A4 – Success and Leadership (Pepperdine OMAET Paper)

Pepperdine OMAET – EDC639: Mentorship & Team Leadership – Spring 2002

“Rien ne réussit comme le succès” Dumas “Nothing Succeeds Like Success”

In a previous essay I compared my current school site, herein called “Horacio Hornblower Elementary,” with my previous school site, “Pontius Pilate Elementary.” I noted that one of the largest differences between the two sites was my current site’s habit of success and tremendous community/parental support and my previous site’s “working harder but getting nowhere” blight. In this current essay I will examine the two schools in terms of the administrators’ leadership styles, the relationships between the powerful groups/committees/persons, and the role of the schools within the surrounding community.

The administrator at Pontius Pilate Elementary, Mrs. Candace Conversant began her career as a classroom teacher working primary the lower elementary grades Kindergarten through Third grade over ten-years beginning in another school district before coming to Pontius Pilate’s school district. At one point she served as a teacher at Pontius Pilate before going to another school and then coming back as Pontius Pilate’s principal. Because of her love for the people and the language, Mrs. Conversant, though not a native speaker, became fluent in Spanish. This, in combination with her expertise in Literacy and Bilingual issues, seemed to make her an excellent candidate to be principal at Pontius Pilate Elementary (99% of Pontius Pilate’s incoming Kindergarten students were Spanish-only speakers from 1995-1999).

I came to Pontius Pilate Elementary as a 6th grade teacher in 1995 during Mrs. Conversant’s third year as principal. Two years prior (1993-1994) the school district suffered from a divisive and prolonged contract dispute and teacher strike. This was during Mrs. Conversant’s first year as principal. During my first year there were still some remnant bad feelings and distrust at the school.

In her personal style Mrs. Conversant tended to act more like my older sister than my administrator. While the proposed effect was to create familiarity and ease, it also made it difficult to work through problems without them feeling personal. She was always sharing personal information about her family whether in a one-to-one conversation or in a whole staff meeting. Perhaps her intent was for us to all feel like “family” but it did, at times, make some feel ill-at-ease and make the meetings unnecessarily long. Grade level leaders (with the tech coordinator) met every Tuesday afternoon and the whole staff met every Wednesday afternoon. Grade levels were given one hour planning time during library/computer lab/PE pull-out time.

Pontius Pilate was replete with committees, grade level committees, curriculum committees, school site committees, technology committees. As a new teacher it was a great experience in how schools work (or would like to work). But over the course of my six years at Pontius Pilate I wonder how much of the committee work was little more than a means to deal with the massive amounts of paperwork required to run the school. Add to this, in my last years at Pontius Pilate, because of Pontius Pilate’s failing test scores, teachers were required to attend endless scores of “improvement” meetings, and fill out endless surveys, questionnaires and data-sets that filled up their grade level planning time and were due back at the district office “yesterday.”

Mrs. Conversant seemed quite comfortable delegating responsibilities to others. This worked in my favor when I got on the technology committee as a first year teacher and was one of three teachers to represent our school when the district began to create it’s district technology plan. This style also made it possible for me to work with another teacher at my grade level to devise a team-teaching process that made it possible for my partner and I to focus on our subjects in more depth, create greater interest for our students, and contribute to an improvement in their test scores. The freedom to innovate worked well with my team teaching partner and I.

It also worked well for me (and our site) when it fell to me to generate the technology specs for transforming our one-computer-per-classroom school to becoming a technology/broadcasting Federally funded Magnet school with over 250 networked computers, computer lab, and 3-camera real-time digital-video broadcasting studio. Clearly she was willing to let others crunch the numbers and run the specs in areas where she had little or no expertise (I had very close district support and guidance from the district’s director of technology). As a successful classroom teacher and technology program designer this style (hands-off) worked well for me.

But when it came to implementing the requirements of our grant she was just as absent in the enforcement as she had been in the original decisions to purchase which pieces of equipment. For example, we had clearly stated expectations on how teachers would use the technology for classroom management and instruction at first and then, as the number of computers in the classroom increased, the emphasis would be towards more hands-on student usage that was to be integrated with the rest of the instruction. Alas, she almost never attended training and rarely visited classes to check to see if the technology was being used as promised.

Pontius Pilate, like any group, was populated by a small group of over-achievers who, in this case, jumped at the chance to use the technology, another somewhat smaller group who were determined to never touch the stuff, and a large middle group who just weren’t sure. I don’t know if she thought that being a cheerleader for the program when we had public or district visitors was her role, but that’s what it eventually degenerated to.

