The Alberta Teachers’ Association

Alberta Principals: Sustaining Performance “Beyond Expectations”

“After twenty years as a principal I appreciate the fact that there will always be a line-up of people outside of my office door—but it is the growing number of  bureaucrats, consultants and other ‘experts’ hovering outside the school yard telling me how to do my job that I find most frustrating.”

This observation, made by an Alberta participant in the recently completed study The Future of the Principalship in Canada, captures a key dilemma facing school principals today. The study, which was part of a two-year partnership between the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) and the Canadian Association of Principals (CAP), is one of a number of research initiatives that are helping us to better understand what it means to be a school principal and how we might better support principals in their work.

Recent research certainly validates the findings of the study’s literature review—namely, that school administrators

• are overloaded by the volume and complexity of their responsibilities,
• ·often feel unable to act in the best interests of their school staff and students,
• are frustrated by excessive accountability demands, and
• are at risk of burnout in an increasingly ramped-up culture of performance and bureaucratic surveillance.

The research clearly shows that school principals from across the country are facing the same issues. As the average workweek of an Alberta principal approaches 60 hours, the capacity of principals to achieve their aspirations as leaders is at risk. Furthermore, it appears that education ministries in all provinces have moved toward devolved administrative responsibilities, increased accountability, and reduced public funding for social services and family supports. These realities are shaped by global trends and influences such as the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) and PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), as well as other mechanisms designed to compare the impact and quality of school leadership. On the horizon we are seeing PISA for schools—further enabling the culture of naming, shaming and blaming school leaders.

Yet despite these very real challenges, two recent books hold out promise and offer a long-term strategic view of how and why school principals should remain hopeful.

In The Principal: Three Keys to Maximizing Impact, Fullan (2014) recognizes the growing complexity of the principalship and the “wrong drivers” that continue to distract school leaders from the deeper and more enduring work they ought to be doing. He advocates for more balance in the role of the principal, through repositioning the principal in three key roles: the Leading Learner, a System Player and an Agent of Change. In Fullan’s view, a “narrow focus on instructional leadership and student achievement can shut out other dimensions of leading learning” (p 41). Fullan’s challenge to principals is to “lead the school’s teachers in a process of learning to improve their teaching, while learning alongside them about what works and what doesn’t” (p 56). On the ground, this work involves seven competencies that push past the reductionist checklists now being used by ministries of education to control and evaluate school principals. The competencies are as follows:

1. Challenge the status quo
2. Build trust through clear communications and expectations
3. Create a commonly owned plan for success
4. Focus on team over self
5. Have a sense of urgency for sustainable results
6. Commit to continuous improvement for self
7. Build external networks and partnerships

Fullan argues that we need to work together within our systems to help principals build the leadership capacity of teachers in their schools. In other words, the focus should not be “dipstick” measures or checklists that assess the principal in isolation but, rather, the overall leadership capacity developed across the school.

While leadership competencies and the attributes of exemplary school leaders will likely remain the focus of literature on the future of principalship, a book released in June, Uplifting Leadership: How Organizations, Teams, and Communities Raise Performance (Hargreaves, Boyle and Harris 2014), offers examples of leaders overcoming the realities of diminished resources, growing competition and complexity across 17 case studies from business, sports and education (including Marks and Spencer, Shoebuy, Dogfish Head Brewery, Cricket Australia, Burnley Football Club, the Vancouver Giants and FIAT).

This book draws on case studies from the global Beyond Expectations Project and helps crystalize how principals might become the leaders they aspire to be. The project examined the ways in which the highest-performing schools, districts/local authorities and school systems achieved and sustained excellence, despite historical and systemic challenges. Drawing from an analysis of 20 education sites across three countries, including case studies from Finland, Alberta, Ontario and Singapore, the authors provide concrete examples of what leadership looks like in the midst of the growing complexity and diversity of our organizations and communities.

The frame of performing “beyond expectations” provides clarity and optimism for the future of school leadership and avoids sloganeering and Pollyanna approaches to re-imagining the future work of the school principal. The book offers concrete examples of situations where leaders achieved a shared dream through strategies that focused on sustained and coherent change by pulling, not pushing, into change.

Both these books, as well as the national Future of the Principalship in Canada study, remind us that if we are serious about meaningful school reform, support for school principals must remain a strategic priority. Unfortunately for Canada’s principals, too much of the commentary that passes for research on leadership is driven by a focus on simplistic performance rankings of schools and the ongoing search for the chimera of the 21st-century school. Instead, we need a systemic and sustainable focus on uplifting all schools, driven by a commitment to equity and social justice.

Through ongoing research, collaborative projects with the ATA’s Council for School Leadership and on-the-ground support (such as the ATA’s international partnership with Finnish high schools, which is soon to be expanded to other countries), Alberta’s school principals will be supported in their aspirations to be co-creators of great schools for all students. As the research increasingly suggests, networks of support that allow principals to work outside their school and system boundaries will help them to achieve this goal.

References

Fullan, M. 2014. The Principal: Three Keys to Maximizing Impact. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Hargreaves, A., A. Boyle and A. Harris. 2014. Uplifting Leadership: How Organizations, Teams, and Communities Raise Performance. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

J-C Couture is associate coordinator, research, with the Alberta Teachers’ Association.