Heads tell their stories

Educational Leaders in the Making. Christopher Bezzina with the collaboration of Vincent Cassar and Andrew Triganza-Scott

Despite a huge literature on school leadership, "few systematic efforts have been undertaken to pinpoint the early markers of leadership" (Gardner, 1995, p. 32); for example, influential sources that contributed to the development of dispositions, beliefs, values, and interpersonal skills.

Bezzina's book sets out to address this deficit in the literature by focusing on the first two of four administrator career phases proposed by Gronn (1994): Formation, Accession, Incumbancy, and Divestiture.

The study involved eight secondary school heads in Malta. Individual interviews of the school heads were guided by several broad themes: influences that shaped their views and values; their reasons for becoming a head; their professional preparation, and the role of their views and values in decisions about teaching and learning.

In many ways, this book reflects emerging thinking in democratic countries around the globe: the belief that a different kind of leadership is necessary to promote innovation and sustain renewal in schools, the necessity for school heads and teachers to be continual learners, and a growing awareness of tensions between competing models of governance that have fundamentally different aims and values (the bureaucratic model and the professional model).

Much of the literature on leadership describes what great leaders do/did, what leaders ought to do, or how followers perceive leaders. The title of this particular book, Educational Leaders in the Making, is significant because the conversations clearly indicate that whilst the secondary school heads continue learning and developing on the job and over time, the broad array of varied experiences, abilities and beliefs they brought to their new position as head has played an important (though often unexamined) role in what they could learn and accomplish as leaders.

Significant findings in the book include the necessity for assistant heads to have good mentors to help them; the necessity of learning how to communicate and work well with teachers; and the importance of parents as role models for these leaders, especially their legacy of valuing education and human relationships.

The secondary school heads also discussed many difficulties facing school administrators - and indeed, entire populations - as democratic nations rethink how best to educate students, teachers and heads for the uncertainties and rapid changes of a global, post-modern world.

The uniquely personal stories of the eight heads, however, portray a side of leadership that is not common in the literature and that is rarely shared with colleagues. Their stories reflect a humanistic tradition that has been largely ignored in many administration programmes.

Some administration programmes have begun to change, exploring ideas such as "learning by heart" (Barth, 2001), distributive leadership (Leithwood et al.,1999), moral leadership (Serviovanni, 1992 ), and leadership by "connecting people, purpose, and practice" (Donaldson, 2001). All of these ideas float through the interviews but were not part of the analysis presented.

The book also seems to beg the question: what role, if any, could the articulation and examination of cultural and personal histories play in frequently decontextualised administration programmes and professional development for leaders? How might self-understanding improve relationships with teachers, an issue that seemed to trouble some of the interviewees, especially in the early years of their headship?

The book offers a refreshing respite from generic leadership literature by presenting individual stories full of emotion, human interactions and moral dilemmas of practicing heads. It might have been helpful to have extended the interviews further by probing in greater detail how the heads try to practise their values and beliefs. It might also have been interesting to elicit from the heads the standards they would suggest as guidelines for the promotion of teachers to assistant or full headships.

Some readers may take exception to the author's decision to present "raw data" conversations (one chapter per interviewee), perhaps at the expense of more extensive analysis. Others may appreciate that reading the uninterrupted conversation allows readers to understand and appreciate more fully the experiences of the individual interviewees.

Some readers may also disagree with the characterisation of one-and-one-half hour to two-hour interviews as part of life history or biographic research. Others may agree that the eight heads have provided intriguing and invaluable information for refining more in-depth and probing interviews.

In total, however, the conversations are a beginning step in contributing to a literature that generally focuses on what leaders do after becoming leaders, but tends to disregard the "making" of leaders. The conversations may be of particular interest to new heads, assistant heads or teachers interested in becoming heads so they can better understand the human faces of leadership and so might begin to examine how their own experiences and role models have shaped their present beliefs and influenced their behaviours.

Additionally, if current heads are struggling with some aspects of their role, they might take comfort that others have had similar experiences and have learned from both successes and difficulties.

References:

Bart, R.S. (2001) Learning by Heart San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Donaldson, G.A. (2001) Cultivating Leadership in Schools: Connecting People, Purpose, and Practice New York: Teachers College Press.

Gardner, H. (1995) Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership New York: Basic Books.

Gronn, P.C. (1994) Educational Administration's Weber', Educational Management and Administration 22: 224-31.

Leithwood, K., Jantzi, D., and Steinbach, R. (1999) Changing Leadership for Changing Times Philadelphia: Open University Press.

Sergiovanni, T.J.(1992) Moral Leadership: Getting to the Heart of School Improvement San Francisco: Jossy-Bass.

Dr Collinson is Associate Professor, Michigan State University, USA.