2.5 THE ROLE AND IMPORTANCE OF THE PRINCIPAL TO PROCESSES OF SCHOOL CHANGE AND SCHOOL
2.5.1 The management and leadership role of the school principal
2.5.1.1 The School Principal’s Role of Leadership
Although this study is about changes in management practices, in section 2.5.1 above, it has been observed that management without leadership rarely results in sustained changes in teaching and learning practices. It is therefore necessary to give equal attention to the leadership role of the principal when discussing management as will be done in this section.
To reiterate, leadership deals with how one can provide the necessary purposing and inspiration to school improvement efforts. Leadership involves articulating a vision,
getting shared ownership, serving as a compass that points the direction to be taken, inspiring enthusiasm, and allowing people to buy into and take part in the shaping of the way that will constitute the school’s mission (Sergiovanni, 1998; Fullan, 1991).
Schools need to change and for change to result in improvement, school require expert leadership. Since education in general and schools in particular, are seen as tools for social change, educational leaders are assumed to be the most critical role players in effecting change. This makes developing school leaders one of the most promising avenues available for successfully addressing the changes, which will challenge future schools (Leithwood et al, 1992). Debates about leadership have led to the identification of many forms of leadership. Of interest to this study are transformational and instructional leadership. Their importance will be clear in the following discussion.
2.5.1.1.1 Transformational leadership
Leithwood et al (1992: 7) see transformational leadership as leadership that derives its power through its ability to empower others. They regard its central purpose as the enhancement of individual and collective problem-solving capacities of organisational members, which are exercised in the identification of goals to be achieved and practices to be used in their achievement. Such leadership focuses on the people involved, their relationships and beliefs and its main outcome is increased capacity of an organisation to continuously improve (Leithwood et al, 1997; Hopkins, 2000).
Leithwood et al (1992: 8) see this form of leadership as culture changing.
Transformational leaders not only manage structure, but they purposefully seek to impact upon the culture of the school in order to change it (Hopkins, 2000: 2). This study contends that the culture of the school should include the culture of teaching and learning which is one of the key challenges of principals in the schools under consideration where traditional methods of teaching have been the norm. Managing change of teaching and learning, therefore, is one of the areas that must be the focus of the principal particularly in these schools. Nevertheless, Leithwood, Begley, and Cousins (1999) see transformational leadership as a sensible point of departure for better understanding changing leadership for changing times such as we have in South
Hopkins (2000) regards transformational leadership as a necessary but not sufficient condition for school improvement. This is because, he argues, it lacks a specific orientation to student learning which he regards as the ultimate reason for improving schools. In support of this argument, Wang, Haertel and Walberg (1993) suggest that any strategy to promote student learning needs to engage students and parents as active participants, and expand the teaching and learning experiences of teachers and students respectively. This requires a different form of leadership from the principal, one which can give what Hopkins (2000) and Elmore (2000) call instructional leadership. Instructional leadership will be discussed in the following section.
2.5.1.1.2 Instructional Leadership
According to Smith and Andrews (1989) and Glickman (1985), instructional leadership is often defined as a blend of tasks, such as supervision of classroom instruction including direct assistance to teachers, group development, staff development and curriculum development and action research. According to Blase and Blase (1999: 2), Schon (1988) has developed a concept of instructional leadership that emphasises collegial classroom observations, and specifically focuses on support, guidance, and encouragement of reflective teaching. This concurs with Leithwood et al’s (1992: 9) definition, which sees instructional leadership as symbolising the importance to school leadership of an emphasis on student growth and on much of the direct service provided by schools in fostering student growth. According to Fullan (1991), many authors found that principals exercised instructional leadership through shaping the organisation, school climate, and resources of the school rather than by intensive, direct involvement in instruction and at the classroom level, something that he agrees with. Webb (2005: 72) notes that, while most teachers acknowledged the value and importance of a curriculum leadership role, the expansion of the activities that it involved meant that increasingly, the work was delegated to deputy heads, senior management teams and curriculum co-ordinators as mentioned in section 2.5.1.
In South Africa too, most of this work is usually delegated to the deputy and the SMT.
While delegating some instructional activities does not preclude the principal from undertaking some instructional activities, it limits the time principals can spend in individual classrooms. Thus, the larger goal of the principal is in transforming the
culture of the school (Fullan, 1991) which includes the culture of teaching and learning. Therefore, while the principal can only spend limited time in individual classrooms and with individual teachers, s/he has the responsibility of leading the transformation of teaching and learning which includes ensuring that teachers and learners use new methods of teaching and learning that enable them to meet the current needs of society and industry. S/he cannot do this if s/he does not spend time in instructional activities, however limited they may be. It should be noted that teachers respect a principal who can demonstrate that s/he knows what s/he expects from them. After all, most of the time, it is teachers who have excelled in teaching that are usually promoted to leadership positions. One of the areas where interventions need to help the principal is therefore on managing changes in teaching and learning, and developing and strengthening the culture of teaching and learning.
