Читать книгу Stories of Caring School Leadership - Mark A. Smylie - Страница 28

As we move to the collections of stories that illustrate how caring school leadership can be practiced, we take a moment to explore several important considerations (see Figure 0.5). The first is that the practice of caring school leadership is framed and guided by the profession of school leadership. While not inseparable, there is a distinction between personal caring as part of being human and caring as part of one’s professional role and responsibility. The profession of school leadership defines the purpose, foci, and scope of caring school leadership work and pairs it with professional knowledge, orientations, and skills. The profession also defines critical boundaries that distinguish personal from professional caring and that distinguish caring school leadership from caring work in other human service professions.

Figure 0.5 Surrounded by Care. Nicholas Fogg, Grade 12

School leadership focuses primarily on organizational leadership and management of schools to promote the learning, development, and well-being of students. According to the National Policy Board for Educational Administration Professional Standards for Educational Leaders 2015 (PSEL), school leadership in all its forms and functions is to be guided by professional norms of integrity, fairness, transparency, trust, collaboration, perseverance, learning, and continuous improvement. School leaders are to place children at the center of education and accept responsibility for each student’s academic success and well-being. School leaders are to safeguard and promote the values of democracy, individual freedom and responsibility, equity, social justice, community, and diversity. They are to lead with interpersonal and communication skill, social-emotional intelligence and insight, and understanding of all students’ and staff members’ background and cultures. In addition, school leaders are to provide moral direction for the school and promote ethical and professional behavior among faculty and staff.

A second consideration concerns the subjects of caring—that is, for whom and for what school leaders should be caring. The PSEL make clear that in all areas of their work, school leaders should care for and be caring of students, their academic success, and their overall well-being. Caring school leadership should have concurrent concern for individual and groups of students as well as teachers and professional staff. This concern centers on the school as an organization and how it supports a caring community for students, teachers, and staff. Caring school leadership also concerns others outside of school who affect students’ lives in school and in general. Most immediately, this includes families and helping families be caring of students. It involves enacting caring work in communities, being an advocate on behalf of children and families, promoting conditions that support children, and improving conditions that impede their learning and development. Caring school leadership applies to caring for the institution of schooling and for education in democratic society. Finally, caring school leadership encompasses caring for the profession and its ability to serve children, families, and communities well.

A third consideration is viewing the enactment of caring school leadership as principled practice. By this we mean that the practice of caring school leadership is propelled by principles of purpose, positive virtues and mindsets, and norms that orient the nature of one’s relationships with others—particularly meeting the needs and concerns of others, promoting the betterment of others, and helping others fulfill their human potential. The practice of caring school leadership is also principled as a moral and ethical endeavor that resides within the norms, expectations, and boundaries of the profession. The practice of caring school leadership evokes orientations toward others as human beings and how we see ourselves in professional roles working on behalf of fellow human beings, living and working in community, and being responsible for one another.

The practice of caring school leadership can also be viewed as principled in recognition of the situational and dynamic nature of leadership. Situational perspectives emphasize that effective leadership requires fashioning specific actions and interactions to fit particular objectives, tasks, situations, persons, and contexts. Inasmuch as these considerations are also continually changing, leadership practice must also continually change. It is therefore very difficult and not appropriate to consider leadership practice as a uniform set of discrete, immutable strategies or behaviors. Leadership practices that are similarly effective in different situations and settings can look very different. This recognizes the importance of thoughtfully and strategically aligning practices to situations and adapting those practices as situations change. Such alignment requires that norms and principles guide action choices. What makes caring school leadership principled practice is consistency with the aims of caring, the virtues and mindsets that orient and drive the pursuit of those aims, and the competencies that translate intention into actions and outcomes.

A critical consideration for practice is educational equity. We believe that caring school leadership is an essential means of promoting educational equity in schools. We have woven equity into the design and fabric of our model. We see every aspect of the model contributing to it. To be genuinely caring of students, a school leader would be caring of each and every student, especially those students who have been marginalized, who struggle to fit in and achieve in school, who have not received support, and who have not been provided high-quality opportunities to learn. To be caring calls on school leaders to work on behalf of each student, address their needs and concerns, help them achieve their interests, move forward on their life projects, and promote their well-being and human potential.

To be caring is to be driven by virtues that require a school leader to value and be empathetic and compassionate to each student, to be kind and fair, honest and authentic, patient, trustworthy, and respectful. To be caring demands that leaders be attentive and understand each student for who they are as individual learners and persons. This involves understanding them as members of groups; of races, ethnicities, religions, and cultures; and of different socioeconomic situations, each with historical and social and political dynamics. To be caring is to be motivated to support each and every student’s success and well-being and to act in ways consistent with the knowledge and understanding derived from caring’s attentiveness. The foundational elements of caring pull school leaders away from unproductive, deficit ways of thinking about some students and direct leaders toward more positive ways of thinking about and acting toward all students—ways that are socially, racially, and culturally responsive, equitable, and efficacious. Caring does not mean lowering expectations. Education leadership scholar Muhammad Khalifa argues the following:

Principals must both take the lead … [as] “warm demanders” and maintain relationships directly with students. These relationships will allow leaders to encourage students to succeed academically in ways that students will interpret through the lens of love and care.²²

²²Khalifa (2018, p. 158).

It is difficult to imagine any other pathway. Caring leads toward equity of opportunity for every student. Moreover, it is difficult to imagine credible school leadership for educational equity that does not place caring at its core.

We now turn to our three collections of stories of different ways in which caring school leadership is practiced. Each collection represents one arena of practice shown in our model of caring school leadership.