Extract from "20 Strategies for Collaborative School Leaders"

An excerpt from 20 Strategies for Collaborative School Leaders by Jane Clark Lindle

What is Collaborative Leadership?
According to common interpretation, a collaboration within the school community is a peaceful and placid state of agreement among all parties. However, authentic collaboration requires recognition and exposure of the conflicts inherent in any school environment. All of the parties must negotiate to reach agreement and collaboration. Collaboration implies cooperation, but among the multiparty interests in schooling, collaboration can also trigger contests between each cooperatively formed alliance.

Two common sources of disagreement arise in every school community. They include (1) the abundance of issues about human nature in schools and (2) the shortage of school resources. Very often, the shortage of resources appears obvious to all. Sometimes school leaders, students, parents, guardians, and community members have difficulty identifying issues associated with human nature, human growth, and development. Sometimes the parties do not want to admit the degree of the problems associated with the human issues they face. Students’ needs and aspirations challenge every school, but communities, parents, or guardians also have needs that challenge schools. In addition, teachers and other school staff present their own sets of human needs and wants. From students to community to school personnel, many people cannot express, or do not want to reveal, the depth of their needs. Nevertheless, collaboration is not possible unless the parties uncover their problems. To achieve collaboration, the parties must bring the problems to the surface. Collaborative school leaders understand that every school faces both the problems of every aspect of the human condition as well the problems of unending shortages. Therefore, rather than placid peacemakers, collaborative leaders are instigators of both conflict and cooperation.

Collaborative leaders are proactive problem seekers. They are data monitors and good listeners. Collaborative leaders remain sensitive to the various indicators of school and students’ needs. They study school and community data trends in order to shore up necessary school community alliances and ensure adequate resources to address students’ requirements.

Collaborative leaders recognize the necessity of building coalitions both within the school and among segments of the school community. They listen for signs of discord among any of the school’s constituents.

Although collaborative leaders pay attention to informal signals and systematic trends in the school and the community, they also remain sensitive to their impact on others. They remain self-aware so that they can address the consequences of their position of power. Based on their self-awareness, they find ways to make themselves more accessible to all members of the school community. They open themselves to students, parents, and teachers, as well as to members of the larger public and the media. Collaborative leaders refrain from unilateral action, but they also prepare themselves intellectually and creatively for various options in addressing the emerging and perennial issues of schooling.

Collaborative leadership is not a new concept. The current conditions of schools and their politicized environments demand a more collaborative stance from school leaders. School leaders need to renew their attention to the strategies necessary for collaboration. This book provides a chief set of 20 strategies for school leaders to apply in their practice of collaborative leadership.

Sources of the 20 Strategies
Based on the author’s various experiences over 30 years in education, this book offers a set of strategies for school leaders. The author generated these strategies from practical experiences as a special education teacher and school principal across four states and five schools. In addition, through her research and service concerning educational leadership as a professor, the author has observed classrooms and principals in over 120 schools. The schools included elementary, middle schools, high schools, vocational centers, and alternative programs in public and nonpublic education systems. Even though some of these schools functioned more smoothly than others did, and some produced more evidence of benefits to their students and communities than others did, none of the schools was free of conflict or competition among school stakeholders. Nevertheless, even the worst of these schools also harbored collaborations and productive partnerships among its stakeholders. Yet problems arose from a failure to use those partnerships to benefit students.

Strategy 1. Collaborative School Leaders Know What They Stand For
Collaborative school leaders remain clear about the primary goal of their work. They sustain that clarity by consistently focusing on the people for whom they work—the students. They have a laser-straight and laser-intense sense of purpose in providing a good education to every student.
Schools roil with competing interests and contradictory aims. Collaboration requires clear statements about all of the opportunities and choices represented by the school stakeholders in their competition to achieve their particular goals. School leaders achieve clarity by stating their principles openly and confidently.

Collaborative school leaders operate from the premise that every act associated with schooling must lead to better opportunities and accomplishments for each student. That premise means that every conversation, each moment, and every activity leads to benefits for every pupil. The school leader asks one consistent, principled, and clarifying question of everyone involved in schools: How does this benefit students? The question can be formed in various ways, but it applies to any situation:
- How does this curricular program benefit students?
- How does this extra- or co-curricular activity benefit students?
- How does this discussion benefit students?
- How does this purchase benefit students?
- How does this school dance benefit students?
- How does this parent’s complaint expose something that benefits or harms students?

