Keywords

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Introduction

This is not a chapter about the principalship. Rather, we place an emphasis on how the cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political conditions for transformed practices in schools can be created by reshaping the arrangements in which educators practise. Specifically, we focus on leading as practices, rather than as series of traits or capabilities invested in sovereign individuals. Our focus on practices is not to eschew the important work that is undertaken by principals and other formal leaders in the transformation of educational practice and their indirect but critical role in influencing student learning outcomes through their impact on teaching practices (Robinson 2007). Instead, by using the verbs ‘leading’ and ‘learning’, we are drawing attention to the ‘situated knowledge and situated action’ (Gherardi 2008, p. 516) which resides in the work of leading and learning. We want to challenge the common sense of ‘leading’ which so often means that leading and leadership are unproblematically equated in the research literature with ‘doing’ the principalship. The two are not the same.

Hence, ‘leading’ is not a set of practices that is solely invested in the principalship. Yet, simultaneously we recognise that one of the critical roles of principals and executive teams is to create the educational conditions under which transformed learning and teaching practices may flourish (Lingard et al. 2003). This is not a new insight. Indeed much time and attention has been paid in the research literature to how these transformed conditions can be created. We suggest, however, that too often the search for the processes by which the material conditions for learning in schools can be fostered and sustained has been rather like the story of the man who loses his keys in the dark of night and looks for them under the lamppost. We have looked for too long in the direction of the leader (and often, just at the principal) to understand leadership; we need to look instead at the practices of leading and the practices that connect with them. In this chapter, our interest lies in the practice architectures which make possible the formal and informal practices of leading (and their links to researching, professional learning, teaching and students’ learning), that is, exploring “how … [these] … practices themselves relate to one another, rather than participantsin the practice” (Kemmis et al. 2009, p. 7). In this search, we need to explore both formal and informal leading practices and how small but highly significant changes in the relations of power embedded in the practices and practice architectures we observed in our case study sites have enabled a richer sense of shared responsibility (rather than authoritarian or bureaucratic responsibility ) for leading and learning to be facilitated amongst executive teams, teachers, students and communities.

In this chapter, we examine how a range of practices connecting leading, professional learning, teaching, researching and student learning work together to create the conditions for transforming schools to become sites of shared responsibility for education rather than sites of bureaucratic responsibility . Practices of leading for shared responsibility foster an intellectual climate characterised by cultural-discursive arrangements which nurture teacher and student agency and substantive dialogue based on critical reflections of educational practice. They engender material-economic arrangements that support transformed teaching and learning practices. They facilitate and build social-political arrangements that sustainable and democratic communities of educators, including teachers as pedagogical leaders (Lingard et al. 2003), students as leading learners, and positional leaders such as those in designated formal positions of authority, like principals and deputy principals. To stimulate such changes requires not only the enlightened practices of positional leaders but a thickening of leading practices throughout the school. Yet no school is an island. The building of these communities also requires practices of leading from beyond the school setting—‘up’ to the level of the school district and ‘out’ to other key stakeholders in the school and its community. Finally, it also requires a fundamental shift towards viewing leading practices as situated in an overall project of education development (a social and critical view) rather than school improvement (a technical and managerialist view).

In this chapter, we make a necessary distinction between on the one hand, positional leading practices , that is, the leading practices of officers like principals and deputy principals who hold formal positions of authority and grounded in system arrangements; and on the other hand, informal leading practices , exemplified in, for instance, the pedagogical leadership of teachers and the collective leadership of senior students. The distinction between formal and informal leading practices is frequently not clear-cut in practice (Wilkinson et al. 2010). Nor indeed do we suggest a simplistic binary between the systemic and the day-to-day imperatives of formal and informal leading practices. Indeed, schools that have foregrounded students’ education as a project of educational development (as opposed to the project of ‘schooling ’) have been characterised by a blurring of distinctions between the formal leading practices of positional leaders and other stakeholders such as teachers and students. Of course, this makes studying and making claims about leading as a practice a slippery and seemingly elusive task. Nonetheless, this highlights the necessary dialectical relationship between the differing imperatives of the formal positional leaders, and informal leaders in a school. The distinction recognises and calls attention to the necessarily different cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements of practice and system demands in which positional leaders such as principals are located and to which they are subjected (cf. Lingard and Rawolle 2010) compared to other people in schools, such as teachers and students. Also, this means that the practices of formal leaders (such as principals and executive teams) in their particular sites are integral, but not sufficient on their own, to bring about change in schools through shifts in the sites’ practice architectures.

At the level of positional leading practices, in each of the case studies, the executive team shared a clear telos or aim in terms of the overall project of the school—that is, an emphasis on student learning and education development as the central foci of leading and teaching practices—and at principal level, had the positional authority and resources to carry out these aims. The leading practices they instituted had significant impacts on the practice architectures in which teachers, students and executive staff carried out their work, particularly in terms of dispersal of leading practices throughout the school. This dispersal was facilitated by a range of practices carried out by the principal and executive team of the various schools, including changes in material-economic set-ups through strategic resource management, such as the selection of promising teacher leaders to attend professional development programs identified as important to each schools’ work. They included the hiring of staff who shared each site’s overall philosophy, and the choice of executive team members who shared the principal’s fundamental commitment to humanistic values underpinning student learning, and who brought a range of complementary strengths to the team. In two of the sites, there was a deliberate attempt to reshape the relational architectures amongst teachers (Edwards-Groves et al. 2010), through the creation of teaching teams at each stage level, via shared timetabling for teacher release. The clear expectation from the principal and executive team was that staff use this time to collaborate on planning of units of work, sharing assessment items and evaluate work units. In terms of cultural-discursive arrangements, members of the executive team in the schools provided research literature at staff meetings as a means of facilitating substantive critical conversations and intellectual engagement about teaching practices.

