Setting the Stage - Joseph Murphy
Overview:
Dr. Joseph Murphy from Vanderbilt University
Dr. Joseph Murphy from Peabody College of Education of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee states that for the last quarter-century, the world has witnessed a nearly unbroken chain of initiatives to reform education. These interventions have germinated in a wide variety of ideological seedbeds. They have emerged in response to powerful changes underway in the larger economic, political, and social environments in which the schooling enterprise is nested. One significant line of work to strengthen schools emphasizes teachers assuming greater leadership.
What are the forces supporting teacher leadership? What is the “theory in action”? What are the pathways needed to bring teacher leadership to life? What are the barriers that prevent it from taking hold? What are the key ingredients needed to make it work? What is the present view of leadership by the principal? These questions are addressed in this presentation.
Segments:
- Introduction
- What Are the Forces Supporting Teacher Leadership?
- Redefining School Leadership
- Changing Calculus of School Improvement
- What’s the Theory and Action? What’s the Engine That Drives This Reform?
- Pathways to Create Teacher Leadership in Schools
- Why Teacher Leadership is Difficult to Infuse – Organizational Structures
- Why Teacher Leadership is Difficult to Infuse – Cultures and Norms
- Areas of Support for Schools to Develop Teacher Leadership
- What Can Teachers Do?
- It’s About Culture
- What About Professional Autonomy
Part 1 - Introduction
Joseph Murphy establishes the focus of his presentation, namely teacher leadership as a necessary condition of work for teachers, for organizational improvement, and for academic and social learning for students. He refers to Ken Leithwood’s research and observes that teacher leadership cuts across a number of the conditions and variables that Leithwood talks about in his book, and for that reason, it is a particularly important condition of work. Murphy proposes to focus on six important questions and look deeper into the infrastructure and some of the ideas around the concept of teacher leadership.
Think about:
- Do you agree with Joseph Murphy that teacher leadership is a particularly important condition of work? If not, which working condition do you feel is of more importance?
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Part 2 - What Are the Forces Supporting Teacher Leadership?
Murphy poses the first question we need to ask ourselves: “What are the forces supporting teacher leadership?” He explains that the idea of leadership-dense organizations is a relatively new phenomenon. Three changes are crucial to whether teacher leadership gets off the ground, makes a difference in working conditions for teachers, and improves schools in term of student academic and social learning: the struggle to rebuild organizational foundations of schooling, the changing nature of leadership in these newly rebuilt schools, and the shift in how we think about school improvement.
Think about:
- What are your reactions to Murphy ‘s statements:
- “What we are seeing in the western world is a real struggle to rescaffold our schooling on the foundations of community rather than the foundations of hierarchy, bureaucracy, and institutional forms.”
- “The guiding values of community are really quite different than the guiding values of hierarchy. They are also different in a way that legitimizes teacher leadership.”
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Part 3 - Redefining School Leadership
Under the umbrella of redefining school leadership, Murphy feels that the kind of leadership we need for community-driven organizations—as opposed to hierarchical or bureaucratic organizations—must be different. It is time to widen the lens in search of a model of school leadership for more productive schools. Murphy notes that when you begin to shift to community-anchored views of schooling, you obtain different footings on which to build organizations. It isn’t that the original footings (e.g., authority) magically disappear; instead, they are augmented. The most central switch here is the ability to privilege expertise and wisdom of practice as co-equal with authority. No shift is as significant as beginning to bring teachers into the leadership equation, because once you privilege expertise, as opposed to authority, you immediately open up leadership to all those in the school who actually possess expertise—namely, the teacher core.
Think about:
- Do you sense a shift is taking place in our schools from hierarchical or bureaucratic organizations to community-driven organizations? What gives you this impression?
- Is it an accurate or fair statement to say that “once you privilege expertise… you immediately open the door to all the people in the school who actually have the expertise; which is the teacher core”?
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Part 4 - Changing Calculus of School Improvement
Joseph Murphy expands on the final reason why there is this force supporting teacher leadership, referring to the changing calculus of school improvement. He touches on the notion that centralized control and market-based types of reform are receding in favour of professional models of improvement and reform. Murphy suggests that once you begin to privilege professional models of reform, you create an environment where teacher leadership is very palatable and which is conducive to the growth and development of teacher leadership as a condition of work.
Think about:
- Which “trains” do you envision in Murphy’s notion of the changing calculus of school improvement?
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Part 5 - What’s the Theory and Action? What’s the Engine That Drives This Reform?
The second question Murphy addresses is: “What is the ‘theory in action’ or engine that drives this reform?” When you look at any major school reform, each of the vehicles that drive the reform has a very different engine and you hope that the engine that you are putting into your vehicle is the right engine. Murphy explains that if you bet on markets, the engine you put into your vehicle is going to centre on competition and accountability, which is a very different engine than if you bet on teacher leadership. If you bet on teacher leadership, the engine that you put into the car is a professional engine. You’re betting that professionalism will drive that vehicle towards school improvement.