Because school environments are chaotic and filled with distractions, collaborative school leaders can relieve that profuse confusion by keeping the central focus on students. Many accounts and research studies note the logistical pressures of too many students and too little time to serve their needs adequately. Daily life in schools reels from time compression and scarce resources. As a result, most messages, memos, conversations, and meetings float on the minutia of how to get things done. By attending to the trivial steps of getting things done, school personnel lose their perspective on the purposes of schooling. When school leaders reshape all conversations to the singular question, “How does this benefit students?” the school’s primary purpose re-emerges. Collaborative principals reshape the conflicts about schools by placing students at the center of attention.

Schools have served multiple agendas, but their core purpose is student achievement. Collaborative school leaders realize the core of their work is students’ learning: teaching school. Repeated reports state that many teachers obtain certification for the principalship for reasons other than serving students.1 Collaborative principals hold their work with students as a sacred trust. They believe that providing every student a good education drives their work with students, parents, guardians, teachers, staff, and the community.

People in positions of power, principals included, suffer a variety of projections about their motives for attaining such a position. People may assume that the principal’s ambitions included a desire to give orders, get a large paycheck, or fulfill a hunger for power over students, teachers, parents, and other community members. Collaborative leaders blunt the speculations by openly discussing their reasons for taking on a leadership role. They explain their motives and ambitions. They recognize that unanswered speculations engender damaging suppositions and distracting gossip. To thwart gossip, collaborative leaders provide straightforward answers about themselves and their ambitions.

When school leaders expose their motives openly, they inspire others to reveal their positions. School leaders who refrain from revealing their positions may believe that they have left room for other people to share their dreams, but usually a reticent school leader impedes opportunities for others. People open up their agenda when a school leader is open. When a school leader models an appropriate manner to express an educational goal, the reaction from others can be one of two responses: (1) an equally clear and open contradiction to the leader’s position or (2) an agreement with the leader’s stated agenda. Either response is more desirable than the confusing dance of political machinations generated from each stakeholder’s guarded probes about meaning and purposes.

The following example demonstrates the debilitating effects of a leader’s lack of candor. It represents a familiar sampling of the kinds of interactions that drive people to headaches and avoidance of meetings.

Example of a Political Dance
A school faculty meeting started at its regularly scheduled time on Tuesday afternoon after the dismissal of students. The principal and twenty-three teachers assembled in the school library. Canned soft drinks and a plate of cookies sat on a table next to a sign-in sheet. The school librarian trolled the tables making sure that everyone was using a paper napkin for a coaster on the wooden tables. The following exchange occurred in the initial 20 minutes of the faculty meeting.

Principal: The district office says we need to write a mission statement for our school.
Teacher 1: What’s wrong with the one we have?
Principal: It’s too long.
Teacher 2: We have a mission statement?
Principal: We wrote it about two years before you came.
Teacher 1: That took forever. I don’t want to go through that again.
Teacher 3: I thought the discussions were very eye opening.
Teacher 4: I was here two years ago and I don’t remember anything about this.
Teacher 5: Think it through. That was two years before she came, not two years ago.
Teacher 4: Oh, well, I’ve been here longer, and I don’t remember anything about a mission statement.
Principal: Well, we need to write something now. Does anyone want to start? What do we believe about the mission of our school?
Teacher 5: Give me your tired, your cranky, your disrespectful, and your wanna-be rock stars and jocks yearning for discovery.
Most of the faculty laughs. The principal’s head nods as his face forms a bemused expression.
Teacher 2: I wish I knew what the current mission statement says.
Teacher 6: It’s on the school calendar. I was on the committee that said it should be there.
Teacher 2: Does anyone have a school calendar? Principal: We can get one for everyone.
Teacher 1: Well, when? I don’t think we should start writing anything new until we’ve all had a chance to look at the old mission statement and start from there.
Other teachers nod their heads or call out “yes.”
Principal: You know, like everything else, this is due yesterday. We need to start now.
Teacher 5: What do you think we’re supposed to say if our old one is too long?
Principal: What I think isn’t that important. This is supposed to represent what the school community thinks.
Teacher 1: I think we need to look over the original mission statement before we open this can of worms.
Teacher 4: Sounds like we should have some parents write this too.
Teacher 3: Yeah, and students should have some say in it.
Principal: Could we start with some criteria that we believe so that we can figure out if the old mission statement fits and for these other groups to have something to use to evaluate it?
Teacher 2: Can you give me an example of what you mean by criteria?
Principal: If I give you an example, then I’m afraid that it might color your answers. Just finish this sentence, ‘We believe . . .’
Teacher 5 [singing]: We believe with every drop of paint that falls, asbestos grows . . .
Several teachers laugh. Then the room settles to an awkward silence. The principal sighs audibly with tightened lips.
Teacher 1: Maybe you could send the original mission statement to everyone, and then underneath it we all could write two or three endings to the ‘We believe . . .’ beginning.
Many teachers nod, and a few “yeses” are voiced.
Principal: Well, ok, but I think we’ll need an extra faculty meeting or two to meet the district’s deadline with that kind of circulation.
The room erupts in groans.
Teacher 5: Does the district have something we could read so we know what they want?
Principal: Not really. It’s just something that came up at the principals’ meeting.