However, it would be a mistake to read these practices as purely ‘top-down’ initiatives by principals, the intent of which was to disperse leading as part of a more instrumentalist approach to creating conditions for improved learning and teaching . Indeed, the notion of ‘dispersal’ implies a set of hierarchical power relations of leaders and followers embedded in the social-political arrangements supporting such a practice. Rather, in each site the move towards dispersal of leading practices by the principal and executive team was underpinned by their commitment to more democratic relations of power. This commitment was in turn reflected in the broader sense of shared responsibility engendered amongst student and teachers for learning and leading which pervaded the sites. This was in some degree due to necessity (that is, each of the schools was small in terms of student numbers and staff—under 250 students). However, this was not the overriding reason for there were other small schools in the two districts that had more traditional hierarchical arrangements. Rather, the dispersal of power, agency and responsibility reflected a set of practices invested in by the positional leaders in the particular schools we studied, which in turn reflected an ecological connection between each of the executive teams and staff, both groups of whom were committed to more democratic ways of working together. A manifestation of this ethos was that in each of the schools, there was to a greater or lesser degree, less of an individualising focus on the principal as the ultimate authority figure, and more of a sense in which the principal was ‘first amongst equals’ (Wilkinson et al. 2010, p. 77). Moreover, each of the sites contained a number of teachers who held no formal positional authority but whose pedagogical leading and curriculum leading practices were enabled by the positional leadership practices noted above in ways that named and located these other teachers unequivocally as “generative” leaders in the school (Edwards-Groves and Rönnerman 2011).

In the following sections, we explore how practices of leading are held in place in the schools we studied—in intersubjective space , that is, in semantic space s that were opened up in the schools, amid the cultural-discursive arrangements to be found there; in spaces in physical space-time opened up in the schools, amid the material-economic arrangements to be found there; and in social space s opened up in the schools, amid the social-political arrangements to be found there. To change or remodel these arrangements—changing the practice architectures in a site—is to remould the intersubjective space in which participants encounter one another.

We have chosen to focus on particular kinds and cases of leading practices in these schools, however, to show how a new conceptualisation of leadership and leading is taking hold: a view of leading as a shared responsibility rather than a hierarchical (or authoritarian or bureaucratic) view of leadership. Thus, we explore site based practices of leading that foster a sense of shared responsibility through the transformation of staff meetings into collective spaces for professional learning and practice. We examine the ecological connections between the generation of more collective practices of leading and how these link to parallel shifts in the practice architectures which enable students’ understanding of leading as a shared, communitarian enterprise. Finally, we examine leading beyond schools—how practices of leading in the school districts we studied fostered transformation in schools and in part, in the districts.

Practices Architectures of Leading

Staff Meetings as an Intersubjective Space for Enabling Practice Development

The executive leadership team at Hillview School is passionate about enhanced and rich forms of teacher and student learning . Philosophically and practically, the executive is committed to the overall district project of building highly effective learning communities based on Wattletree District’s policy promulgated in its Communities of Practice Principles . Hillview School has a view of establishing learning communities that is different from other schools in the District, and one of its distinctive emphases lies in its long-standing adoption of an inquiry approach to student and teacher learning. Like many more successful schools, Hillview is peculiarly responsive to the shifting nature of the specific site ontology of the community in which it is located (namely, an increasingly diverse mix of students from middle and lower socio-economic backgrounds, along with a small group of children from culturally and linguistically diverse origins). The school has developed an ‘antenna’ of responsiveness to these ontologies, which is both responsive to and nurtured by the idiosyncrasy of the specific context in which it works. However, it is not simply reactive to local circumstances and outside influences; it is sensitively responsive. In this section, we explore some of the leading and learning practices and practice architectures that have facilitated the building and apparent sustainability of Hillview’s currently vibrant, living, responsive practice community.

One especially notable feature of the leading practices at Hillview was the way leaders and teachers had transformed and extended the practice architectures of leading in the school, to remould the intersubjective spaces in which teachers and members of the school executive team encountered one another. One example was the shift in the purpose and function of staff meetings from transmission of information about administrative matters to professional learning: the meetings were re-created as a collaborative and dialogic space focussed on professional learning for the school as a whole. Such meetings have been particularly critical for facilitating a shared responsibility for enhanced learning and teaching amongst all staff, including the executive team. Both executive team members and teachers regularly identified the remodelled staff meetings as significant in enhancing the overall professional learning of the staff, individually and collectively, and in nurturing the relationships between the staff as a whole, including the executive team, as co-participants in a community of practice.

What is of particular interest to us is how remoulding the intersubjective space of the staff meeting enabled different kinds of teaching and leading practices to flourish, whilst simultaneously challenging more traditional arrangements of leading practices in staff meetings . For example, in terms of the material-economic arrangements of the practice of staff meetings, the executive team made a decision that staff meetings would be held regularly throughout the term and that administrative matters (the traditional focus of staff meetings) would be dealt with via email and in a separate short, fifteen minute meeting at the start of each week. This decision freed up the space and time of staff meetings so each could focus on a specific aspect of professional learning , clearly related to relevant elements of teachers’ teaching and students’ learning practices, on which the staff as a whole had agreed. Importantly, this professional learning was not regarded as ‘one off’ or ad hoc professional learning (as professional development activities often are in schools and school districts), nor did it focus solely on an aspect of practice handed down to the schools by the school district or the state, for example. Instead, it was embedded in the Hillview School’s annual professional learning plan , negotiated and agreed via consultation between the executive team and staff at the end of each year, and then agreed to by a senior Wattletree School District staff member responsible for formal liaison with the School. Hillview Principal Bronwyn Harper notes:

(O)ur nitty-gritty staff meetings are 15 min on Monday or on bits of paper memos. Our staff meetings are all on professional development , so that we can depth in [our] understanding—for example, in relation to inquiry learning . I will go in and do some mind mapping… what do they know about it now, what are they feeling comfortable with, what are still the challenges, where do we need to go next…

The structuring of the meetings ensured that connections made in the staff meetings flowed into teachers’ conversations and classroom practices. Ronnie Kinross and Jeanette Maidment, two highly experienced upper stage teachers described the meetings as follows:

[T]hey’re very hands-on, the staff meetings , like it’s never chalk and talk. We always have to get into groups and actually do [things], and then… plan and report back. You do get a say, and it’s not just from the top-down, and it makes you very familiar with whatever it is you’re looking at. You’ll then go and put it in place and work with it, and take it into the classroom. As a staff we are challenged. We’re always talking about how to do something better, or “Look, I did this and it was really great, and it worked.” Lots of conversations people have, just over lunch and things, are like that, where people talk about things, just in conversation.

