Part 5: Leadership learnings from opening a new school

In Part 4, I wrote about the importance of being faithful to our school community over time in the process of winning our new school community and I particularly focused on responsiveness as an important element of faithfulness. However, at times, our flexibility was sorely challenged and the words, “How low can you go?” were often on our minds. It was during this time that we came to understand that “demandingness” must go hand-in-hand with responsiveness. This relationship could not be a one-way street with staff being the only ones who were always bending over backwards – not if we wanted genuine community to grow. We also discovered that for faithfulness to occur people have to matter most.

Links to previous parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4

Being faithful continued

Bending over backwards because people matter most

Through my experiences of opening a new school, I discovered that I can bend a long way when I need to. Daily in schools we face tricky, no-win situations for which there is no obvious right answer to be found even after considerable investigation. It is our job as leaders to not try to dodge making decisions in these very difficult situations (which is tempting!) but to show leadership by clear decision-making. However, how do you make decisions when the facts of the matter are not clear or are in dispute and a “right” solution is not at all obvious? I learned to focus not so much on justice, or the rights and wrongs of the situation or who had the most power or who was likely to kick up the biggest “stink”; but, rather, I focused on considering how the various people involved in the situation would be affected by my decision and what would be in the best interests of each of them (including me as one of the players). In particular, I would ask the question, “What is most going to help the growth and development of those involved?” When I did this, I found that my actions were able to be much more flexible and I found myself much more willing and able to bend over backwards to ensure that what was best for people was at the heart of my leadership decisions/actions.

My long-term mentor and coach, Colin Prentice, wrote a book titled: “When People Matter Most: Vision Driven Leadership”. I began to experience what that meant. We often seek justice, and black and white solutions, and we should in the first instance, but beyond that, we need to think about how outcomes and solutions will benefit the most people the most. We need to look for the win…win…win. A situation highlighted this for me. Without going into any details, I sent out an email to teachers outlining an agreement I had come to with two parents. I was fully aware that this kind of agreement would be untenable if we tried to do it for every child in the school, or even a number of children. However, I believed that given the trickiness of the situation, it was a good outcome. The parents achieved what they wanted to achieve for their children, but I had also set some boundaries. A teacher came to me and intimated they did not feel happy with the agreement. To the teacher it felt as though we were giving all the ground in a situation that was not of our making. I agreed with the teacher in terms of the parents. But I pointed out that when I looked at it from the point of view of the children who were caught up in a situation that was not of their making, then this agreement was the very best solution for them. The way the parents had behaved was a matter that I needed to address separately.

I learned that faithfulness is making people, and what is best for them, your focus, whether it is saying no or saying yes. In every situation, in the final analysis, I saw it as my role to advocate for the best interests of the students in our school, even though it may have felt, at times, that parents’ unreasonable expectations went unchecked. However, this was made easier when I assumed good intent (see Part 1) and acknowledged that parents only ever act out of concern for their children and though there may have been a lesson they needed to learn, perhaps, in this instance, the most important lesson was for us to communicate that we do listen and we are trustworthy with their children. Perhaps another time the lesson might be about parents acting in a reasonable manner. 

He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tāngata, he tāngata, he tāngata. What is the most important thing in the world? It is people, it is people, it is people.

As I have said, this wasn’t always easy for me, but I was very fortunate because our first (non-establishment) Board Chair, David Waters, was a voice of reason and had a strong belief in resolving differences. He often found himself in the position of mediator to resolve situations in his own work. I had several conversations in which I explored my concern that we can sometimes resolve situations but never address the issues and not serve justice. His view was that what is seen as justice is always from someone’s perspective and that justice is not hard and fast. He was right. And sometimes our cry for justice can simply be a cry to be acknowledged as right, for our egos to be soothed or for blame to be apportioned. Especially for blame to be attributed.

Avoiding the power struggle

As someone who tries to be deeply principled, I needed to be sure that this was not mere situational ethics or utilitarianism in which anything goes as long as it fits the context and resolves the problem. Decision-making needed to be based on rationales and principles and not on personal preferences or simply how I was feeling at the time, or on what would most easily resolve the situation. Increasingly, as I have said, the vision principle that underpinned this decision-making was that people matter most. In the situation outlined above, when I thought about every person impacted by the situation, even though it felt as though the parents involved were getting their unreasonable, perhaps, misguided way, I also recognised that these were parents who felt that they did not have sufficient voice and I knew that they were entitled to feel as though they had influence/voice/power in relation to their children’s education. Agreeing to their demands, did not put us into a powerless situation, in fact, it acknowledged that we were in a very powerful position, after all, we had the power to make that decision. It is parents who often feel quite emasculated by their inability to impact their child’s education. I think as leaders we always need to be aware of this. The reason, I think, we often view parents as difficult parents is because we become embroiled in a power struggle with them. They feel that they have no voice and want more voice and we are saying to them, we are the professionals, you should just trust us. But should they? These are their precious children and as one parent said, “My child gets one shot at it.” I have found it helpful to reframe my thinking about “difficult” parents to those who simply want to know whether their child is realising their potential. At heart, they are acting in the best interests of their children, as they see it.

Demandingness

However, that said, I think there is more to this. The customer is not always right. If people matter most, then I am a person and teachers are people. And we matter. As I worked through these situations, I always needed to be aware of the impact on me, from time-to-time taking my own temperature, checking my leadership shape. Am I OK? How am I feeling? How am I being impacted? Is this situation undermining my deep sense of who I am? Am I beginning to feel damaged by what is happening? Is there anything that is happening that I need to address quite directly? This process of putting people first, must also assist me to find myself more deeply, not lose myself. And I always needed to take account of the impact on teachers. How were they feeling? As a result of the answers to these questions, there were certainly a few occasions when I, very directly, but hopefully, kindly, addressed the behaviour of parents with them.