The above example illustrates the kind of paralysis that poor leaders generate when they are coy about their motives. The implicit message in this vignette is that the principal just needs to fulfill a task set by the district. The content and veracity of the school’s mission statement seems an ancillary point. More than the principal, the teachers keep trying to deal with the content of the mission statement. Yet the teachers also participate in delaying any direct evaluation of the current mission statement or initiation of a new mission statement. Within these 20 minutes of posturing and stalling, what would be the answer to the seminal question: How does this meeting benefit students?

After almost 20 minutes, the meeting has stalled, the cookies have been eaten, the canned drinks have been consumed, and despite the feeding frenzy, everyone is frustrated. Given this scene, the likely outcome is that the principal will not fulfill the district’s directive however wise or ill advised that edict might be. Indeed, the principal suggests a hidden motive by not being forthcoming about what the district’s purpose might be, and the teachers must question the principal repeatedly in order to gain any information about the expectations for the task. Teachers also resist proceeding. The result is an ugly waste of time, which is a scarce resource for schools—one that schools cannot afford to abuse.

A collaborative school leader could have elicited more from the faculty with two simple steps. Both steps encompass the strategy of clarifying what the leader stands for. First, the collaborative leader could have prepared for the meeting. The preparation could have included giving each teacher a copy of the current school mission statement and any other relevant materials from the district’s meeting with the principals. Second, the collaborative leader could have prepared an opening statement that covered the following:
1. When and why the district wanted new or revised school mission statements
2. A brief synopsis of when, how, and why the school’s previous mission statement had been constructed
3. A short list of school issues and conditions that are similar or different from those stated in the original mission statement
4. A set of choices among steps that the faculty could follow in revising the old or developing a new mission statement signaled when the collaborative leader was expressing an opinion or belief of his/her own as opposed to relaying a district command or policy.

Although human nature is such that even with such preparation, faculty members might ask clarifying questions, the chances are greater that this preparation would stimulate a substantive discussion. The faculty’s work could have proceeded about the advantages and disadvantages of the school’s current mission statement. In any case, a leader’s revelation of his or her stance regarding the mission statement assignment potentially would lead the group closer to fulfilling the task than the above dance produced.

Even though many people resist orders, they are less frustrated at complying with demands that are clear, concise, and openly acknowledge the conditions of the requirement than when the directions appear covert and uncertain. Moreover, in an open exchange, people are more likely to be frank about their beliefs. Groups that are engaged in probing the leader’s beliefs waste precious school time. A leader’s failure to speak plainly leads to others’ guardedness. Collaborative leaders need to know what others believe and think in order to make opportunities better for students. They start by modeling the kind of openness about personal visions, goals, and ambitions that they need from others.

From 20 Strategies for Collaborative School Leaders by Jane Clark Lindle, 2005, 128 pp, paperback, $29.95

Published by Eye On Education (914) 833-0551