Staff members’ professional learning was also enabled by small but highly significant changes to the physical set-ups of the staff meetings . For example, Hillview adopted a policy of deliberately rotating meetings through various teachers’ classrooms. The aim of the executive staff was to facilitate the deprivatisation of classroom practice (one of the principles of Wattletree District’s Communities of Practice Principles policy). An added informal professional learning bonus occurred as teachers were exposed to the variety of material ‘set-ups’ in the diverse classrooms they encountered. As one member of the executive commented, in regard to the trust required for teachers to accede to this deprivatisation of practice , “that took a lot of years to develop and it was explicitly taught by doing different things like rotating staff meetings around different classrooms.”

In terms of the social-political arrangements of the staff meeting , that is, the relations of power between individuals and groups, Hillview ’s policy was that the teacher in whose classroom the meeting was held would take responsibility for chairing the meeting. The teacher’s leadership skills were thus facilitated, but even more importantly, a more democratic set of relatings was subtly but powerfully signified within the school, namely that authority was not solely invested in the formal leadership team. Moreover, by rotating the meetings between classrooms and Years, traditional hierarchies of power in primary school settings could be challenged and disrupted (for example, the binary division between feminised and seemingly less authoritative Kindergarten teachers and masculinised and seemingly more authoritative upper primary teachers). Remodelling the social-political arrangements of staff meetings remoulded the social space of staff meetings and relatings in the school more generally: leading came to be seen as a practice of power with others, rather than the more conventional Western-centric notion of power over others (Smeed et al. 2009).

Executive staff attended and participated fully in the meetings, in general facilitating them only when it was their turn to do so, when they were the host in the classroom where the meeting was held. Thus, through their practices, they demonstrated their commitment to shared professional learning and to learning as a shared responsibility for all staff, including the executive team. In primary schools, the active engagement of principals in staff professional learning has been demonstrated to be the most significant factor in enhancing and transforming teachers’ practices, and in turn students’ academic practices (Robinson 2007).

A further range of practices was embedded in these meetings by executive staff to ensure collaborative engagement by all teachers and the executive team. In terms of the cultural-discursive arrangements of practice, staff meetings at Hillview were characterised by particular kinds of sayings that focus on professional learning as a collective, shared responsibility amongst the staff. For example, a group of teachers across stage levels had worked with Kendra Clarke, a member of the executive and highly-regarded upper stage teacher, to analyse the school’s NAPLAN (National Assessment Program in Literacy and Numeracy) results (the NAPLAN Focus Group mentioned in previous chapters). It was agreed that the teaching of spelling throughout the school needed to be enhanced and the group identified the staff meeting as the primary forum for staff professional learning about how this could be achieved. Kendra facilitated a series of staff meetings examining the school’s practices for teaching and learning spelling. Particularly noteworthy was her language, which did not ‘name or shame’ teachers but signified a shared sense of responsibility for enhancing teachers’ (collective) work as professionals in the teaching of spelling. For instance, she commenced the first meeting asking, “What are we doing wrong? We need to work on this. Weare clearly teaching these skills in isolation” (our emphases). Staff were then asked to reflect individually on a series of questions about their teaching practices such as, “How do you teach spelling in your room?” Kendra took part in this activity along with the others present. Crucially, the questions and tasks modelled an inquiry approach to learning, which the school had adopted a number of years before, rather than a hierarchical approach in which, for example, facilitators might transmit a chosen method for teaching spelling to staff. In the meeting we observed, Kendra was discursively modelling the practices of inquiry learning which the school had been implementing, while at the same time signifying by her language an active building of the relationships between staff that are characteristic of a professional learning community.

Sayings at Hillview ’s staff meetings were characterised not only by the language and ideas initiated by members of the executive team or other staff, but also informed by ideas sourced from professional readings. One of the critical features of staff meetings at Hillview was Principal Bronwyn Harper’s insistence that professional reading be a key component of each meeting, in order to stimulate teachers’ learning. To be selected for discussion at a staff professional learning meeting, an article or document had to be accessible, relevant and short enough to be digestible in one reading. All of the participants in the meetings were expected to read, share responses, and discuss the findings of the chosen piece. The readings were not only chosen and sourced by executive staff; as a result of their being constantly exposed to different types of professional reading, teachers frequently brought along their own chosen readings to share with executive staff and teachers. Continuing professional reading thus became a taken-for-granted collective practice at Hillview (unlike many other Australian schools). Focused talk and reading about pedagogical practice was subtly but powerfully conveyed as a kind of continuing intellectual engagement which was a necessary part of the professional lives of staff at the school, in an expectation that teachers would continue to explore whether and how theory and practice supported one another. As Deputy Principal Wendy Michaels commented:

We had a staff meeting last term, and we did Habits of Mind™ and all I had was three one-paragraph readings. All they did was sit and read in their groups, brainstormed and thought and jotted down ideas, and then shared [responses] with the whole group. I found it fascinating because the connection that, “Oh, we can use the Habits of Mind™ language in general comments in our reports” wasn’t a natural connection. But it was just a very simple, one paragraph thing that all of a sudden they went, “Oh, yeah, I can see how this fits into that, that makes so much sense… let’s run with that.”

In this particular case, the semantic space of report-writing at Hillview was slightly remoulded as participants in the meeting came to realise that they could use the language of Habits of Mind™ (cultural-discursive resources) in their reports to parents and care-givers, not just in their teaching.

