Redefine Leadership

No one needs to tell you that transforming a school is very difficult work.

Most school systems understand that teaching and learning needs to shift from the factory model to the global knowledge and innovation model. But few school systems have achieved this.

It requires leadership.  A lot of it. Delegate leadership responsibility to faculty and staff, students and parents. Here are some ideas how to do it.

A School is a Complex System

Every school is different, but one common trait runs through all schools: it’s really a complex system of instruction, operations, student needs, and relationships. All these components must work together to ensure student success. School leader(s) cannot do this alone.

The leadership team should draw a conceptual map of the opportunities and roadblocks to student success. These may be things like academic interventions, funding, stopping violence and bullying, for example. Identify the areas that need greater attention, and create a distributed leadership plan and empower that person or a committee to address the issues. Give parameters, but also give the leaders freedom to think, plan, and pilot their ideas. Agree to check in at major milestones.

Think about

• How to empower staff to improve teaching and learning foremost (everything else can be left to others)
• How best to use parent associations
• The powerful roles students can take on to establish a school culture they want to be a part of

Empowering others can be a very challenging task for school leaders, but it can also have powerful outcomes.