Smart & Good High Schools - The Flippen Group

CHAPTER 4: The Professional Ethical Learning CommunityPELC 1: Develop shared purpose.Promising Practice 2:Recruit and develop school leaderscommitted to the pursuit ofexcellence and ethics.In developing the PELC, mission and vision are mostimportant, but strong, committed leadership is a closesecond. (See the box at right for recommendedresources.) The leaders of the best schools we visited weredetermined in their pursuit of excellence; they took pridein their accomplishments but were also sincerely humble.An administrator of a school that had received severalawards for excellence and ethics said:You have to succeed at success. If you do well and then getcocky and lazy, you fail at success. If you are successful andyou keep pushing, you succeed at success.Effective school leaders arewise about strategy.It is very hard to imagine excellence and ethics as the cornerstonesin a community where administrators espouseone set of standards for staff and another for themselves,where faculty and staff are not respected, and so on. Thebest school leaders are committed to excellence andethics—personally as well as organizationally. They arealso members of the PELC, not the sole architects. Theybecome coaches who seek to develop the leadership talentsof their faculty and staff and thereby cultivate newleaders poised to continue the vision.Finally, effective school leaders are wise about strategy—how to chart a course that creates and sustains institutionalchange. One school leader, who had taken a school onthe verge of closing to becoming a National School ofCharacter, commented:It’s not enough to have a good vision. There is always a gapbetween what is and what ought to be. To lead and sustaineducational change, you have to consider the factors that cansupport, or make difficult, school reform. Many well-intentionedschool leaders are set up for a mugging because theydo not plan for and cultivate these cultural forces. I havefound it important to consider questions such as:●●●1.2PELCHow can we gain the support of our key stakeholders,including our alumni?Who might oppose or sabotage new directions?How should we communicate with our diverse stakeholdersabout new directions? Who should know what, when?Leaders lead by serving.—THOMAS SERGIOVANNIRESOURCES ON LEADERSHIPAssociation for Supervision and Curriculum Development.(April, 2004). Special Issue: Leading in toughtimes. Educational Leadership, 61 (7).Collins, J.C. (2001). Good to great. New York:Harper Business.Deal, T.E. and Peterson, K.D. (1999). Shaping schoolculture. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.DeRoche, E.F. and Williams, M.M. (2001). Charactereducation: A guide for school administrators. Lanham,MD: Scarecrow Press.DuFour, R. and Eaker, R. (1998). Professional LearningCommunities at Work. Bloomington, IN: NationalEducation Service.Fullan, M. (2001). Leading in a culture of change.San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.Komives, S.R., Lucas, N., et al. (1998). Exploringleadership: For college students who want to make adifference. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.Kotter, J.P. and Cohen, D.S. (2002). The heart ofchange: Real-life stories of how people change theirorganizations. Boston, MA: Harvard Business SchoolPress.Kouzes, J.M. and Posner, B.Z. (2002). The leadershipchallenge. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.Kouzes, J.M. and Posner, B.Z. (2003). Credibility:How leaders gain it and lose it, why people demandit. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.National Association of Secondary School Principals,(2004). Breaking Ranks II: Strategies for leadinghigh school reform. Reston, VA: NASSP.Patti, J. and Tobin, J. (2003). Smart school leaders:Leading with emotional intelligence. Dubuque, IA:Kendall/Hunt.Sergiovanni, T.J. (2000). Leadership for the schoolhouse.San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.66Smart & Good High Schools