In terms of activities and work, we deliberately have focused on the micro-practices of staff meetings in order to explicate how such meetings were crucial sites for transforming leading practices in ways that facilitated teachers’ and leaders’ professional learning and enabled the building of more authentic professional learning communities . Theoretically, we have focussed deliberately on staff meetings as sites of practice in order to foreground the phenomenological reality that staff meetings are critical locations existentially and ontologically. They were specific sites in which transformations of practices—professional learning, teaching and leading—were engendered. The transformations that occurred in these practices were directly related to the specific conditions created in the meetings—conditions including where they took place (rotating from one teacher’s classroom to another’s), what they focussed on (topics discussed in readings chosen by different staff, always relevant to teaching and learning in the school), and the routine activities of the meetings (individuals pre-reading for the meeting, discussing the readings in small groups, sharing responses with the whole group, and drawing inferences for practice at Hillview). An example of how such transformations may be engendered through shifts in the practice architectures in a site such as Hillview is outlined in Fig. 7.1:

Fig. 7.1
figure 1

Practices of leading : An example

Full size image

Figure 7.1 highlights the inherent sociality of participants’ (such as Hillview ’s leaders and teachers) practices and the dialectical relationship between an individual’s practices and their immersion in the social world. For example, the outer right and left hand columns of the Figure reveal that the participants who enter practices of leading always do so through the intersubjective spaces and sets of cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements depicted in the middle column of the Figure. This intersubjective space and the arrangements that constitute it prefigure and shape the interactions between the leader and teacher. One of the valid criticisms of much of the literature reporting research into leading is that it tends to privilege either an individualistic approach to understanding leadership practice that foregrounds only the left hand column in theories such as trait, transformational or capabilities theories of leading , while ignoring the critical role of teachers’ leading practices; or a systems approach that privileges the middle column of the Figure (and especially the ‘social-political’ cell in this column) in theories such as distributed leadership. The theory of practice architectures of leading depicted in Fig. 7.1 focuses on both individual and systemic aspects of leading, not either individual or systemic aspects. The stereoscopic view afforded by the theory of practice architectures allows us to see both how individuals’ practices are shaped by social conditions (arrangements; practice architectures) and how individuals’ practices also shape social conditions by making and transforming the arrangements that support individuals’ practices. This is to recognise not only the agency of individuals, but also the agency of the human and non-human (for example, buildings, floors, walls, resources, money)—arrangements that enable and constrain practices. As stated in earlier chapters, here, too, we see that practices are interactionally secured; they are not just the ‘property’ of the people who participate in them. More powerfully still, the notion that practices are enabled and constrained in practice architectures that are distinctive for those practices highlights not only the systems that shape leading practices, but also the lifeworlds—the semantic spaces, locations in physical space-time and social spaces—in which we encounter one another as thinking and acting beings. It is amid such system and lifeworld arrangements that leading practices like those we observed in the staff meetings at Hillview are located and embodied.

Site Based Leading Practices

In the preceding section, we examined some of the micro-practices of Hillview School as a means of illustrating a broader point about the intrinsic intertwining of formal leading practices directed towards enhancing staff professional learning in ways that encompassed the practices of teachers and members of the school’s executive team. In that example, the executive team put in place a series of practices to foster and facilitate professional learning communities that were grounded in the particularities of the site . These practices have engendered the growth not only of a sense of shared responsibility among staff for their professional learning and its educational consequences, but also the nurturing of leading practices amongst both individuals and teams of teacher leaders, including beginning as well as more senior teachers—a “thickening of leadership ” across the site (Lingard et al. 2003). In short, the leading practices of positional leaders gave rise to leading practices amongst other staff members.

In terms of the social-political arrangements supporting leading at Hillview, this sense of the ‘we’ of the school and of the educational field more broadly (Lingard et al. 2003, p. 74) is characterised by relational trust . That is, the way positional leadership was practised at Hillview conveyed a sense of the Principal’s and the executive team’s openness to changes initiated by staff, which in turn, conveyed a belief in teachers’ professionalism, judgement and agency . Consequently, the ecological relationship between leading practices and transformations to teaching and professional learning practices in this school (and the other case study sites) can be more typically conveyed as a dialectical process occurring in learning communities, rather than the more individualistic and hierarchical notion of the relationship between leaders and followers. This is not to suggest that relations of ruling had disappeared, but rather to draw attention to a shift in the practice architectures of positional leadership from a notion of power over others, to power with . This characteristic ‘thickening of leadership ’ throughout the school was evident in a range of ways, including sharing responsibility for school-based curriculum decisions and positional leaders deferring to particular expertise spread across the staff and school community.

A feature of positional leading practices and their arrangements was that they were evolving in response to the developing nature and needs of the school community. This responsiveness (rather than reactiveness) was illustrated in the changing nature of the leadership group at Southwood School in Figtree District in Queensland. In 2007, the school had a new Principal who had instigated a reform of the leadership within the school. Brian, the Deputy Principal, recounted:

I guess a lot of schools will say they have shared leadership , but … Margaret, who was the Principal when I first started three years ago, she actually lived it every day. It is shared leadership where … she had faith in others and their professional ability to make decisions. … I think with her leaving at the end of last year, that shared leadership model has really come to the fore because there hasn’t been that person driving it.

In structural terms, Margaret created the initial Southwood leadership group of five that had limited representation from across the school staff. Its purpose was to ensure that decisions were made in consultation with staff and it included the principal, the support teacher, the pastoral care worker and the two community development workers. By 2011, this group had grown to about 12 people, and included the librarian, a group of classroom teachers and the school secretary. In terms of the material-economic arrangements , the meetings were held every fortnight, and anyone could add to the agenda. Brian also noted that “it is quite a broad range, and everyone who wants to come is allowed to come; it is not an invite only sort of thing”. Interestingly, Belinda, the new Principal who started at the beginning of 2011, reviewed the leadership group structure. Her concern was that in the process of trying to be representative, it had become a large and unwieldy group. As such, the material set-ups of the group were actually working against its original democratising intent by excluding some staff members. Hence, at the end of 2011, the motion to disband the leadership group meeting in favour of a whole staff meeting was proposed, and the leadership group ended its own existence.