The idea, then, is not to “compete people into improvement or incentivize people into improvement or program people into improvement”—you improve by deepening the professional competency, capacity, and work of people who run schools and who are in classrooms. The health of the organization will improve as it becomes more flexible, more innovative, more change oriented, and more collaborative; the school itself will improve organizationally. This logic says that you are more likely to have an impact on the classroom in terms of instructional relationships between individual teachers and individual students.
Think about:
- Which engines have driven our educational system under the leadership of the current and previous provincial governments?
- What does Murphy mean when he says: “Any school reform model which skips that stage is bankrupt on delivery?”
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Part 6 - Pathways to Create Teacher Leadership in Schools
Murphy outlines two broad pathways to create teacher leadership. One is “Role-Based Strategies” and the other is “Community-Based Strategies”. Murphy emphasizes that he does not want to present one pathway as good and the other as bad. Instead, he describes the community-based side as having a more powerful set of ideas, such that one would want to augment role-based strategies with community-based strategies. He describes in detail the elements of each strategy.
Think about:
- What are the implications for you personally or for our education system of the following statements made by Murphy?
- “There are pathways to create teacher leadership in schools; this is the central idea you want to gravitate toward. There are two very broad paths you can follow…Stopping with the notion of role-based strategies is a truncated and limited model to get teacher leadership infused inside of a school organization.”
- “We create mentors, literacy coaches, and induction coaches. We create more roles that teachers can move into. Not a bad strategy but insufficient to get you where you want to go.”
- “Community-based is much more organic. You want to create a live virus called leadership and get it into the belly of the whole school instead of creating three or four boxes into which you place teachers who didn’t have boxes before. It doesn’t mean that the live virus is live all the time; it means that it can come to life and teachers can move into leadership activities because they have the capacity and ability to do that and when the structure support systems and demands are there. Teachers can exercise leadership in a variety of ways.”
- “If you’re going to create role-based strategies, you do not want to take teachers out of the classroom full-time; you’d do better to have two literacy coaches each teaching half-time and coaching half-time. The moment you walk out of the classroom door, you are no longer a teacher.”
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Part 7 - Why Teacher Leadership is Difficult to Infuse – Organizational Structures
Next, Murphy talks about why teacher leadership is difficult to infuse or to get into place. Two major problems exist: organizational structure, and culture. He emphasizes the need to look at school structures and how we can rebuild structures that support teacher leadership. We need to be “planful” about it by including the school community, district community, and provincial community.
Think about:
- Murphy admitted that it took forever for the United States to come up with the idea of common planning time. He asked how it is possible to exercise teacher leadership when you can’t even see the people with whom you work. The structures that we have to build schools around are not conducive to teacher leadership.
What examples can you think of in your school or board that demonstrate new structural thinking?
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Part 8 - Why Teacher Leadership is Difficult to Infuse – Cultures and Norms
Murphy discusses cultural barriers in more detail. Evidence demonstrates that schools’ culture is often somewhere between non-supportive and heavily toxic to notions of teacher leadership. If one doesn’t address the culture, it will be impossible to bring teacher leadership into the school. Also, there are two cultures that exist: the culture of the school and the culture of the profession. The associated norms of the profession are also problematic, and teacher leadership issues challenge these “sacred” norms. Murphy feels strongly that for teacher leadership to flourish, you must think about these norms and be willing to confront them, because otherwise you will not move forward.
Think about:
- Both as a professional norm and as a norm of individual teachers in individual classrooms, Murphy notes that the mentality of compartmentalization is very much alive—“This is my cubicle. Thou shall not enter. Leave me alone and I will leave you alone.”
How entrenched or pervasive is this norm in your school, across your board, or in your organization? - “This firewall that has built up over the last century between administration and teaching, [is] hugely dysfunctional to the well-being of school organizations, the people that work in them, and the children who learn there. We have built them up. Those norms are there. That’s his or her responsibility. I teach or I run the building. That’s their job, not your job.”
Are we changing to any extent in this area?
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Part 9 - Areas of Support for Schools to Develop Teacher Leadership
Murphy concludes with a final question: What can we do to get teacher leadership into place? He presents seven broad areas of support that are needed to make this happen in schools:
- Developing relationships in support of teacher leadership – must be valued
- Recasting leadership – structures, culture, capacity, and resources are critical
- Building strong relationships with teachers – the essential role of formal leadership
- Rethinking conceptions of power – notions of power and what it means
- Fashioning supportive organizational structures – principals are able to maneuver structure
- Working to promote teacher leadership – an important element
- Promoting professional development – capacity is crucial
In his summary, Joseph Murphy stresses that the role of formal leadership, even in new models of leadership, remains critical to the well-being of this reform initiative.
Think about:
- Consider your impressions of Joseph Murphy’s presentation.
- What are the forces supporting teacher leadership?
- What are the pathways to bring teacher leadership to life?
- What are the barriers to present it from taking hold?
- What is the view of leadership for the principal in this reform idea?
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