Educational Leaders Today: International Trends

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Educational Leaders Today
International Trends Dr Louise Stoll
Creating Capacity
for Learning

Visiting Professor

London Centre for Leadership in Learning
Institute of Education
University of
London Presented to
Time for Leaders
Introductory Conference for Working Groups of
the Project
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• School leadership the main challenges
  in 22 countries participating in the
  OECDs Improving School Leadership activity
• Role expansion and intensification
• Insufficient preparation
  and training
• Concerns about recruitment
  of future leaders
• Unequal gender distribution
• Unattractive working conditions
• OECD (2008)

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Improving School Leadership (OECD, 2008)

• Approaches to leadership training and development
  

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Improving School Leadership

• Policy lever No. 1 Re-defining school leadership
  roles and responsibilities
• Ensuring leadership responsibilities are well
  defined and focused on core practices of
  leadership for learning
• Developing leadership frameworks
• Providing higher degrees of autonomy with
  appropriate training and support
• OECD (2008)

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Relationship above OECD average impact
Relationship not different from OECD average
impact
Relationship below OECD average impact
PISA 2006 Performance in science at age 15
and impact of
socio-economic background
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• Four groups of interrelated leadership
  responsibilities consistently associated
  with improved student outcomes
• Leadership focused on supporting, evaluating and
  developing teacher quality
• Setting learning objectives and
  implementing intelligent assessment
  systems
• Using resources strategically and
  aligning them with pedagogical
  purposes
• School leadership beyond the school borders
  (supporting other schools,
  networking)
• Leithwood et al (2006), Marzano et al (2005)
  Pont and Hopkins (2008)

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Effects of school leadership on student outcomes
Effect size estimate
Leadership dimension
Establishing goals and expectations
Ensuring an orderly and supportive environment
Planning, coordinating and evaluating teaching
and curriculum
Promoting and participating in teacher learning
and development
Strategic resourcing
Robinson (2008)
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Improving School Leadership

• Policy lever No. 2
• Distributing school leadership responsibilities
• Authority to lead not residing only in one person
  can be distributed among people occupying
  various roles within (and beyond the school)
• Extending leadership training needs to leadership
  teams and middle leaders
• Recognising and rewarding
  distributed leadership
• Supporting school boards
  in their tasks

OECD (2008)
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Improving School Leadership

• Policy lever No. 3
• Developing knowledge and skills
  for effective school leadership
• Providing ongoing and career-staged training
  (preparation, induction, in-service)
• Ensuring coherence and quality of provisions by
  different institutions
• Training based on needs analysis
• Connecting training and experience
  combining learning, coaching and
  practice

OECD (2008)
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Improving School Leadership

• Policy lever No.4
• Making school leadership
  a more attractive
  profession
• Planning for leadership succession
• Professionalising recruitment
• Providing adequate remuneration salaries
  should recognise level of
  responsibility
• Providing opportunities for flexible career
  development

OECD (2008)
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Seven interlinked issues
and implications for
capacity building

• Varied contexts and capacity differentiated
  capacity building
• Broader aims of schools capacity building
  emphasising instructional improvement and
  learning
• Rapidly changing world capacity building
  addressing present and future
• Ensuring sustainability capacity building as
  habit of mind
• One person cant lead school improvement
  develop leadership capacity
• Networked society lateral capacity building
• Improvement takes more than individual schools
  systemic capacity building
  
• Stoll (2009)

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A professional learning
community is . . . an inclusive group of
people, motivated by a shared learning vision,
who support and work with each other, finding
ways, inside and outside their immediate
community, to enquire on their practice and
together learn new and better approaches that
will enhance all pupils learning. Stoll et
al (2006)
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• Deeper forms of learning networks between schools
• Clarity of purpose through shared focus
• Collaborative enquiry that stimulates
  challenging, evidence-informed learning
• Trusting relationships that build social capital
  for learning
• Leadership for learning through formal and
  informal roles, including skilled facilitation of
  networking links
• Evidence seeking about intermediate and end
  processes and outcomes linked to theories of
  action
• Attention to the connection between the network
  and the individual professional learning
  community of each participating school
• Stoll, Halbert and Kaser (2010, in press)

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Systemic capacity building
Austrian Leadership Academy (LEA)


traditional system
ministry
inspectors
dynamic system
heads
hierarchical system
Schratz and Schley (2007)
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• Austrian Leadership Academy
• Working in and on the system
• School development and improved schooling
  outcomes
• Starting with personal change
• Generations (cohorts of 250-300)
• Forums - learning experiences based
  on learning
  principles
• Learning partnerships and collegial
  team coaching
• Regional network meetings
• Rigorous assessment, certification
  membership

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Creative leadership

• . . . collaborative, imaginative and
  thought through responses to
  opportunities and to challenging issues that
  inhibit learning at all levels. Its about
  seeing, thinking and doing things differently in
  order to improve the life chances of all
  students.
• Creative leadership is both
• being creative leaders yourselves
• providing the conditions and opportunities
  for others to be creative
  
  Stoll and Temperley (2009)

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. . .if creativity does not infiltrate the DNA of
an organization, it is unlikely to be passed on
to the next generation Gardner (2006)
. . . Developing and exploiting creative
capacities calls for a systemic strategy to
create a culture of innovation across the whole
organisation . . . Robinson (2001)
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Conditions for promoting and nurturing the
creativity of your colleagues

• model creativity and risk taking
• stimulate urgency if necessary create a
  crisis!
• expose colleagues to new thinking and experiences
• self consciously relinquish control
• provide time and space and facilitate the
  practicalities
• promote individual and collaborative thinking
  design
• set high expectations about the degree
  of creativity
• use failure as a learning opportunity
• keep referring back to core values
  Stoll
  and Temperley (2009)

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  . . . . where people continually expand their
capacity to create the results they truly desire,
where new and expansive patterns of thinking are
nurtured, where collective aspiration is set
free, and where people are continually learning
how to learn together. Senge
(1990)