This example highlights the willingness of Southwood School staff to deal flexibly with material structures in order to maintain their commitment to the democratising and collective intent that underpinned their leadership principles and values . It also stresses the ecological relationship that was a common feature across the case study sites, that is, leading for learning practices were not randomly dispersed, but were profoundly interconnected to other practices such as professional learning , classroom teaching and students’ learning. We have drawn attention to the ecological relationships between such practices, through analysing how the cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements supporting teachers’ professional learning and leading practices at staff meetings were transformed via the processes of facilitation and structuring of the meetings outlined above. This transformation was achieved in a variety of ways. First, teachers’ practices were transformed by shifting teachers’ sayings—by changing the cultural-discursive arrangements that supported their practice (for example, by sharing professional readings that introduced new ideas to teachers, which they were able to discuss in small groups, and use to interrogate their existing and possible new classroom practices). Second, transformation was achieved by changing teachers’ doings—by changing the material-economic arrangements that supported their practice (for example, the rotation of Hillview ’s staff meetings through various classrooms so teachers had an opportunity to observe new material set-ups and arrangements for classroom practice which they could safely discuss with a host teacher). And third, transformation was achieved by subtle but critical shifts in relatings between staff—by changing the social-political arrangements that supported their practice (for example, the decision at Southwood Primary School to adopt a whole staff meeting as the vehicle for whole school leadership, gave a clear signal that the executive team trusted the staff to act as professionals who shared a joint commitment to democratic and collaborative practices of leading).

Students’ Leading Practices

One of the obvious implications which flows from a lifeworld view of leading as a shared and democratic practice is that leading and leadership are not limited to positional leadership, nor restricted to teachers and others with formal positions of authority. This was explicitly recognised by staff at Hillview School. A deliberate decision was made by the executive team, and supported by staff, that all Year 6 students (the most senior year in New South Wales primary schools) would take on a leadership role, involving activities undertaken both within the school and outside in the community. This was in contrast to the more hierarchical norm in many Australian schools, in which two students (one female and one male) are selected as school captains. While, in one sense, the decision to appoint all the Year 6 students as Year 6 student leaders, might seem to be a recognition that leadership, in practice, flows out of and escapes from the hierarchy of formal positional leadership to others; in another sense, and perhaps paradoxically, the designation of the group as ‘Year 6 student leaders’ might equally be read as an extension of the formal leadership structure—an elaboration that assimilated some of those to be led (the Year 6 students) into the leadership structure. As outlined below, however, we think the designation of Year 6 leaders created—as the staff of the school intended—new and positive opportunities for Year 6 students to exercise a variety of responsibilities.

The tasks for Year 6 student leaders encompassed a variety of dimensions, including local community work (which involved a good deal of emotional labour through activities such as regular visits to an elderly people’s home); school community work (such as tutoring younger children in the school, representing the school at community events and sport); and a number of more ‘menial’ but fundamental jobs, intrinsic to caring for the physical conditions of the school (for example, emptying rubbish bins and looking after the sports shed). Ronnie Kinross and Jeannette Maidment, the upper stage teachers, commented thus:

We don’t have school captains here. All our Year 6s are just Year 6 leaders. So they just have roles and responsibilities which are as low and degrading as doing the bins and all of those things… They take turns… in representing different things, like Bronwyn … [the Principal] … took us, to a [community event] last week. [T]hen there’s ones that volunteer… that run the swimming carnival… then there’s different house captains for the athletics carnival.

When asked what the rationale was for sharing leadership amongst the Year 6 students, Ronnie and Jeanette observed:

Well, just to recognise that all children have gifts and talents… to offer and that there is not—you know—there’s lots of people worthy of being a leader of the school and not just one boy and girl. And although, I’m sure not everyone has got great leadership skills, they all have something to offer.

When asked why the decision had been made to share leadership amongst Year 6 as a whole, the combined Year 5 and 6 student focus group commented variously:

Student::

Because we’re all equal.

Student::

We all have potential to do it.

Student::

And we’ve all learnt the skills.

Student::

Like, we’ve learnt—some people may be smarter than others but we’ve all –

Student::

You trust them to be a leader …

Student::

So we’ve all got responsibilities around the school and maybe when me and all the other Year 5s next year, I think it’s really good to have leaders all around you so that you always—there’s three classes, there might be one in the other class, and one in—another one in the other class as well. So there won’t be any leaders in our class but we still have the Year 6s which are actually all leaders, so we all learn from them and so then we know how we should be next year about being just like them and having leadership.

Student::

And everyone takes on responsibility so you’re not just relying on two people, everyone knows they’re a leader and thinks of themselves as a leader and knows they can help.

Both teachers and children stressed the relational domain inherent in the activities they undertook, “They all have something to offer”; “We’re all equal.” Importantly, these sayings did not appear to be symbolic only, but were connected concretely and explicitly to the doings and relatings of the students’ leading. For example, Ronnie and Jeannette observed:

Ronnie::

And, even, lately we’ve been talking a lot about being givers and takers and about giving of yourself in—not only within the classroom, but out on the playground and at home as well.

Jeannette::

And they also ... were going to the Daycare in the church of a Thursday lunchtime ...

Ronnie::

And as part of being leaders of the school, and as part of reaching out to others in the parish ... they were just rostered on to spend some time with the elderly people in the parish—and they loved it ...

Jeannette::

You had to be chasing them back to class!

However, the connections between children’s practices went more deeply than this. They also provided an important model of student leading as democratic and shared responsibility , which linked into what Hillview School was striving for, captured in the Wattletree School District policy Communities of Practice Principles —a notion of schools as learning communities . These practices generated an important message that school and District policies were not only symbolic but had real material impacts for children’s as well as teachers’ practices. Students’ leading practices connected up with student learning practices and teaching practices and teacher learning practices and practices of researching, in an ecology of practices that together realised the idea and ideal of the learning community. These connected practices within the learning community emerged, together with its underlying commitment to humanitarian values in which new arrangements of collective student leading challenged traditional arrangements. In turn, they opened up new intersubjective spaces for social practices and ways of relating between different groups of students. A clear example appeared at Hillview in the ‘buddy’ system which paired Year 6 students with beginning Kindergarten students, with the Year 6s sometimes teaching the Kindergarten students (to give them opportunities to report to others about things they had learned); and through a student community partnership in which Year 6 students regularly visited elderly people in a nursing home. The Year 6 children observed the following doings in relation to teaching their Kindergarten counterparts, which illustrated clear ecological connections to the facilitative classroom conditions that their teachers had enacted for them as learners:

Student::

Yeah and we—sometimes we get asked to go to the younger classes, like the younger kids’ classes and help them on the computers, like help them make a slide show or something and just a basic one to teach them how to do it.

Interviewer::

And what sort of things do you do?

