Making leadership everyone's responsibility

We are living in difficult times. This comes as no news to us as we see the headlines and read the local papers every day. Some of the articles are quite pungent and explore matters that really matter and try to create sense in the vast superficiality and artificiality that often surrounds us. It is more than clear that our country's future lies in our capabilities in harnessing the collective genius of our people, and so in all sectors. This is a number one challenge.

The question that I, as an educator, want to address is what are we doing in our school systems that holds us back from using the collective genius of all our people?

Through various visits to local and foreign institutions, through conversations, through my readings I have pursued the answer. From these explorations two themes consistently arose from the responses that I got: the need for leadership and a clear focus.

Leadership density

Various people that I talked to offered some interesting, fresh and atypical definitions of leadership. They argued that leadership is a skill that we all need to develop and use every day. Most pointed out that leadership is not a position, but a way of doing for everyone in a school system. In other words, all members should take on the responsibility for the whole by ensuring that they direct their energies towards organisational priorities. Getting everyone involved in leadership as a way of doing builds an organisation's leadership density, which yields benefits for the whole.

A typical example of this is a group of secondary school teachers I knew who felt disappointed with the science results of their students and decided to do something about it. They took it upon themselves to survey the students about the quality of the science curriculum and teaching methods. The teachers were not told to do it; they knew it was the right thing to do and did it. They knew it was the best thing to do if they wanted better results. They learned first hand that the students felt bored and disconnected with the existing programme. This helped the teachers reflect on current content and practices and helped them to create a more rigorous, focused programme that challenged all students and did their utmost to connect the syllabus with student experiences.

Clear focus

The conversations on leadership also shift to the topic of having a clear focus. If we want to harness the collective genius of everyone in a school system the school head cannot keep on doing everything on his/her own, or involve only the senior members. We need to make hard choices about what we do. Establishing a clear focus thus fits into the concept of leadership density: If everyone in the system understands the goals, then the work of leadership by all should have a laser-like focus on what is most critical.

For example, on a visit to Sweden I found primary school teachers and the heads unified in saying that literary and numeracy skills were key targets for their pupils. They all agreed that a child without such skills in today's knowledge-based society would be relegated to poverty.

And, in a Maltese school, four principles drive the school forward: collaboration, personalisation, performance-based assessment and relevance. The efforts are currently directed at reviewing both the content of the curriculum, the educational programme itself, and the planning and decision making structures and processes to reflect these principles.

Building on our strengths

There are many other great examples from various countries that practise these two essential skills of leading and focusing each and every day. What is interesting to note is that the schools are generally small in size, tend not to have all-encompassing curricula or else offer alternative programmes and routes, and offer active, in-depth learning for all their students. They also support both student and adult learning in an effort to establish a culture where learning and leadership are part of the system for all to experience.

These are important policy issues. We need schools that provide alternative programmes that provide - even under one roof - the opportunity for students to follow programmes that are meaningful to them, to our society, and that lead to learning. Secondly, we need schools that cultivate the right values. As a profession and a vocation we need to clearly identify what we stand for and what we expect within a community of learning.

There is little doubt that if we could harness the collective energies of all the educators, students, and staff in schools around the world, we could make the changes needed to educate all our children. Leadership density and a clear focus are great places to begin.

Dr Bezzina is from the Office of Professional Practice, Department of Education Studies, Faculty of Education, University of Malta.