As bad as it was when contending with uncooperative staff, she was even less helpful where I really needed the help when working with all of the district groups that we needed help from. For example, when the district delayed, and in some cases downright stonewalled, facility upgrades required in the grant, she fatalistically just said that that was the way the district is. At one point, during the summer, I was so frustrated with the delays that I emailed the director of maintenance and operations that they can let dates slip but I have to have the site up and running when teachers and students show up in September. I CC’d the email to the director of technology, district magnet coordinator, and assistant superintendent to make sure that everyone knew what wasn’t getting done. Where was my principal? I don’t know, she left the office the first week of July and I didn’t see her again until the last week of August, even though I was onsite almost every day of the summer break. I got my hand slapped for that email and was told to use the (then invisible) chain of command, but M&O got off their butts and started working on our site soon after this.

In retrospect, her hands-off approach and the problems that we had with the grant implementation, and other organizational deficiencies can be traced back to decisions that were made years before when she first came on staff. It is the “natural” tendency of any newly appointed leader to sweep away any reminders of the past person-in-charge and replace them with ones own “new” programs. Mrs. Conversant did that, first by breaking up a grade level of teachers who had become accustomed to telling the other grade levels how things were going to be and then by making the PTA feel “unwelcome.” The first maneuver was a necessary evil if the whole site was going to work together (but created an unfulfilled power-vacuum). The second one was most unfortunate in the long run. Remember that the school and district underwent a difficult contract dispute and strike during her first year, creating a “state at siege” mentality. Allowing the PTA to “go away” and her non-relationship with the community managed to keep the “state at siege” feeling going long past the memory of the strike.

Clearly her intention was to eliminate “traditions” that didn’t contribute to the improvement of the school. Eventually, however, this degenerated to a “it may have been done that way when X was here, but that’s not going to be the way it’s going to be while I’m here” for no obvious reason other than to change things. Thus, one of the most essential resources of any community educational institution, the good will, participation and ownership of the surrounding community, evaporated and then died. During my first three or four years at Pontius Pilate there was no PTA. Then in the fifth and sixth years a skeleton of one began to appear, but staff participation was almost non-existent and administrative support feigned. Parents came to Pontius Pilate as visitors and not as a community of participants. As I noted in my earlier study, this seems to be the one major factor, community good will, participation and ownership, that clearly separates Pontius Pilate Elementary from the much more successful Horacio Hornblower Elementary.

The principal of Horacio Hornblower Elementary, Mr. Dave Davies, was also a classroom teacher serving in elementary and middle schools. His last teaching job was as the computer lab instructor at a middle school where he also become an assistant principal. He also has a friendly, easy going style. Horacio Hornblower also has its fair share of committees. Grade level leaders meet with Mr. Davies every other Thursday morning and the whole staff meets on the alternating Thursdays. Thursday are also minimum days to facilitate grade level meetings and each grade level is given one planning day every month.

Whereas much of the grade level planning time at Pontius Pilate was occupied with district paperwork, Mr. Davies has made it his business to keep the district stuff to an absolute minimum so that the classroom professionals can do what they do best (and keep those test scores ever higher). Besides running interference for the teachers Mr. Davis is also in every classroom and on the playground and generally present everywhere. He’s in my computer lab at least once a week (but then I’m the new guy in town . . . Hmmm).

And just at Pontius Pilate, the staff at Horacio Hornblower could be subdivided into the small over-achieving group, the footdraggers, and the middle group. But because of the very high standards and another factor, the foot-draggers are less influential and the middle group is largely very successful (just not as over-the-top as the over-achievers). But they all want to achieve and see that as just another expected part of the job.

The other factor is the huge parent/community participation in every aspect of life at Horacio Hornblower. It can be a tightrope walk for the administrator to work with such a powerful and successful group as Hornblower’s PTA but as one who has worked with two very hard working staffs, the biggest difference is the relationship with the community/parents and how well the administrator balances these influences with the needs of providing an environment for learning.

Sizer makes a big deal in “Horace’s School” about the necessity for the staff, students and community to feel that their school is a safe environment for thoughtful learning (pp. 120ff). While Hornblower doesn’t take the example to its “exhibitions” extreme, it does engender the sense of a community of learners within the larger local community.

My reflection from my observations and experiences is that the role of leadership is a role of relationships. I was most successful with those whom I spent enough time with to understand their needs and communicate mine. Whether this person was a district purchaser, teacher’s-aide, director of technology or fellow teacher, it was all in the time to understand and communicate that things could begin to get done. It was first in observing, listening and learning that I could best direct and assist. Leadership was a function or role not a hierarchical position or level. JBB

“Good schools are thoughtful places. The people in them are known. The units are small enough to be coherent communities of friends. Amenities are observed. There are quiet places available as well as places for socializing. No one is ridiculed. No one is the servant of another. The work is shared. The entire place is thoughtful: everything in its routines meets a standard of common sense and civility. At such places do adolescents learn about the thoughtful life.” “Horace’s School” by Theodore Sizer, p. 128

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