This summer, I was lucky enough to travel to Spain. I expected to feel rejuvenated and inspired from getting to experience another culture and people, but I didn’t expect to come back thinking about different ways to lead in schools.
During my trip, I stayed at the home of close friends outside a coastal town. My friends live in the middle of a national park and rely on a community of neighbors. Watching my friends interact with their community—borrowing items and performing labor for one another—got me thinking about the traditional models of school leadership and the opportunity for something different.
Even the most community-minded school leaders often function within a fairly traditional model of school leadership: There is a principal, a vice principal, and, sometimes, a teacher on special assignment in an administrative role. There might be an instructional-leadership team or similar grouping of experienced teachers who support their departments or grade levels. There might be a parent-advisory committee or group and maybe even student government.
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This is often referred to as distributive leadership, because the principal is not leading alone and has the support of others at their school site. While this is an improvement from traditional leadership that positions the leader as the hero, it is still hierarchical.
The vision for a community approach to leadership in schools goes beyond distributive leadership. It is time to push ourselves to consider this community-based approach to leadership that taps into what my friends experience in their seaside community—something that is far more interdependent.
If conceived with clear goals and implemented thoughtfully, this approach could truly transform students’ experiences of schools. It means that every member of the school community plays an integral role in the success of the school, which is ultimately measured by the success and well-being of all members of the community. It means that school leaders not only involve multiple stakeholders’ decisionmaking but also create structures for ongoing communication and collaboration among those various stakeholders. The school leader, then, is not forced to continuously make decisions in a vacuum but can instead make important decisions alongside the educational partners at their site.
With so much on their plates, a concrete step school leaders can take to be more community-based is their design of adult learning. The implementation of a design team is a proactive way to develop powerful adult learning across a school site. Developed by the professional learning organization where I work, Lead by Learning, this model refers to a collection of educators across a school site, representing different levels of power within a system, who meet regularly to plan, develop, implement, and evaluate adult learning. The members have direct knowledge about the needs of their teaching teams, their students, and the wider school community that they can utilize in the process of leading adult learning.
The school leader is an integral part of the design team, but now, they don’t have to work in isolation when it comes to adult learning, spending hours thinking about how to use the limited time and resources available to them, trying to predict what might feel most useful to their teachers, or create a thorough plan that only gets ripped apart by a new district initiative or teacher feedback. They instead get to collaborate on a professional learning trajectory that is responsive to the needs of their staff.
It is true that sometimes, as a building leader, it feels easier to plan PD in isolation, check off all the topics that seem urgent to cover, and just “get it done,” but research about teachers’ perceptions of professional development shows that approach is not working.
This year, maybe it is time to democratize your PD agendas and try a more community-based approach to designing and implementing professional development at your site. Here are some suggestions to get started:
- Identify. Select one adult learning space to be the focus of your design team. This can be whole-staff professional development, department or grade-level meetings, or specific professional learning communities.
- Self-assess. The magic of a design team is all about the mindset the leader and facilitator brings to the space. Set aside time to reflect on current power dynamics and positionality. You might consider which teachers are the most vocal and which ones are not. Whose perspective has not been included in decisionmaking at your school in the past?
- Invite. Ask two to four members to join your design team. Choose members who represent a vertical slice of your school and hold diverse perspectives in relationship to the needs of the adults in the learning space you are focusing on.
- Prepare. Create an agenda for the design-team meeting. Pay attention to the goals of the meeting, as well as the social and emotional learning needs of the design-team members.
As you continue your school year, I encourage you to think about how you can bring this community-based leadership to your professional learning. As with any new approach, the process of developing and sustaining a design team will take some time, but with a commitment to the power of leading with your community rather than solely as an individual, you are sure to see the positive impact of this shift.