Student::

You let them control it, but …

Student::

They tell—they sort of tell you what they already know and you just give them a hand.

Student::

You just like let them do it, but you show them how to do it, like you tell them, click there, that’ll do this for you, but if you want that, click there.

Interviewer::

So how did you learn how to do that?

Student::

Well we normally teach each other, so it’s normally just like teaching ourselves and other people around you but, just like in an easier way, like the younger kids they normally just ask for your help and you just sit there and say, “Oh, maybe this might be a bit better” and you just show them extra ways and maybe a different way to use headings or something, and then you can just—because we’ve been teaching each other and listening to each other we just know that we can teach these younger kids because they’re just like us, but a little bit smaller.

Interviewer::

Oh, okay.

Student::

It’s just basically sharing what you already know with them. I don’t think of it as teaching, I just think it like …

Student::

We sort of learned the same way they did, from …

Student::

Yeah it’s just that they need … Yeah, when we were younger the older people helped us.

The senior students’ understanding that teaching was not about transmission but facilitation, and their stress on the affective domain of teaching and learning practices, “we’ve been teaching each other and listening to each other … these younger kids … they’re just like us, but a little bit smaller” was striking. It suggests that the enabling and more democratic teaching practices adopted by Hillview staff, which the children viewed as the norm, “we normally teach each other”, had ‘travelled ’ as pedagogical forms of leadership practice from senior children to juniors (Wilkinson et al. 2013). This approach to teaching and learning also connected up with the shift, noted by Hillview’s Deputy Principal Kendra Clarke, from a more transmission approach to staff meetings, to an inquiry approach to pedagogical leadership, which we will examine later in this chapter.

Systemic Leading Practices

Leading practice is not confined to schools; it also entails transformations to the conditions for practice in the broader systems in which schools are located. There has been a recent interest in examining the conditions by which systemic educational development can be fostered and enabled (see, for example, Hargreaves et al. 2007; Anderson et al. 2010). The foundation of such research is an (often implicit) recognition that the practices of schools are shaped by the practice landscapes of the educational systems in which they are located. For example, all our schools could be characterised as

school-level learning communities in which a combination of managerial and teacher leadership as well as sometimes student and parent leadership build ‘professional learning communities’ and ‘collective efficacy’ (Hargreaves et al. 2007, p. 4).

In the Wattletree District schools we studied, however, the building of school communities of practice was orchestrated not only by people at the schools, but by a confluence of systemic practices and orientations that enabled and fostered the conditions for collective leading practice in each school. For example, in ecological terms, the Wattletree District schools’ practices and dispositions towards learning communities were ‘nested’ within a long-term, District-wide orientation to learning communities. Some of the key features of this orientation were outlined in Chapter Three, and included the formation of Communities of Practice Institutes , the production of the Our Children, Our Future policy, and the development of associated programs such as Pedagogies for Literacy . Here we will focus on the Communities of Practice Institutes and Our Children, Our Future to illustrate and exemplify some of the leading practices at the District level—at the level of the Wattletree District Office in its relationships with schools, principals, teachers, students and families.

The Communities of Practice Institutes were formed in the 1990s and two leading researchers in professional learning communities were employed to work with Wattletree District and its teachers on an ongoing basis. The aim was to engender a system-wide practice of collaborative learning amongst teachers as a vehicle to enhance student collaboration , with the goal of improved and engaged student learning . The Institutes placed strong emphasis on teachers’ collaborative professional learning, including the building of relational trust between teachers. In terms of leading practices, a number of points can be made about this initiative. Firstly, at the level of the Wattletree District education system, the Communities of Practice Institutes produced an ongoing “learning frame” based on teacher collaboration and learning communities, in which the local district “embrace(d)… the forms of learning that … [were] … valued” in the District (Hargreaves et al. 2007, p. 11). These principles were encapsulated in its key policy document, Our Children, Our Future . The challenge for such systemic leading was to work in concert with schools to embed these practices at all levels of the system in sustainable ways, and to ensure they continued to travel into the classroom teaching practices of teachers and the learning practices of students. As Brian Alwyn, Director of the District explained:

What’s the very thing that is going to give the teacher the freedom to take a risk? It’s a relational trust. It’s the trust between two teachers suddenly saying, “Can you come past and watch how I ask questions in the classroom?” instead of going, “Bang”, with the door … therein lies the challenge of leadership for our principals. [I]f you can hark back to the basic diagrams of learning communities—it’s where that intersects in the middle there. It’s where the trust is … without it the opportunities for achieving and learning at all levels are compromised. That’s the basic belief around learning communities and the relational take … it really underpins everything that I do as Director … in terms of the need to take the time to do that. You know it’s a model all the way down. You think of a student in a classroom … [if] there’s no connection between the teacher and student for whatever reason, there ain’t going to be much happening there.

In terms of building system capacity and the thickening of teacher and executive leadership, there was evidence that the Communities of Practice Institutes had been instrumental in the production of a new generation of leaders across the district, for whom the building of authentic learning communities was a key practice. In particular, collaboration and relational trust were two principles of the effective learning communities that were practised by principals in our case study schools. The development of shared understandings, language (for example, Habits of Mind™ at Hillview School), norms and values amongst staff, and between staff and students, was one concrete manifestation of these practices ‘travelling’ to the district via Australian and international researchers. As Bronwyn Harper—the Principal of Hillview—herself a graduate of the Communities of Practice Institutes—observes about the school:

We started a long time ago talking about learning communities based on … [leading researchers’] … work and that’s really becoming the focus that now we try to align … [our] work … around … [these] … six practices … So everything we do we go back to those six practices and the essence of learning communities being around relationship, support and challenge and we question ourselves the whole time, every time we introduce new things into the school, as to where it fits around your moral literacy and your social and emotional development and also around academic …

A critical feature of the leading practices underpinning systemic approaches to educators and students’ learning in the district is a shared, system-wide commitment to a “clear and defensible moral purpose” for education (Hargreaves et al. 2007, p. 10). The longitudinal nature of the Communities of Practice Institutes and the ongoing commitment over two decades to the philosophies underpinning the Our Children, Our Future district policy, indicated a long-term commitment by district leadership in “support of their student-focused missions” (Leithwood 2010, p. 278). Wattletree District Director Brian Alwyn commented:

We’re talking about students taking control of their own learning all the way down the line … But where does this all come back to—that person who fronts up with them every day. There’s our target. That’s the … centre of influence for us is the teacher and anything we do is directed straight at improving that person in their potential; their skill base; their knowledge; they’re everything—that’s the future. That’s the greatest centre of influence on a student.

