Journal of Educational Change © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007 10.1007/s10833-007-9045-7

Should educational leadership focus on best practices or next practices? Kenneth Leithwood1 (1) C/O Jessica Finlayson, OISE/UT, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5S 1V6 Kenneth Leithwood Email: [email protected] Received: 10 July 2007 Accepted: 11 July 2007 Published online: 15 August 2007 Abstract Policy makers and leadership developers now admonish both aspiring and practicing educational leaders to base what they do on evidence of “best practice”. Some argue, however, that today’s best practices stand a reasonably good chance of being unsuitable for schools in the future. Unfortunately, effective leadership in future schools is empirically unknowable. This paper unpacks the arguments about “best” and “next” practices concluding that there is an empirically defensible foundation for current and future leaders. Keywords Leadership - Best practice - Headship

This is, of course, a more complicated question than it appears at first glance. My answer to the question, to begin at the end, is both. But I am pretty sure you don’t know what I mean by this. So let me explain by unpacking the possible meanings of “best” and “next” practices.

Best practices How do some types of leadership behaviors come to be identified as best practices? Without some clarity on this issue we cannot know what we are choosing or rejecting. My own broad reading of the professional and academic leadership literature suggests four distinctly different sources of this label each calling on largely different warrants and often resulting in the identification of substantially different practices. These sources are bandwagons, slogans, locally-valued ways of behaving and systematic, empirical research.

Bandwagons

I use the term bandwagon here in reference to a widely accepted “best practice” initially advocated by an articulate and often charismatic champion. These best practice champions (yes, it does sound a bit like “breakfast of champions”) may have their roots in relevant practitioner roles or the academy. But champions with roots in both are especially irresistible to many practitioners. Disciples often take over, or supplement, champions’ efforts to widely disseminate bandwagon practices. These disciples are sometimes more or less in the direct employ of the champion (e.g., Stephen Covey’s organization comes to mind). But sometimes the attraction of the practice, or the money to be made through developing wide acceptance of the practice—or both—produce independent disciples prepared to undertake the sort of “on the ground” training and other dissemination and marketing initiatives necessary to create a full-blown bandwagon. The justifications offered for bandwagon practices are often quite compelling logically or anecdotally. But these justifications never include systematic evidence at the outset. Such evidence is almost never available until the bandwagon’s popularity reaches its zenith. As this systematic evidence begins to catch up with the claims of champions and disciples, the few practices that are shown to work sometimes become part of routine professional work while the vast majority drop by the wayside in favor of “the next great thing”. The field of educational leadership has witnessed more than its share of bandwagons over the past four decades. Engaging in “walkthroughs” and fostering action research among one’s teachers are among the most obvious contemporary examples. Some of the most influential strands of the work on professional learning communities also fall into this category; even the corpus of quite extensive and systematic research on this concept (see, for example, Stoll and Louis 2007 and the September 2006 issue of the Journal of School Leadership) is almost entirely devoid of evidence about the impacts of professional learning communities on student learning (among the few exceptions are Bolam et al. 2005; Louis and Marks 1998; and perhaps Jackson and Temperley 2007).

Slogans While bandwagons often fail to live up to the claims of their champions and disciples, they usually get specified in quite a bit of detail, eventually. This is a function of the incentive system for becoming a champion or disciple to begin with; the need to attract the following of people whose roles focus them on getting things done. Successful attraction to the bandwagon depends on having answers to questions like: How would this work in my school? What should I do to get started? and, But what about the five teachers in my school who won’t change? Creating answers to these eventually predictable questions elaborates the meaning of the bandwagon and increases the dependence of practitioner-converts on bandwagon champions and disciples. This is very good for business. Slogans, on the other hand, are like Rorschach inkblots. They allow a great many different people to agree on the same thing without ever having to sort out whether everyone sees the alligator. Abstractness is the key to agreement. As long as the slogan “signifies” something we all agree is a good thing it has served its purpose. In our field, the poster child of all slogans is “instructional leadership”. Now, there are several very well specified models of instructional leadership (e.g., Hallinger and Murphy 1985; Smith and Andrews 1989; Duke 1987) and the Hallinger model, in particular, has attracted an impressive body of empirical inquiry. But the

specific practices specified by these models are rarely what people have in mind when they use the slogan. In fact, when I refer to these well-specified models in schools and districts which have enshrined instructional leadership as the ideal in their policies, most have never heard of them. But the slogan is useful to them because it signifies the accountability of leaders for the quality of teaching and learning in their schools. And it permits the users to insist on their own favorite set of “best practices” for getting that job done.

Locally-valued ways of behaving While my example of a slogan—instructional leadership—leaves open considerable room for local specification, if such specification should be needed, there is at least a big idea evoked by it for which there is typically widespread agreement. The “best practice” concept, however, can take on even more localized meanings. These are meanings shaped by local policy and culture: the way we do things around here; the way we have always done things around here; the most efficient way of leading given our structures and resources; the way the most powerful members of our community do their work—you get the idea. In such cases, the local meaning of “best” might be only remotely, or not at all, anyone else’s meaning of best. It might also simply amount to expression of ignorance—people not knowing what they don’t know. If my own impressions are at all representative, this is presently a widespread means of defining “best practice”.

