Autumn 2005

Leadership

Don't believe everything you read

Want to know what being a school principal is really like? DAVID MCRAE contends that the real world can be at odds with the literature and theory.

FULLAN, Hargreaves (both A & D), Senge, Drucker, Hill, Sergiovanni, Beare, Spinks, Leithwood, Caldwell, Hopkins, Tucker, Gaebler, Stoll, Jantzi, Crump, Elmore, Bentley, Ramsey, Miles, Shanker, Hughes, Brierley, Schlechty, Peters (&) Waterman, Steunbacj, Murphy, Croker, Scott, Clinton (HR), even Clinton (WJ) … there now— that’s the surface scratched.

I understand the words, but after five years of working very closely with principals the words sometimes seem to be describing life on Mars. I want to make several observations which incline us to marvel at and celebrate principals’ work as it is rather than as some authors think it ought to be.

There are 500 teaching principals in Queensland alone. Of 9595 school principals in Australia (give or take), one in five works in a school with an enrolment of less than 100. There are also 23 primary schools and 304 secondary schools with enrolments over 1000. The job is not the same.

All schools are community schools, where ‘community’ is defined as being the cohort of students and their families served, with all the cultural norms, expectations and other baggage that entails. Recently, five hours after leaving a group of government school leaders from the Moree area I was speaking to another group of heads of junior independent schools in Toorak. The job is not the same.

Attempts to drop a template over the tasks and experiences of school leaders across the country must fail, but I now want to offer some possible regularities.

The nature of the job

Over the last five years I have conducted six studies, three on a large scale, of school leaders and their work. From these largely self-reported data, principals work long hours—on average 50-plus hours a week for primary principals and 55 for secondary principals. There is an understandable positive correlation between size of school and hours worked.

There is near unanimous agreement about how principals think they should be spending their time. They should be educational leaders spending far more time on curriculum planning, development and review, and working with staff to this end. There is also quite strong agreement about the proportion of time spent on administrative work (20–25% among primaries, 25–30% among secondaries). There’s my role statement, but this is what I actually do. I run a school—whatever it takes. This is a widespread and, I think, deeply felt paradox.

Immersion and isolation

Most of the hundreds of principals I have met and worked with in the last few years have been first-rate hosts. Very long conversations begin simply: ‘How are things going?’ These are some of the best times for guest and host. The guest is one of the few people genuinely interested in the preoccupations of the host. Who can principals really talk to? Where’s the opportunity just to let it all hang out, to express that near complete absorption in their place, their project, that thing for which they have accepted so much responsibility? You can hit a few golf balls round with a mate, or have a coffee with some friends but it is not quite the same thing. You need someone to tell what’s going on.

This point is endlessly reinforced in studies of principals’ preferred learning modes. In Scott’s study, for example, every one of the top eight (of 24) responses to the ‘most relevant form of training and development or support’ entailed peer interaction or personal experiential learning. Second lowest was learning through ICTs, and lowest was having to develop a school vision. Run your eyes back over the names at the beginning of this piece. How many are on the value of vision statements?

Being a principal is absorbing and it’s lonely. Perhaps as a consequence, principals can be very different people out of their own location. Sometimes, all that deftness, that authoritative air, that deep engagement in the enterprise just drains away and, despite their strength of numbers and their pivotal position in the community, they get rolled.

Filtration: ready, fire, aim

All principals have been teachers at one time or another, and have thus had practice in the ‘domestication’ of external initiatives. This delightful term appears in the meta-analysis ‘Teachers’ Thought Processes’ (Wittrock, 1986), which summarises the results of a series of studies where teachers were required to implement new curricular content/processes. In short, the initiatives were unfailingly modified to conform with the research subjects’ understanding of what good teaching was.

One of the most abiding impressions from spending about half my working life with principals during the last year is the extraordinary set of internal and external demands that they accommodate through a process of filtration. I assert with some confidence that it would be impossible for any government school in Australia to accommodate every formal requirement from systemic sources. So you choose; you prioritise. Sometimes you fake and paper over, sometimes you insist, sometimes you pass it on. Sometimes it goes into the plan and, sometimes, the bin.

One consequence of this is the enormous difficulty of finding a niche for something new, of persuading a principal that what you have got for them is something not just splendid but utterly essential. They know what the go is; they know how far they can stretch their teachers; and they know that the rubber band is already not far off snapping.

Fractured time and the explosion: more research

The average time a principal of a school with more than 200 students spends on any issue is less than two minutes. I have sat in principals’ offices and watched this lived out in real time. Head pops round the door: ‘Lee/Jane/Tom. Just wanted to let you know Mrs Blah Blah is coming in this afternoon.’, ‘Maria has gone home ill. I’ve put Harry in with 8D.’

One principal said, ‘When things are going well ... a monkey could sit at my desk and do my job ... When thunderbolts fall from the sky that’s when all the skills and knowledge are used.’ The thing about thunderbolts is not their regularity, but their unpredictability. The trigger might be a decision to do something about the poor/ unacceptable performance of a staff member. The clouds roll in from every direction and the lightning rod is the monkey behind the desk.

Principals aren’t overseeing the manufacture of fire hydrant housings; they are leading the effective functioning of small (and not so small), purposeful communities. And people are always the hardest part.

The lighthouse keepers

At any given time I usually know quite a few lighthouse schools— everyone else does too. They’re going like trains and will for three or four years. The principal is a highly energetic figure with an idea, distinguishable from fundamentalist religion but with some things in common. There is always a committed, capable and very well-aligned group of middle management. There is a great deal of meeting and productive talk.

Everyone deserves to feel what an institution can be like when it really takes off, to know the adrenal rush and the immense flood of professional engagement once in a lifetime. But to expect—nay, demand it—consistently as a conventional behavioural benchmark is rhubarb.

Going back to where we started, I can understand the value of the creation of a simplified model to deal with complex situations, and the encouragement of rational behaviour based on that simple model. That’s one way in which we can get purchase on the fluidity and unpredictability of the social environment. I can understand the value of publicising and lionising leaders who have had success. I vigorously support loud barracking for people who work in schools. I approve entirely of consistent improvement efforts. What I can’t stand is the suggestion that because X is doing Y at Z, or because Professor C says you should, everyone else’s efforts are devalued. Perhaps the principals’ associations might show a bit of leadership and take that up. Good schools have good leaders, and there’s a great many good schools in Australia.

References

Clark, C & Peterson, P (1986). ‘Teachers’ Thought Processes’ in Wittrock, M (ed) Handbook of Research on Teaching, Third Edition, American Educational Research Association, Macmillan, NY.

Scott, G (2003). ‘Learning principals: Leadership capability and learning research in the NSW DET’ available at www.curriculumsupport.nsw. edu.au/leadership/

David McRae is one of Australia’s most experienced education consultants. He spent much of 2004 working with principals in northern NSW and south-east Queensland on issues related to Indigenous education.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au