Balanced Leadership

Waters, Marzano and McNulty (2003) believe that more than three decades of research on the effects of instruction and schooling on student achievement are creating a new science of education. They translated results from their meta-analysis on the effects of leadership practices on student achievement into a balanced leadership framework, which describes the knowledge, skills, strategies, and tools leaders need to positively impact student achievement. According to the authors, balanced leadership is a comprehensive analysis, grounded in evidence and goes beyond abstraction to concrete responsibilities, practices, knowledge, strategies, tools, and resources that principals and others need to be effective leaders. They believe that:

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Effective leaders understand how to balance pushing for change while at the same time, protecting aspects of culture, values, and norms worth preserving. They know which policies, practices, resources, and incentives to align and how to align them with organizational priorities. They know how to gauge the magnitude of change they are calling for and how to tailor their leadership strategies accordingly.

Finally, they understand and value the people in the organization. They know when, how and why to create learning environments that support people, connect them with one another, and provide the knowledge, skills, and resources they need to succeed. This combination of knowledge and skills is the essence of balanced leadership (p.2).

Waters, Marzano and McNulty (2003) identified 21 key leadership responsibilities that are significantly associated with student achievement:

• Culture – fostering shared beliefs and sense of community and cooperation.

• Order – establishing a set of standard operating procedures and routines.

• Discipline – protecting teachers from issues and influences that would detract from their teaching time and focus.

• Resources – providing teachers with materials and professional development necessary for the successful execution of their jobs.

• Curriculum, instruction, assessment – directly involved in their design and implementation.

• Focus – establishing clear goals and keep them in the forefront of the school attention.

• Knowledge of curriculum, instruction and assessment.

• Visibility – quality contact and interactions with teachers and students.

• Contingent rewards – recognizing and rewarding individual accomplishments.

• Communication – establishing strong lines of communication with teachers and among students.

• Outreach – as an advocate and spokesperson for the school to all stakeholders.

• Input- involving teachers in the design and implementation of important decisions and policies.

• Affirmation–recognizes and celebrates school accomplishments and acknowledges failures.

• Relationship– demonstrates an awareness of the personal aspects of teachers and staff.

• Change agent – is willing to and actively challenges the status quo.

• Optimizer – inspires and leads new and challenging innovations.

• Ideals/beliefs – communicates and operates from strong ideals and beliefs about schooling.

• Monitors/evaluates the effectiveness of school practices and their impact on student learning.

• Flexibility – adapting leadership behaviour to the needs of the current situation and is comfortable with dissent.

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• Situational awareness – is aware of the details and undercurrents in the running of the school and uses this information to address current and potential problems.

• Intellectual stimulation – ensures that faculty and staff are aware of the most current issues and practices and makes the discussion of these a regular aspect of the school’s culture.

Balanced leadership can therefore, be considered as a synthesis of all the leadership skills, knowledge and practices (transactional, transformational, collaborative, participative, distributed and instructional) in order to draw out commonalities and relevance to the school context.

Waters, Marzano and McNulty’s (2003) findings on balanced leadership indicate that one standard deviation improvement in leadership practices is associated with 10 percentile increase in average student learning, which represents a statistically significant difference in achievement. Also, focusing on the most effective or most needed leadership practices can have positive impact on student achievement, thus, accurate understanding of the magnitude of change is essential.

They further organize the 21 leadership practices into ‘knowledge taxonomy’ with 4 orders:

1. Experiential knowledge – knowing why this is important;

2. Declarative knowledge – knowing what to do;

3. Procedural knowledge – knowing how to do it; and 4. Contextual knowledge – knowing when to do it.

Further research is going on concerning the 21 leadership responsibilities and the knowledge taxonomy. Data is being collected and factor analysis will be used to produce a smaller number of responsibilities and practices after ‘teasing out’ the underlying factor structure (Marzano and McNulty, 2003).

A lot of emphasis has been laid on school leadership both at the level of educational policy and practice as discussed in this section. Yet according to Scheerens (2012), examining the results of school leadership effect studies over three decades shows small direct and indirect leadership effects. He also notes that in the development of school leadership concepts over time the notion that schools have many substitutes for leadership has been rediscovered. Based on theoretical work and results of empirical

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studies, in normal situations of average schools a ‘lean’ kind of management might be sufficient which would make maximum use of the available substitutes and self-organization offered by the school staff and other provisions. However, in the literature on ‘failing schools’ weak leadership is diagnosed as one of the facets of low performance. In such cases more leadership effort is required, which should be more directive and oriented at basic issues like resourcing, standard setting and profiling leadership (Scheerens, 2012).

Furthermore, Scheerens (2012) distinguishes between direct-control and meta-control.

Meta-control is in line with distributed and organizational leadership which could be seen as creating favorable conditions for teachers to do their work independently and providing opportunities for professional development and alignment among staff.

Scheerens (2012) therefore, cautions about the assessment of school leadership effects in research studies and the evaluation of leadership in practical contexts.

The Wallace Foundation (2013) produced the Wallace Perspective to develop and share information, ideas and insights about how school leadership can contribute to improved student learning. Wallace’s work since 2000 suggests that school leaders need to be or to become leaders of learning who can develop a team delivering effective instruction. This entails five key responsibilities:

• Shaping a vision of academic success for all students.

• Creating a climate hospitable to education.

• Cultivating leadership in others.

• Improving instructions.

• Managing people, data and processes to foster school improvement. (p.6) It was also reported that effective principals studied by the University of Washington

urged teachers to work with one another and with the administration on a number of activities including developing and aligning curriculum, instructional practices, and assessments; problem solving;

and participating in peer observation(p.10).

The effective principals also look into ways to encourage collaboration, paying special attention to how school time is allocated. More specifically, the study suggests that principals play a major role in developing a ‘professional community’ of teachers who

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guide one another in improving instruction. It is also reported that the University of Washington study found a link between the professional community and higher student scores on standardized math tests. The effective principals define and promote high expectations and focus on the quality of instruction. They attack teacher isolation and connect directly with teachers and the classroom. The effective principals encourage

‘continual professional learning’ by emphasizing research based strategies to improve teaching and learning and to initiate discussions about instructional approaches, both in teams and with individual teachers. It is also reported that ‘they pursue these strategies despite the preference of many teachers to be left alone’.

The Wallace Foundation reported that the Minnesota-Toronto study contrasts weak and strong leadership. High-scoring principals conduct frequent class observations for short periods of time. The class visits are formative observations used for learning and professional growth. Direct and immediate feedback is provided. The study also reported that the length of the principal’s stay in 80 schools studied was 3.6 years. They found that the higher turnover was associated with lower student performance on reading and math achievement tests.

Wallace work over the last decade therefore suggests a pipeline for effective leadership with four necessary and interlocking parts:

• Defining the job of the principal and assistant principal. The knowledge, skills and behaviour principals need to improve teaching and learning should emerge from research.

• Providing high quality training for aspiring school leaders. The training should reflect the realities education leaders are facing.

• Hiring selectively. Only highly trained candidates should be selected for principal and assistant principal jobs.

• Evaluating principals and giving them on-the-job support they need. Professional development including mentoring on specific areas according to the needs (p.16).

The Wallace report based on research and evidence draws a portrait of how school leaders can be supported and trained to become effective school leaders. If we analyse all the elements of the proposed leadership model, it is in alignment with transformational, instructional and shared leadership and focus on the importance of collaboration and

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professional learning. The emphasis is on a leadership team, where the principal is a leader among many other leaders and help to spur leadership capacity and roles in others.