We are importing our theories of leadership from management disciplines anchored in business schools, says Professor Thomas Sergiovanni, author of Leadership for the Schoolhouse. "We import our leadership practices from corporations, baseball teams, armies, transportation systems and other organisations," says Sergiovanni, the Lillian Radford professor of education at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.
These leadership theories start by emphasising ends first, he says. "The ends-ways-means approach works well for enterprises where work patterns can be described as linear, but a more effective and more rational strategy for schools is a means-ways-ends approach. The means-ways-ends approach allows people to choose goals and paths as they go along."
We must begin with the premise that inquiry is at the heart of the teacher's work, he says, and then design out from this premise to the conditions of schooling needed to enhance this work.
"I believe a theory for the schoolhouse needs to be aesthetically pleasing," he explains. "Its language and images, for example, should be beautiful, should evoke thoughts that are consistent with the school's human purposes and condition. I believe that a theory for the schoolhouse should encourage principals, teachers, parents and students to be self-managing, to accept responsibility for what they do, and to feel a sense of obligation and commitment to do the right thing."
He speaks of a school's capital - its social capital, intellectual capital, academic capital and professional capital. Ordinary schools are efficient developers of material capital, he says. This includes the different types of material capital such as fiscal and physical. But, he says, communities are "efficient developers" of human capital - social, academic, intellectural, professional and other forms of capital.
"When students have access to social capital they find the support needed for learning," says Sergiovanni. "But when social capital is not available, students generate it for themselves by turning more and more to the student sub-culture. The result, too often, is the development of behaviour which works against what schools are trying to do."
SERGIOVANNI believes that teachers are less influenced by management and more influenced by what they believe, by what peers believe and do, and by other more elusive cultural matters. A school community must come together around shared values and ideas because "real schools" are managerially loose and culturally tight. Finally, he says, it needs to be understood that cultural change is the real agenda, not implementing single innovations.
"The lessons are clear," he concludes. "Leadership for meaning, leadership for problem-solving, collegial leadership, leadership as shared responsibility, leadership which serves school purposes, leadership which is tough enough to demand a great deal from everyone, and leadership which is tender enough to encourage the heart - these are the images we need for school as communities."