Although different styles are evident, all effective instructional leaders pay attention to resource provision, instructional resource, communication, visible presence but they do it with different methods and styles depending on their personality and setting (Fullan, 1991). Fullan also argues that the underlying orientations and behaviours such as encouraging high performance goals, providing a high level of support both emotionally and in terms of task, open and honest communication between staff and the principal and firmly held values that are enacted behaviourally, make a difference between principals. Therefore, the personality of the principal plays an important role in her/his approach to instructional leadership.
Muller and Roberts (2000) observe that, in complying with the progressivist roots, most school improvement remains ardently humanistic, concentrating on human relations, complementary and collective decision-making. Elmore (2000) indicates a need for whole school efforts to also enter the classroom. Factors at the instructional classroom level have more influence on achievement than factors at the school level (Muller & Roberts, 2000). For this reason, Elmore (2000) expresses the need for the principal to act not only as manager of structures and processes around instruction but to manage instruction as well. The reality is that society, including the departmental authorities, tends to judge the effectiveness of a principal through the quality of the instruction they see in the achievement of their children. Also, experience shows that
teachers and parents usually contributes to the development of culture of teaching and learning and this tends to reverberate to other areas of the school. It is therefore important that principals make management of teaching and learning their priority and this applies to interventions such as the IP.
According to Elmore (2000: 6), there is a tendency for principals to focus on the management of the structures and processes around instruction such as organising, budgeting, managing, and dealing with disruptions inside and outside the system, in order to create and maintain public confidence in the institution and leave teachers to manage teaching and learning alone. This explains why, for example, most innovations in schools, and the most durable innovations, occur in the structures that surround teaching and learning and only weakly and idiosyncratically in the actual process of teaching and learning. Such innovations include site-based governance that engages in decision-making about everything except the conditions of teaching and learning. Most professional development for educational leaders makes at least symbolic reference to the centrality of instructional leadership to the work. Hopkins (2000) suggests that instructional leadership needs to be on two key skill clusters, namely, strategies for effective teaching and learning, and the conditions that support implementation on the other- in particular staff development and planning. This is the view of this study and an attempt will therefore be made to assess the changes in the management practices of school principal with regard to teaching and learning and the extent to which the IP training programme for principals gave attention to this.
2.5.1.1.3 The Principal’s leadership role in vision crafting
As mentioned earlier, leadership involves articulating a vision, getting shared ownership, serving as a compass that points the direction to be taken, inspiring enthusiasm, and allowing people to buy into and take part in the shaping of the way that will constitute the school’s mission (Sergiovanni, 1998; Fullan, 1991). This section discusses the process of vision crafting by the principal.
The principle of school based management which has been adopted internationally involves participation of all school role players in school governance. Participation of role players implies that those who have to participate in school governance should
have common vision of what they would like their school to look like in the future.
A vision is simply a desired future. In a school situation where many role players with diverse ideas and perceptions are involved and where future generations are moulded, this desired future needs to be shared. For this future to be shared it must be created by the people who must share it. Having a vision of what they would like their schools to be in the future is critical for school leaders, that is, the principal (Leithwood, et al, 1992: 6). According to Leithwood et al (1992: 10), the problem of leadership in the future includes developing a shared vision of a future school considered desirable by those with a stake in it; directly assisting members of the school in addressing the challenges encountered in their efforts to achieve the vision; and increasing the capacity of school members to address those and future challenges themselves, more successfully. The role that the principal, as a leader, should play in the process of developing this vision of the future is clearly encapsulated in the statement by Bennis and Nanus (1985:101) that
…. If there is a spark of genius in the leadership function at all, it must lie in this transcending ability, a kind of magic, to assemble-out of all the variety of images, signals, forecasts and alternatives- a clearly articulated vision of the future that is at once single, easily understood, clearly desirable, and energising
According to Miles (1987:12), vision is sharable, and provides direction and driving power for change and criteria for steering and choosing. Secondly, it involves a shared vision of the change process, the strategy for achieving the vision for desired future. The creation of the shared vision is the most important part of the change and school improvement process. Creating or crafting this vision of the school is a process that should involve all the school role players. While all school role players must be involved, the principal has to provide the leadership in the process. The IP took note of this in that it had a module for all role players, namely, SGB members, principals, teachers, EDOs and members of the community in its training framework.
At the school level the process of vision crafting included all the parents, teachers, the principal, learners and other members of the community but the principal had to play a leading role in mobilising all the role players.
Vision building has been identified by Louis & Miles (1990) from a study they conducted as one of the themes necessary for schools to change. Fullan (1992) notes that vision building permeates the school with values, purpose and integrity for both the content and the process of improvement. The formation, implementation and shaping of vision in specific organisations is a constant, dynamic and interactive process. For an organisation to be effective, it needs both a vision of the nature or content that it represents, and a clear vision of the processes it characteristically values and follows. Vision building is a dynamic and fluid relationship in which the vision of the school is shaped and reshaped as people try to bring about improvements. Though it is a difficult balance, commitment and skill in the change process on the part of organisational leaders and members are very crucial as the ideas about where the school should be heading (Fullan, 1992).
In South Africa and in the Eastern Cape in particular, where parents were traditionally not involved in the running of the school, due to discriminating legislation and illiteracy, working together in governance and changing their perceptions of their role in the school demands that all role players first come together and agree on what they would like their school to look like. This process has to be facilitated by the principal.