Viceprincipal leadership The share or not to share

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Vice-principal leadershipThe share or not to
share?

• The mood
• The context
• The ideas
• The comments
• The end

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Tell me

• If you were to write an article describing your
  life as a vice-principalship, what would the
  title be?

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Recent Articles on the VP

• Help for principals who dont want to be top dog
• The administrative oxymoron assistant principals
  as peacemakers
• Painful home truths
• Going back to the floor
• Making the most of it
• Painful hometruths
• A step into the principalship
• Dancing through a minefield
• Mentoring leadership
• Toughest Job in Education
• Assisting the assistant principal
• Other duties as assigned four rules for
  surviving the assistant principalship
• Assistant principals the case for shared
  instructional leadership
• Tough guy
• Increasing the leadership role of the assistant
  principal
• Deputies dodge the headship loop
• How to select a good assistant principal
• Its a dawgs life as a deputy if youre not
  careful
• The party of the second part

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Other duties as assigned 4 rules for surviving
the assistant principalship

• Know your job description and everyone elses,
  too
• Respect everyone
• Trust you instincts
• Remember that no matter what happens, youre
  going to eat lunch tomorrow. (Johnson, 2000)

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Dancing through a mine field(Jorgenson, 2000)

• Get organised
• Be flexible
• Be collegial
• Be compassionate
• Be visible
• Be consistent
• Market your strengths
• Enlist parent support

BE EVERYTHING
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Harvey (1994) on the VP

• Position is increasingly problematic with recent
  reform
• Support for principal and teachers and to provide
  for welfare of students.
• Are defined by the professional needs of other
  school participants.
• Mainly reactive, little control of how, wide
  range of loosely structured tasks.
• With reform, a further intensification of
  workload
• By supporting others - largely preoccupied with
  routine and org. stability
• Role has not been redefined as jobs have been
  externally redefined.
• VPs are a wasted educational resource in many SBM
  schools.
• Failure to capture creative energies of VPs.
• Oversight by policy makers to assess the
  potential of VPs during turbulence.
• Either reluctance/overkill by principals to
  delegate responsibility.
• Traditional expectations of the teachers for a
  high level of support
• A lack of opportunities for the professional
  development
• The work overload of VPS and their inability to
  take collective action to define the role

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The sharing it really better? Vice Principal as
Boundary Rider

• Main Argument
• From strict and heroic to shared
• Teams - valuable but romanticized
• Leadership of multiple teams (not A)
• Strong leadership

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Outline

• Part 1
• Assertions, Reality, Propositions
• Why strong leadership is needed
• Part 2
• What strong leadership might look like -
  Boundary Rider

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Shared or team leadership

• When has it worked? WHY
• When has it not worked? WHY

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Strong leadership propositions

• P1 As traditional structures relationships
  dissolve, and leadership becomes more dispersed,
  schools need strong leadership to replace the
  functions served by the formal rules used to
  guide their behaviour.
• P2 As school cultures become less binding
  because of more scattered structures and
  leadership, schools need strong leadership to
  sustain values, norms and beliefs which bind
  multiple teams together.

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• P3 As formal hierarchies dissolve and informal
  hierarchies strengthen to replace them, schools
  need strong leadership to harness micropolitical
  behaviour and preserve the focus of the school.

• P4 As shared leadership increasingly becomes the
  norm, strong leadership is needed to confirm the
  value of individual work and to ensure equity in
  terms of contribution. As senior
  leaders resist sharing leadership, strong
  leadership is needed to balance individual
  ambitions and needs with demands for
  collectivism.

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• P5 As the pressure for teams and shared
  leadership grows, strong leadership is needed to
  ensure that teams are not formed just to be
  trendy and that the sharing of leadership is
  either meaningful, or discarded.

• P6 As teams of leaders gain more discretion,
  strong leadership is needed to ensure that they
  have the required knowledge and skills to make a
  positive difference to student learning.
• P7 As shared leadership gives teams more
  discretion, strong leadership is required to
  demand that all leaders share accountability
  for actions and outcomes.

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Tell me how wrong I am!

• Based on your experiences, the benefits of
  sharing leadership and moving more to distributed
  leadership.

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Quality Team LeadershipLeader as Boundary Rider
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Boundary Rider as Quality Team Leader

• a leader who holds that the students are the only
  reason for the schools existence, and that the
  loss of even one student is a major disaster.
  When it comes to saving students, sharing
  anything takes second place.
• a leader who protects and sustains justice and
  integrity, and holds the various teams together
  through welding and clarifying shared values.
• a leader who moves easily between the different
  professional groups within the school - between
  all brands of teams, between the school and the
  department, and between parents and staff.
• a leader who can see between and across different
  perspectives, thereby allowing them to see new
  possibilities while retaining the freedom to
  seize new opportunities.
• a keeper of fences - who interfaces between
  teams within the school and the wider
  environment, repairing breeches, fighting for
  resources, and protecting students and staff.
• a leader who knows the intricacies of the school
  and what happens, and should happen, within its
  boundaries.

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Quality leaders of teams

• provide a protective shield for students, which
  guarantees their access to high quality learning
  opportunities regardless of organisational form.
• build an environment where professional trust is
  important but is something which is earned rather
  than blindly given.
• replace weakening organisational structures and
  cultures with coherent frameworks to enable
  co-ordinated and focused action.
• build a sense of purpose, a way forward, and
  shared values across teams.

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• support shared leadership and teamwork but
  attempt to manage micropolitical activity toward
  the productive rather than the destructive.

• maintain elements of a stable and predictable
  environment in order to make change more
  meaningful.
• create and maintain a positive mood and look
  after the welfare of teams.
• sustain the power of collectivism to create and
  change, but dont dismiss individuality,
  implementation and routine.

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What will I do on Monday Morning?

• Create teacher trust.
• Create certainty through building that stability
  platform.
• Create the insulation that used to be provided by
  bureaucracy.
• Create connections between leadership, teams and
  individuals who take on shared leadership roles.
• Create the conditions within which shared
  leadership still allows teachers to actually
  teach.

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Quality Team LeadershipLeader as Boundary Rider
The Strong Among the Shared
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Boundary Rider

• Is a boundary rider a role for you?
• What blocks you from performing the role?
• Can shared and strong hierarchical leadership
  coexist for VPs?
• What will YOU do on Monday morning?

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The career perspectivesof deputy principals

• Potential aspirants, active aspirants,
  unpredictables, settlers, unavailable aspirants