How far should you bend? I think I learned that you keep bending over backwards until you discover really clearly where the boundary sits. If you stop too early, you will not discover what the real rationale or principle is. I had to ask myself, “Is this just my ego that the situation is hitting against, or is it a real principle? Can I bend further? When I became clear about my rationale for taking particular action, then I was ready to act in the situation.

I think in these situations you have to listen with your heart and not just your mind, and you have to acknowledge that the question that is at the heart of the issue will almost always be a very emotional one, not a cognitive one. Once a parent said to me that she would never be able to win an argument with me about education. It was then that I realised I had slipped into arguing with her. And of course, what she said was true. This was not solving the problem or making her feel better. If it comes down to arguing a point of view about education, then of course I would win. By slipping into arguing, I, as the educationalist, was only reinforcing her feelings of helplessness and disempowerment where her child’s education was concerned. I needed a different approach in which I acknowledged the deep fears and anxieties she felt about her son’s future whether they were real or unfounded.

However, it is important to acknowledge that implicit in our relationship with the school community must be both responsiveness and demandingness. To become a community, there has to be shared expectations of all parties and that includes parents as well as teachers. Though we have tested just how far we can bend to be responsive to parents, there would be no authenticity and little value in the relationship if the commitment and faithfulness remained one-sided. The relationship would quickly become demeaning. There were definitely times, particularly early on in 2012, when I felt as though we (staff) were being regarded and treated (by some parents) as servants. At one point a young teacher asked me, “How much rudeness should we put up with from parents?” There are different views about this. Some argue that parents are clients, and, like customers, the client is always right. I personally don’t subscribe to that view. Treating each other respectfully should always mark any relationship and I think the relationship between parents and school is markedly different from just a client/service provider relationship, and even in that type of relationship I am hearing more about businesses sacking clients.

Partnering with the school community

Research has shown quite clearly that the home-school relationship can positively impact students’ learning if it has the right characteristics. According to Bull, Brooking and Campbell (2008) these include:

• Partnerships that are multi-dimensional, and responsive to community needs.

• School partnerships that are collaborative and mutually respectful.

• Successful home–school partnerships are planned for, embedded within whole school development plans, well-resourced and regularly reviewed.

• Successful partnerships are goal oriented and focused on learning.

• There is timely two-way communication between school and parents.

If it is to be effective in achieving the purpose of the relationship (effective learning for children, first and foremost), then research is very clear, it should be a partnership and lead to the development of a community.

Timperley and Robinson (2002) agreed that the relationship between school and home should take the form of a partnership and suggested that “entities are in partnership when they each accept some responsibility for a problem, issue or task, and establish processes for accomplishing the task that promote learning, mutual accountability and shared power over relevant decisions” (p. 15). This suggests that while the school needed to be accountable for the actions it took to improve each child’s learning, the school was also entitled to expect parents to behave in certain ways that positively impacted their child’s learning. This included expressing their concerns, but it also included maintaining respectful and positive relationships with teachers. We know that parents acting in a disrespectful way, can hugely impact the quality of the learning relationship between the student and teacher and vice versa.

The research by Timperley and Robinson (2002) suggested that strong community (or strong "partnership" as they called it) is built around a central purpose or task that the community/partnership has been formed to achieve. When the community acknowledges that achieving the task is a joint endeavour; when the community comes to a shared understanding of what the central task of the community is; when there is clear agreement about what each community member's roles and responsibilities are in achieving the purpose; when each member of the community is committed to supporting the other members to carry out their roles; when members have shared values or agreement on how they are going to treat each other and how they are going to communicate with each other as they carry out this task; when members seek to understand each other's perspectives rather than each thinking their perspectives are the only valid ones; then, the community will be most effective and students will learn. Also, when a community behaves like this, all will thrive together, rather than just survive together.

Therefore, there are rights and responsibilities on both sides. As staff, we have a responsibility to be responsive to the needs and concerns of our school communities, but we also have the right to expect that parent behaviour supports their child’s learning. As we became firmer in our understanding that we had, not only a right, but a responsibility to “demand” certain behaviour from parents, we became more likely to address parental behaviour that we experienced as negative. We also raised a community-wide conversation about it through consultation to develop a Community Partnership document. To date, this document continues to be school policy and is sent out to the community for frequent review and discussion. The original purpose of the document was to generate a conversation about the nature of the partnership and to document that relationship. From time-to-time it has been used with parents to point out the kind of behaviours that will support the effective learning of students and the review process ensures that every so often we focus on partnership as an important aspect of our faithfulness to each other. This included us, as staff, holding it up as a mirror to reflect on our own behaviour and on the depth of our commitment to true partnership and community.

 Conclusion

 According to Dirham (2007), the combined effects of high responsiveness and high demandingness in relationships with others, places the leader in a good position to orchestrate renewal and change. We also found these to be not only effective but essential leadership capabilities as we opened a new school.

In Part 6, I will begin to look at managing my own authenticity – being faithful to myself as an aspect of leadership and winning the school community.

References

Dirham, S. (2007). How schools get moving and keep improving: leadership for teacher learning, student success and school renewal. Australian Journal of Education, 51 (3), pp. 263 - 275

Robinson, V. & Tmperley, H. (2002). Partnership: Focusing the Relationships on the Task of School Improvement. NZCER: Wellington, New Zealand.