This moral purpose was reflected in Bronwyn Harper’s observations about Hillview in her comment above and also in this comment:

I say to parents “As far as I’m concerned, if we don’t have children leaving us after seven years here feeling really good about who they are, we’ve failed”, and I really feel that’s the essence of character development and kids being successful because they’ll all find their strengths probably after they’ve left school and their purpose for learning in all of the cases.

In relation to engendering transformations to learning and teaching practices, of particular note was the interdependent ecological arrangement between the practices of Wattletree School District Office staff and teachers and members of school executive teams in the District schools. This arrangement was facilitated and sustained by close relations of trust and respect that had been built over a long time between core District professional development officers and case study schools (Leithwood 2010). Westville Principal Stephanie Marks demonstrated this trust in her comments about Wattletree District Curriculum Consultant Hilary Roberts—at the same time revealing an openness to building not only the professional practice of Westville staff, but also her own practice as a teacher, which is one of the hallmarks of leading learning practices amongst positional leaders. Stephanie notes:

[O]ver the last few years, we’ve been really privileged to be working with Hilary and she has been such an amazing leader in taking us forward in literacy … [W]e sort of worked with Hilary to come up with… [a program] … that we could implement as a whole staff because that was critical and be able to tap into … key big things … [S]he has such an amazing way to get the big things and say this is the core of what we’re trying to get to and be able to communicate it … so although Hilary has left us recently … we’ve been able to have one of her great, well I guess, ‘apprentices’ is the word … [to continue her work with us]…

It would be a mistake to suggest that there was a seamless alignment between Wattletree District’s learning communities philosophy and leading practices, and that of its schools. For instance, when students who had been exposed to an inquiry approach to learning moved to secondary schools, a new challenge for system leadership arose, that is, major clashes between the cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements that framed the far more hierarchical culture of secondary schools, compared to the learning community philosophy so valued by Wattletree District and evident in the practices of the primary schools we studied. In Bourdieuian (1990) terms, secondary schools’ differing location in the education field, entailed a very different logic of practice , with which the District continued to struggle. Brian Alwyn observed:

[T]he primary schools had—well 15-20 years we’ve been immersed in that culture of … learning communities … It’s around the essence of things being based in relationship … It took … five or six years for … [the secondary schools] … to even catch up with what we’re talking about, to even use the same language. Narelle Jones, who was a former employee of ours … was my personal gauge … because she came in new and she would say to me, “What the hell are you talking about?” “If I can’t understand it, how are they going to understand?” and she was instrumental in me slowing down … and waiting until that enculturation time, that use of language … till they had hold of that enough for them to understand where we had been and the worthiness of getting them on board and coming forward with us for the rest of the journey.

Nonetheless, the long-term philosophy that underpinned systemic leadership practices was integral to the development and maintenance of community-responsive education in the case study schools in Wattletree School District. However, it was also clear that the leadership required from the District was grounded in principles of trust and respect, where a broader lifeworld understanding of leadership was expected across all levels of schools and their communities.

Site Based Leading : Leading Practices (in Ecologies of Practices

The previous sections showed that leading practices were composed of particular sayings, doings and relatings, and how these were enmeshed with and supported by the particular cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements that pertained at the particular sites.A critical feature of the leading practices examined above is not only their composition but also how they travelled to and connected up with other related practices and practice architectures within and beyond District, school, classroom and community sites.

For example, in the discussion of students’ leading practices earlier in this chapter, it was clear that there was an ecological interdependence between the students’ leading practices and their learning practices . There were similar connections between staff leading and professional learning practices , exemplified through the re-arrangement of the architectures of Hillview ’s staff meetings to enable a more collective approach to professional learning. In turn, this was fostered through the adoption of a range of practices, including the executive team’s use of an inquiry approach to teachers’ professional learning in these meetings, as part of a deliberate shift towards engendering a more dialogic and collaborative learning space. The quotation in the preceding section from Hillview Principal Bronwyn Harper reveals that Wattletree School District’s Communities of Practice Institutes had set in place a set of cultural-discursive arrangements that supported more dialogic and collaborative professional learning practices. These cultural-discursive arrangements had been assimilated by teachersFootnote 1—some of whom, like Bronwyn Harper, later became principals—who participated in the Institutes, and the ideas were being daily realised in such teachers’ and leaders’ practices of leading in their schools.

Not only were these ideas evident in the work of teachers and leaders at Hillview and other schools, they travelled to students. Hillview’s Year 6 student leaders’ description of the approach they had adopted when teaching their Kindergarten buddies, illustrates the strong connection between practices of leading and student learning in the classroom, as well as the staff room. The students’ emphasis on the facilitation of classroom practices with their junior learners, parallels the practices we observed in Hillview’s staff meeting where teachers collectively formulated an inquiry approach to spelling —an approach, that is, realised in their teaching practices. The Year 6 buddies of the Kindergarten children at Hillview adopted the practices they had learned in their own classroom (how they as a class were being taught and led by their teachers), and clearly articulated these in a language of facilitative and collaborative practices—a language they learned from their teachers, used with each other, and were in the process of passing on to the junior students.

