Supportive Leadership
Superintendent/Principal involvement in a school’s efforts to become more democratic can range from being actively resistant to actively supportive of democratic efforts.

Superintendent/Principal resistance involves placing obstacles in the way of teachers attempting to become more democratic (e.g., withholding financial or material support) or simply refusing to engage in certain practices (e.g., sharing decisions).

Passive forms of superintendent/principal support consist of neither blocking the efforts of teachers engaged in school renewal work, nor proactively supporting or becoming personally involved in such efforts.

Active superintendent/principal support includes regularly publicly and privately communicating support for democratic efforts, personally participating in such efforts, and providing time for discussing the school’s movement toward professional learning communities.

 

Supportive Leadership Articles:

Taking the Lead: The Role of the Principal in School Reform (Southwest Educational Development Laboratory)
Research tells us that principals are the linchpins in the enormously complex workings, both physical and human, of a school. The job calls for a staggering range of roles: psychologist, teacher, facilities manager, philosopher, police officer, diplomat, social worker, mentor, PR director, coach, cheerleader. The principalship is both lowly and lofty.

Every Child Learning: Safe & Supportive Schools (NAESP Principal Online)
The Learning First Alliance (LFA), an organization of 12 leading national education associations, believes that every school must make the creation of a safe and supportive learning community one of its highest priorities if they are to succeed in meeting high academic expectations and raising achievement for all students. Research suggests there are four core elements relevant to all schools in all communities seeking to create and maintain safe and supportive places of learning . These four core elements are: a supportive learning community; systematic approaches to supporting positive behavior; involving families, students, school staff, and the community; and standards and measures based on data.

It’s the Principal of the Thing (Education World)
Nearly one third of beginning teachers leave the field within five years. We know why they leave, but do we know why they don’t stay? In fact, according to an NCES survey, “less than five percent of public school teachers who actually leave the field do so because of money.” Read this article for insights into the significant role a principal may play in the teacher retention dilemma.

What Is Servant Leadership? (Greenleaf Center for Servant-Leadership)
Servant-Leadership is a practical philosophy which supports people who choose to serve first, and then lead as a way of expanding service to individuals and institutions. Servant-leaders may or may not hold formal leadership positions. Servant-leadership encourages collaboration, trust, foresight, listening, and the ethical use of power and empowerment. Robert Greenleaf, the man who coined the phrase, described servant-leadership in this way.

“ The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. He or she is sharply different from the person who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions. For such it will be a later choice to serve – after leadership is established. The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature.

The difference manifest itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer , is: do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society; will they benefit, or, at least, will they not be further deprived?”

Taken from the Servant As Leader published by Robert Greenleaf in 1970.

 

Supportive Leadership Books:

Encouraging the Heart: A Leader’s Guide to Rewarding and Recognizing Others James Kouzes, Barry Posner (Jossey-Bass, 1999). ISBN: 0-7879-4184-0

Included is an “Encouragement Index Survey” where a leader self-rates his/her behaviors in seven areas associated with encouraging the heart, with commensurate feedback on the results of the survey. This is not a book about glad-handing and backslapping, gold stars, and payoffs. It's about the importance of linking rewards and appreciation to standards of excellence. It's about why encouragement is absolutely essential to sustaining people's commitment to organizations and outcomes. It's about the hard work it takes to get extraordinary things done in organizations, and it's about ways to enhance your own ability in -- and comfort with -- recognizing and celebrating the achievements of others.

Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box The Arbinger Institute (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2000) ISBN 1-57675-174-0
Using the story/parable format so popular these days, Leadership and Self-Deception takes a novel psychological approach to leadership. It's not what you do that matters, say the authors (presumably plural--the book is credited to the esteemed Arbinger Institute), but why you do it. Latching onto the latest leadership trend won't make people follow you if your motives are selfish -- people can smell a rat, even one that says it's trying to empower them. The tricky thing is, we don't know that our motivation is flawed. We deceive ourselves in subtle ways into thinking that we're doing the right thing for the right reason. We really do know what the right thing to do is, but this constant self-justification becomes such an ingrained habit that it's hard to break free of it -- it's as though we're trapped in a box, the authors say.

Learning how the process of self-deception works -- and how to avoid it and stay in touch with our innate sense of what's right -- is at the heart of the book.

 

Technology:

Connecting the Human Infrastructure
A Journal of Staff Development article discussing the importance of human connections when establishing a technological infrastructure within a school.

 

Sample Action Plan for Practice 7:  WORD   PDF