Getting everyone involved in leadership as a way of doing builds an organisation’s leadership density, which yields benefits for the whole.Getting everyone involved in leadership as a way of doing builds an organisation’s leadership density, which yields benefits for the whole.

The social fabric in our country is changing. The tapestry being woven around us is quite different from the ones we grew in. Old and current ways of thinking and doing need to be revisited to address the issues that confront us.

Addressing such challenges relies on our capabilities in harnessing the collective genius of our people. The question I would like to address is what are we doing in our school system that holds us back from using the collective genius of all our people?

The way we have conceptualised and implemented educational reform over the years has an impact on the type of answer we can give to this question. In all this, we need an education system that is not reactionary but evolutionary in nature.

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 I got: the need for leadership and developing a clear focus.

Leadership density

Various people I talked to offered some interesting, fresh and atypical definitions of leadership. They argued that leadership is a skill 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 teachers 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.

They sought expert advice in pedagogy, assessment and in understanding and interpreting the published results. This helped the teachers reflect on current content and practices and helped them 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, we need to change the way we look at governance, power and control. We need more distributed forms of leadership. 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.

During a visit to Sweden, I found primary school teachers and the heads unified in saying that literacy 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 I am directly involved in, 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 programme itself and the planning and decision-making structures and processes to reflect these principles.

Building on our strengths

There are many other 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 curriculums or offer alternative programmes and routes and offer active, in-depth learning for 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. Unless we take a serious look at how reforms are undertaken and change managed we will not be able to make this leap.

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

Christopher Bezzina is associate professor at the University of Malta’s Faculty of Education and coordinator of the Master’s programmes in educational management and leadership.

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