There were also clear links between the case study schools’ leading practices and their practices of researching . For example, at Hillview , in the face of some staff hostility and resentment in relation to their poor NAPLAN results in some areas of literacy, Deputy Principal Kendra Clarke had shifted from a more hierarchical approach in which she analysed the school’s NAPLAN results (that is, she had been the sole evaluator of results) to a more organic, ‘bottom-up’ set of practices of collaborative review and reflection in a volunteer group of staff—the NAPLAN Focus Group . This was as a result of her move to Wattletree District from a different district (Gumtree District) and her exposure to the learning communities framework and inquiry approach to learning at Hillview. Kendra noted that in earlier years when Hillview’s NAPLAN results had begun to decline, past practices such as the executive team analysing data and then having a staff meeting in which they “threw up the NAPLAN results”, were extremely problematic. Staff were “negative and threatening … mostly the younger ones who felt threatened, they hadn’t yet learnt to go, ‘Well, actually we don’t know it all’”. Yet this initial response had significantly shifted through a variety of changes in practice architectures, including the formation of the volunteer NAPLAN Focus Group and the actions of executive team members in a variety of settings—like staff meetings for professional learning—where they modelled being learners who did not “know it all”. Kendra noted that

there’s been a huge shift … and I think it’s through the professional dialogue that we’ve slowly built on … Constant discussions in staff meetings … those like myself or Olivia [Lincoln, the other Deputy Principal] … who are perceived as leaders in curriculum … will openly say “What I’m doing isn’t working” … That opens conversations in teams …

A new set of material-economic arrangements (the NAPLAN Focus Group) was created, in which the volunteers met weekly to analyse results and then plan and discuss the school’s resultant professional learning approach. Staff engagement and a greater set of shared responsibility for the school’s overall professional learning when it came to NAPLAN results was one consequence of this deliberate shift in leading practices.

A critical component of the ecological connections between leading practices and teaching practices was the composition of each study site ’s executive team. Each school had a ‘traditional’ hierarchical executive in the sense that it was composed of a principal and, depending on the size of the school, one or two Deputy Principals. However, all but one of the schools operated their executive along the lines of a professional learning community , thus modelling via their leadership practices, their expectations that teachers should also work in more collaborative and team-based ways. Westville ’s and Hillview ’s executive team modelled a dynamic and inclusive form of collaborative leading practices, meeting weekly as a team to discuss not only administrative matters, but engage in long term planning around teacher professional learning and curriculum development. The collaborative practices engaged in by these teams flowed into both schools’ staff meetings, characterised as they were by a dialogic (rather than monologic) approach to professional conversations. In a similar vein, the executive team at Southwood School operated as a leadership team that included representatives from across the school community. Importantly, each of the teams contained at least one member who was highly respected by staff as a pedagogical leader, thus demonstrating the genuine commitment the schools placed on student learning and providing them with a critical resource for teacher learning. In sketching the composition of the executive teams, we are not implying that those in positional leaders’ roles did not undertake aspects of their leading practice individually and independently. Rather we are foregrounding the strategic reflexivity suggested in positional leaders’ practices in relation to which facets of the school required more collaborative or dispersed leading.

Conclusion

None of the connections and interactions between leading and the other practices and site arrangements outlined above can be reduced to a neat set of capabilities or competencies that will ensure educational ‘success’ for students. The shifts in leading practices we observed in the schools we studied has led us to the conclusion that practices of leading as ‘command and control’ might not be as effective in producing changes in teaching practices and student learning as practices of leading that foster a sense of shared responsibility among staff and with students for the conduct teaching, student learning, professional learning and researching in a school. On the latter view, we understand leading as located in ecologies of practices that have a common commitment to, overall project of, education development. We contrast this with the ‘command and control’ view of leading which seems to us to underlie many programs of school improvement around the world—and which may often take a technical and managerialist view of the process of educational change.

In this chapter, we have shown how some schools have made the shift from more hierarchical practices of leading to practices of leading that foster a sense of shared responsibility for education in a school. We have traced this shift as entailing firstly, a move away from viewing positional leadership as a hierarchical and technical practice—the primary purpose of which is to disperse leading and learning amongst followers in order to enhance learning outcomes—and, secondly, a democratic and collaborative approach to positional leadership practice which engenders a notion of shared responsibility amongst principals, executive teams, teachers and students. However, we would posit that there is one more step in the shift towards a social and critical view of leading practices, and this entails understanding leadership as a practice-changing practice . This latter is in contrast to the notion of leadership as a transmissive pedagogy, as may be implied in characterisations of “leadership as pedagogy ” (see, for example, Lingard et al. 2003). By characterising leading as a practice-changing practice, we are highlighting the critical role that the practices of positional and informal leading play in conjunction with other, interconnected practices such as professional learning , in shaping the conditions for transformed learning and teaching . Simultaneously, by conceiving of leadership practice as a practice-changing practice , we are attempting to forestall its reduction to a form of technē (or technique). Finally, we aim to foreground the role of leading in the process of education development, which focuses on its power to shape site based education development as a praxis -oriented practice, that is, as a morally-informed practice enacting a socially-critical practice tradition in the education field (Kemmis and Grootenboer 2008).

The shifts we observed in practices in each case study site —across the Education Complex of practices of student learning, teaching, professional learning, leading and researching—attest to the fundamental importance of the practice of leading as a practice-changing practice . We saw how practices of leading change sometimes met resistance and contestation. We saw that results were not always guaranteed, as if ‘success’ could always be achieved if only a leader were technically adroit enough. Leaders act in uncertain conditions, and their actions are interpreted (and sometimes misinterpreted) by those around them, with sometimes unpredictable effects. Leadership is not just a technical matter of producing known effects by known means. In this chapter, we have attempted to sketch the kinds of practical actions undertaken by leaders—principals, executive teams, teachers, students and District Office personnel—that are not dictated by rule-following, or producing an outcome of a kind that is known in advance (both characteristic of technical action) but rather actions whose implications can be evaluated only in the light of their consequences (characteristic of practical action). We have also tried to disrupt the view of leadership that see leading as manifested in the person of the leader. Instead, we have tried to show that and how leadership is realised in practices of leading. We think this view of leadership as leading—as practising leading (as we describe it in the title of this chapter)—offers new insights into the ways different practices of leading are enabled and constrained by different kinds of practice architectures (cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements) with which leading practices are enmeshed in the many different kinds of sites where leading goes on. We also think this view of leading—as a practice-changing practice—allows us to see how the practice of leading is enmeshed with other practices (like teacher professional learning, teaching, student learning and researching). By understanding how leading practices are enmeshed with practice architectures that support them, and how they connect with other practices in ecologies of practices, we may also better understand how leading practices are and can be practice-changing practices. Seen from this perspective, leading practices are not the prerogative of leaders; they are ubiquitous; they are practices enacted by everyone.