Читать книгу Stories of Caring School Leadership - Mark A. Smylie - Страница 27

Following the main points of our discussion, we present a model of caring school leadership in Figure 0.4. This model contains three major components: (1) foundational elements for caring leadership; (2) arenas of caring school leadership practice; and (3) student outcomes. Reflecting how caring works, our model traces with arrows relationships among these components and how each relates to others. Our model does not focus on every aspect of school leadership or how the totality of school leadership work might be performed in a caring manner. Rather, it focuses on three key arenas of practice particularly associated with caring for students: (1) caring in interpersonal relationships with students; (2) cultivating schools as caring communities; and (3) fostering caring in families and communities beyond the school. While caring for teachers, staff members, parents, and families is critically important, our model focuses on students because their learning and development, their academic success, and their overall well-being are the primary responsibility of school leadership.

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Figure 0.4 Surrounded by Care. Nicholas Fogg, Grade 12

Our model shows caring school leadership proceeding from the aims, positive virtues and mindsets, and competencies of caring. It suggests that the presence and strength of these elements enable and shape the character and impact of caring leadership practice. At the center of the model lie three arenas of practice particularly associated with caring for students. The first arena involves school leader caring in interpersonal relationships with students. The second arena, cultivating schools as caring communities for students, involves developing the capacity and context for caring within the school. This arena encompasses work to develop caring learning environments in classrooms and in student-teacher and student-peer relationships. It also involves work to develop organizational conditions that support the development and enactment of caring throughout the school. The third arena of caring school leadership practice focuses on fostering caring for students beyond the school in families and in the community at large. Bridging the gaps between schools and families and communities is a crucial part of school leaders’ work for which many leaders feel ill-prepared. It is work to which most principals devote little time. Nevertheless, we know that school leaders can play an important role in developing the broader systems of caring that students experience and that contribute to their growth, success, and well-being.

In the lived work of school leaders, these arenas of practice are often intertwined, but our model does not presume that they are. A school leader may be particularly attentive to interpersonal caring with students but not to developing the school as a caring community—or vice versa. A leader may be strong in working outside the school with civic leaders and community organizations on behalf of students and their families but weak in interpersonal caring of students and developing caring within the school. Our model allows for the possibility of one arena of caring school leadership practice compensating for another.

We would expect principals to act in caring ways and provide caring support to students with whom they are able to form trusting interpersonal relationships. At the same time, to ensure that every student receives caring support, principals can promote teacher and staff caring so that each student experiences caring relationships with a number of adults in the school. By doing this and in fostering caring in families and communities, principals need not take on all the work themselves. Principals will be much more effective if they develop the capacity of others, work in partnership with others, and guide and support others to step up and be better at caring.

The right side of the model shows the student outcomes that we expect from caring school leadership. The model identifies several types of outcomes important to students that we discussed earlier, including positive psychological states, social integration and responsibility, capacity for achieving goals, engagement, academic success, and capacity for caring. The model indicates that the stronger the practices of caring school leadership, the more likely caring’s benefits to students will accrue. We recall that students benefit most when the totality of caring they experience is strong and positive.

The major parts of the model are laid out in linear order, indicating with one-way arrows that the foundational elements of caring shape caring leadership practice and, in turn, promote student outcomes. The model indicates with feedback arrows that student outcomes can shape the nature of caring leadership practice and the three foundational elements of caring. For example, students’ responses to positive experiences of caring may motivate leaders to continue those practices. When students ignore or resist particular actions or interactions intended as caring, attentive leaders may seek more information, reflect, and perhaps alter what they are doing. While it does not depict them, our model recognizes the importance of dynamic and interrelated interpersonal, organizational, and extraorganizational contexts. These contexts and the importance of developing and managing them are emphasized by our framing of the three arenas of caring leadership practice. While the arrows in the model suggest a sequential order of elements, the reality of leadership generally and caring school leadership in particular is more nonlinear and dynamic.

Finally, we recognize that there may be crucial differences between our model’s application to a caring leader’s relationship with an individual student and its application to a leader’s relationship with a whole student body, with adults in a school, or with families and community. We also recognize there may be differences between the caring of an individual school leader and the caring that emanates from a schoolwide community. The latter may hold additional meaning and exert greater influence than the sum of individual interpersonal caring therein.