trying to fulfill the responsibilities of
managing both the internal and external
environments.
; School leaders may spend so
much time developing contacts and
managing external relationships that
they grow distant from the work going
on inside the school.
; Leaders who leave the school—like
doctors or lawyers who leave their practices for a rival firm—will take many of
their contacts and relationships with
them; the new leader will have to
reassemble the network of relationships
that the school needs to be successful.
To combat these problems, school
leaders need to distribute the work both
outside and inside the school. This
distribution of responsibilities can grow
out of a shared knowledge of a school’s
goals. School members who attend
conferences, take courses, and just walk
around in the community can help
explain the school’s mission, recruit
qualified staff, find resources, and
advance the school’s interests. Without
that common understanding, members
of the school community can sometimes
do more harm than good by inadvertently spreading conflicting messages
about the school or, in some cases, by
deliberately undermining their
colleagues’ efforts.
Scan and Seed
Far beyond typical parental involvement
activities or show-and-tell sessions for
administrators, connections between
staff members and parents, community
members, district administrators, policy-makers, and other educators make it
possible to discover common interests
and develop the wider understanding
and trust that people need to work
constructively toward common ends.
These connections also give schools the
capacity to both scan the environment—
to learn about issues, concerns, and new
developments outside the school—and
seed the environment—to put insiders
and advocates into positions of power
and influence on the outside.
Getting staff to participate in and lead
local and national professional development activities can serve as a crucial
avenue for both information and influence. Teachers at Peninsula Elementary
School, a suburban high-performing
K– 5 school in the San Francisco Bay
Area, regularly serve on the district’s
literacy leadership team. In one
instance, a veteran 4th grade teacher
from Peninsula learned that another
teacher on the team had an approach
that matched Peninsula’s emphasis on
direct instruction. After learning that the
teacher was getting worn out at her own
school, the veteran teacher urged her to
apply for a new job at Peninsula. When
she was hired, Peninsula gained another
advocate for the district’s approach to
literacy instruction—a crucial avenue of
influence when some schools in the
district adopted whole-language
approaches to literacy that the school
found inconsistent with its own
philosophy.
Schools can also invite outsiders in to
learn more about the school’s work and,
in some cases, draw them directly into
school activities. For example, Dewey, a
progressive, student-centered school in
Peninsula’s district, organizes orientation meetings, coffees, open houses, and
information nights that enable parents
and community members to learn about
the school. Although in many schools
these are seen as obligatory nods toward
parent involvement, at Dewey these
activities are part of a strategic series of
initiatives designed to ensure that
everyone understands the basic goals,
philosophy, and work of the school. In
addition, these informal meetings give
the principal opportunities to recruit
parents and community members for
various roles and responsibilities.
For example, the principal created a
community relations committee
composed of teachers and parents
whose role it was to bring to attention
any emerging issues about the school
and district. That committee provided
crucial support for the principal when a
new superintendent came to the district
and mandated the use of a new report
card that would have supplanted the
school’s narrative reports. The principal
worked with the community relations
committee to engage the superintendent’s staff and a school board
member in a daylong retreat in which
they all studied the school’s assessment
process. In the end, the administrators
attending the review recommended that
the superintendent give the school a
waiver from implementing the new
report card.
This effort had two other important
consequences. First, the administrators
decided to incorporate some aspects of
Dewey’s narrative approach into the
report card the district required other
schools to use. Second, the new superintendent began to recognize other
instances in which district policies were
likely to conflict with Dewey’s
