The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership

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Kouzes and Posner discussed in detail, their Five Practices of Exemplary leadership. This practice will be applied and compared with the practices that are portrayed within the leadership style of principals within the Darlington County School District. The main focus of this paper will be based on the observance of principals that I have come in contact with through my years of being a Guidance Counselor.

We will begin with the first practice of exemplary leadership Model the Way. This is best explained by Kouzes and Posner as simply leading from what you believe.

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(Kouzes & Posner). A passionate principal's belief and direction have demonstrated crucial to the lasting success of school change. The principal must "up-end the pyramid," some say, supporting the school organization from below, not leading it from above. The principal serves as the "pivot of the change process," keeping a refined balance between the often conflicting demands coming from teachers, community, district, state. The principal introduces a "blueprint for change," then modifies it persistently in response to individuals who will have to live with it.

Commendable leadership requires that educational leaders have a comprehensible vision of the form of school they want to have and operate again and again according to values and beliefs tied to that vision. These leaders rarely claim to have invented the vision or the essential values and beliefs, instead, they recognize themselves to be "keepers of the dream." They embrace it whole-heartedly and make sure that everyone else does too. The principal models the type of vision that are wanted within the school and continue to visualize that others will recognize this effort and struggle to model the vision as well.

While this nation has been progressively shifting forward with education reorganization, principals' job descriptions have racked up additional responsibilities. Yesterday's principal was often a deskbound, authoritarian building manager who was more concerned with the buses running on schedule than academic results. Today's principal must involve herself with not only discipline, school safety, and building management, but also must act as an instructional leader who knows how to use research and testing statistics to enhance teaching technique, student success, and classroom management. Today's principal is a visionary leader who spends significant time working with faculty and interacting with students and rarely sees her desk. Today's principal coordinates staff development and community engagement. Today's principal wears far too many hats. School boards, communities, state legislators, governors, Congress, and the federal government need to take notice and provide greater support to today's school leaders.

The principals vision is sometimes filled with tension and motion, conflicts and resolutions. The principal must have a clear idea of what they are about." The vision is not plucked from thin air. Nor is it imposed from above. Rather, it must take root in the school's history -- the shared norms, beliefs, traditions, and myths of the school community. This deeply embedded context in which the school operates -- what researchers call school culture -- is the seedbed from which a guiding vision must grow. Only by knowing and understanding her school's quirks, cliques, penchants, piques, feuds, dreams, and habits (good and bad) can a principal hope to travel toward a workable vision.

This brings out Kouzes and Posner's next practice which is "Inspired a Shared Vision." In this regard, an effective principal must be much more than "keeper of the vision": she must foster a faculty capable of marshaling itself to keep the vision and to go forward as a governance system. As the school's intellectual conscience, as its resource for time and opportunities, as manager not of its product but its process, the principal carries the metaphor of "teacher as coach" to the administrative level--provoking, modeling, and nurturing the thoughtful growth everyone in a good school should experience. In the literature concerning leadership, vision has a variety of definitions, all of which include a mental image or picture, a future orientation, and aspects of direction or goal. Vision provides guidance to an organization by articulating what it wishes to attain. Vision is a picture of the future for which people are willing to work.

However, vision is more than an image of the future. It has a compelling aspect that serves to inspire, motivate, and engage people. Vision should be described as the influence which shapes meaning for the people of an organization. It is a influence that provides meaning and principle to the work of an organization. Vision is a compelling picture of the future that inspires commitment. It answers the questions: Who is involved? What do they plan to accomplish? Why are they doing this? Vision therefore does more than provide a picture of a desired future; it encourages people to work, to strive for its attainment.

Kouzes and Posner state in their book, that leaders should challenge their visions, yet accept responsibility that there may be possible risks, failures and even success. Taking incremental steps and accepting smalls victories, may build the confidence of school the principal and prepare them to meet bigger challenges (Kouzes & Posner, 2002.) Principals that have taken such a view, however, often cast principals onto uncertain ground. Although you want to continue to encourage your staff to share your dream, the overall decisions are still made from the principals. Often left out of contract negotiations that give teachers substantial decision-making power, principals are nonetheless still legally accountable for what occurs in their schools. They often feel caught between a hierarchical administration expecting competence and authoritative leadership and a upheaval from below that requires a new style of leadership.

Principals now have to grapple between helping people see new possibilities and enabling them to decide whether they're going to go for the new possibilities. "They may come in as an architect does, with an initial vision--but then they have to be able to accommodate revisions to their notion. If they can't do that, they haven't really learned to operate in new ways." (Kouzes & Posner, 2002.)

Administrators must never forget where they came from (and where they might return to). When a school administrator makes a decision or commits to an action or policy that makes even one teacher's job the tiniest bit more difficult, he or she has made a mistake, and has done a disservice -- not only to the teacher, but also to his or her students. When we forget, even for a moment, what it was like to walk the classroom floor, we have forgotten what years of teaching experience should have taught us.

Teaching is difficult, and administration work is challenging in its own way, but there is no reason why both groups should not be able to work together toward the same goal: providing the best education possible for all students. This is how leaders initiate the fourth practices of enabling others to act.

Finally, we are drawn to the last practice inspired by Kouzes and Posner. Encourage the heart. Many administrators have to find motivating strategies to continue to uplift their grop to strive to achieve. To be a learning leader, a principal must be the lead learner in the school. This means knowing the standards and knowing how to deconstruct or unwrap them; knowing how to develop units of study using backward planning; knowing performance assessment and how to evaluate what is being taught against the standards; and knowing how to differentiate instruction to meet the needs of all learners. It also means understanding the most effective research-based teaching strategies, knowing how to build a professional learning community within your school, and being able to establish data teams and use data to improve student achievement. A learning leader must challenge his or her teachers to gain and use professional knowledge.

There isn't anything that a principal should ask their to check out that they haven't done as well. Some of the best conversations our principal has with the staff are about putting new ideas into practice. Giving them anything they need within moderation, and attempting to partner in teaching and learning. The principal expects a lot from teachers and other staff, but in exchange, she works to give everyone more time for planning and collaboration. We have changed our schedule every two years to accommodate these expectations. We have gone from a traditional seven-period day to a modified block schedule (i.e., three days all periods, two days longer blocks). We received board approval for shortening the school day by 1.5 hours once a week to give teachers additional time. We moved from the modified block to a five-period trimester schedule to further reduce the number of students seen by each teacher and extend preparation time for teachers.

In conferences at the beginning of each year and again in the middle of the year, teachers and other staff show their data, student work, growth projections, and plans to help students make the targets. These are called our long range goals. Team leaders turned in monthly proficiency reports that showed the results of the common assessments conducted by each teacher on the team. Strategies for reaching goals are discussed in weekly team meetings. These type of motivating strategies encourage teachers and various school staff that they indeed have a voice within the school that they diligently come to work in for 190 days each year. Encouragement like this is what continues to motivate these individuals including myself to return each year.