Paradigm Shift in Leadership

When I reflect on the leadership in failing schools, I realized that leadership has been based primarily on hierarchical management. Such approaches have led to the creation of rigid systems that depend on rules and procedures and encourage smoldering fires that require constant cure and aid. Hierarchical management does not encourage the analysis of or a focus on the underlying organizational problems. The shared leadership model, in contrast, requires orchestrating a process whereby the competing points of view of the staff coalesce into a cohesive vision. The school leader would model this behavior by embracing a holistic view of the school environment and shaping the internal structures and processes while keeping the bigger picture in mind.

Overseeing the totality of school functions requires leadership, not solely management. Understanding how management and leadership differ is an important concept in providing the kind of vision that is needed to restructure today's schools. Although management provides consistency, leadership, control, and efficiency, leadership is the catalyst for stimulating purpose, passion, and imagination. Management is fundamental to an authoritarian-driven hierarchical structure that seeks to maintain fragmentation in organizational structures. In contrast, leadership offers a opportunity to re-evaluate and restructure a system that is nonoperational, dysfunctional, or poorly operating by building bridges and alliances with colleagues and major stakeholders

Currently schools are not structured in ways that invite easy adaptation to student needs. As we begin to think about tailoring instructional strategies and interventions to fit diverse student needs, the paradigm that governs school organization will need to move towards hierarchically structured team roles and away from hierarchically structured compartmentalized roles. School administrators will be needed to encourage staff to embrace change rather than endure, or resist it. The changing paradigm in school organization is one that views students, teachers, and principals in distinctly different roles than they have traditionally held. We propose that the vision of leadership and school organization shift to one in which the student is viewed as client and customer rather than a product, the teacher is seen as an innovator and initiator rather than the production unit and the principal is viewed as an organizational leader rather than the production manager. Principals who can bring about effective instruction, foster a quality of leadership that encourages flexibility, open lines of communication, and invite negotiation among school staff hold the greatest potential for promoting successful student outcomes.

The new leader should be an instructional specialist. Assessment and instruction must be a seamless web that promotes teacher/student collaboration, active learning, critical thinking skills and multidisciplinary understanding (Khattri, Kane and Reeve, 1995). To do this, the leader must first acknowledge the fact that different students learn in different ways. The next step is to prepare differently. This means that activities are varied to address the "seven intelligences" as outlined by Howard Gardner in his 1983 book "Frames of Mind" and explored further by Thomas Armstrong (1994). The seven intelligences are:
1. Linguistic.2. Logical-mathematical.3. Spatial.4. Bodily-kinesthetic.5. Musical.6. Interpersonal.7. Intrapersonal.

Randy Schenkat (1993) suggests six task themes must underlie the Total Quality Management process in schools. The task themes are: 1. the nature of the problem; 2. the motivation for the task; 3. time frames to accomplish tasks; 4. the nature of solutions; 5. the human capacities used to accomplish the tasks; and 6. the assessment of the results or program evaluation.








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