnose and design for effective instructional advancement in a school, a condition not met by simply implementing external designs for improvement.

School Administration Matters

There is reason for the attention given to school administration by policy-makers, practitioners, and scholars: the available research evidence suggests that school administration is critical to school improvement. Though the empirical evidence has limitations, it has consistently pointed to the critical role of administrative support in school reform and policy implementation (Berman & McLaughlin 1977; Fullan 2001; Leithwood et al. 2004; Liberman, Falk & Alexander 1994; Purkey & Smith 1985; Rosenholtz 1989; Seashore Louis & Kruse 1995; Sergiovanni 1996). School administration is especially critical in schools that serve impoverished students (Leithwood et al. 2004).

The literature on school administration also offers insights on what matters. For schools to run effectively and efficiently, three sets of macro-organizational functions must be addressed: compass setting, human development, and organizational development. Studies have consistently identified both setting and maintaining a direction as critical for school success. This involves developing an instructional vision that is shared by school staff (Bryk & Driscoll 1985; Newman & Wehlage 1995). In many urban schools, a key component of direction setting entails raising school-staff expectations for students’ academic capabilities. At Kelly School in Chicago, for example, the principal and her leadership team designed and implemented organizational routines intended to raise teachers’ expectations of students’ academic abilities and their sense of responsibility for student learning (Diamond 2007).¹ All names are pseudonyms.

Developing the school’s human capital is another critical function. Teacher hiring, summative and formative monitoring of instruction and efforts to improve it, support for staff development and growth, and recognition of individual successes are all aspects of developing the school’s human capital. Another macro-organizational function is building and maintaining a school culture in which norms of trust, collaboration, and collective responsibility for student learning support ongoing conversations about instruction and its improvement. Further, maintaining an orderly and safe work environment and procuring the necessary resources for the organization to run effectively are also essential.

Appropriately attending to these macro functions takes time and a vast range of knowledge and skill. Equating school leadership and management solely with the school principal’s work fails to acknowledge that one person cannot sufficiently master the essential knowledge. Moreover, the available empirical evidence suggests that others, in addition to the school principal, are involved to varying degrees in the duties of leading and managing (Camburn, Rowan & Taylor 2003; Spillane, Hunt & Healy, forthcoming; Spillane, Camburn & Pareja 2007; Spillane et al. 2009).