Systematic empirical research Finally, we come to the approach for defining “best practice” that is strongly implied whenever the term is used in reference to a high status profession. This approach endorses practices demonstrably capable of accomplishing what is claimed for them using systematic empirical research (qualitative and/or quantitative) meeting conventional standards of validity, reliability and replicability. I don’t need to repeat at much length the frequent observation that the field of educational leadership is just a bit thin when it comes to justifying leadership practices on these grounds. Nonetheless, recent efforts to synthesize what we do know about such practices point to a knowledge base that is of considerable practical value, although greatly underutilized. Arguably, the main cause for its underutilization is the noise in the system created by the three other sources of “best practice” reviewed above. These other sources overwhelm research-based sources with, respectively, investments in promotion and advocacy, ease of accommodation and both cultural and political capital. The field of educational leadership should focus a considerable proportion of its attention on best practices identified using research-based approaches. It should focus little or no attention on best practices identified through any other approach. I am speaking here, it should be noted, about the field “writ large”—the field, for example, that is to be captured by a set of state, provincial or national leadership standards. There may well be local reasons for advocating best practices on some other grounds. But that is an entirely different matter.

Next practices

If defining the meaning of “best practices” was the first challenge in answering the question posed for this paper, defining the meaning of “next practices” is the second. How would a leadership practice come to be privileged with such a label? My answer draws on two radically different disciplines, futurism (alright—maybe discipline is too strong a word) and normal science.

Futurism Practitioners of this discipline have the potential to become quite rich and famous; their books sell well in airport bookstalls. “Applied futurism” (I made up the term) was famously promoted—and with good effect—by Royal Dutch/Shell Corporation’s Arie de Geus in the 1970s (Schwartz 1991). But his success in actually predicting the future is something of an anomaly and that was not, strictly speaking, what he was up to. Rather, he was sensitizing leaders to the need for more outside-the box-thinking. The success rate of most futurists ranges from “hit-and-miss” to dismal—about the same rate as the proverbial “man on the street”. To suggest that we have a reasonable chance of predicting successful future (next) leadership practices and arming future leaders with them depends on a series of five interdependent assumptions. Each one of these assumptions is highly suspect in its own right. To imagine they will all be correct stretches credulity miles beyond the breaking point. Try them on for size: 1. We can predict, with some accuracy, the nature of our future schools;

2. Those future schools will be substantially, if not dramatically, different from current schools;

3. Something about the nature of those future, different, schools will demand successful leadership practices different from those of our current schools;

4. We can identify now who will provide leadership in those future schools;

5. We can figure out what those different practices are with enough certainty to justify spending today’s resources on providing future leaders with the capacities they need to enact those “next” successful leadership practices.

While space prevents an explanation of why each of these assumptions is more than a little shaky, I doubt very much that many would disagree. What I am pretty sure most of us can agree on is that futurism provides us with no leverage on figuring out what practices successful leaders of the future will exercise.

Normal science It is not unreasonable to insist on processes for improving leadership practices (arriving at “next practices”) at least as defensible as processes used for improving, for example, medical practices, agricultural practices, forestry practices and correctional services practices. Improving such practices typically includes some form of small-scale, controlled experimentation followed by larger-scale clinical trials, and finally, large-scale dissemination, assuming a transparent and trustworthy trail of supporting empirical evidence. Of course, these processes are closely related to those systematic research methods serving as the fourth source of “best practices” described above. They are in service of a more forward looking agenda, however, one intended to push the field forward rather than simply sorting out which of the wide array of current practices seems to work best in today’s schools. Normal science is a creative process. But it is embedded within a critical ethic (e.g., Ziman 2000) aimed at keeping us from fooling ourselves, as well as others. It forces us to think out loud and in the company of anyone who cares to listen. And it officially welcomes skeptical responses. Grand leaps are possible but they remain hypotheses with more or less credibility for extended periods of time rather than assuming the force of truth overnight. The practice of normal science, in other words, produces no virgin births. Each “next practice” is arrived at through the issue of often inconvenient evidence. It feels incremental rather than radical by the time it becomes a hypothesis you can place your bets on. As it should.

Conclusion So back to the original question: Should educational leadership focus on best practices or next practices?1 If we assume the use of systematic research as the process for determining best practices in today’s schools (my 4th alternative), continuing to inquire about such practices has much to recommend it. Because educational leadership has consequences for what students learn, today’s students benefit. They are every bit as important as tomorrow’s students. In addition, however, the search for best practices has the potential to uncover creative forms of leadership that might point us toward “next practices”. This is as likely a source of innovative leadership as any other, not least because it may well be found in the company of efforts to recast today’s schools in a form more suitable to the needs of tomorrow’s students. When these creative forms of leadership are identified, they should be subject to normal science in order to determine whether or not they qualify for the label “next practices”.

References Bolam, R., McMahon, A., Stoll, L., Thomas, S., Wallace, M., Hawkey, K., & Greenwood, A. (2005). Creating and sustaining effective professional learning communities. DfES Research Report RR637. University of Bristol.

Duke, D. (1987). School leadership and instructional improvement. New York: Random House. Hallinger, P., & Murphy, J. (1985). Assessing the instructional management behavior of principals. Elementary School Journal, 86(2), 217–247.

Jackson, D., & Temperley, J. (2007). From professional learning communities to networked learning communities. In L. Stoll & K. Louis (Eds.), Professional learning communities: Divergence, depth and dilemmas (pp. 45–62). New York: McGraw-Hill. Louis, K. S., & Marks, H. (1998). Does professional community affect the classroom? Teacher work and student work in restructuring schools. American Educational Research Journal, 106(4), 532–575.

Schwartz, P. (1991). The art of the long view. New York: Doubleday. Smith, W., & Andrews, R. (1989). Instructional leadership: How principals make a difference. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Stoll, L., & Louis, K. S. (Eds.) (2007). Professional learning communities: Divergence, depth and dilemmas. New York: McGraw-Hill. Ziman, J. (2000). Real science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Footnotes 1

I have assumed that the term “educational leadership”, as it is used in this question, refers to the field as it is represented in the published literature—the forum in which members of the profession and academy publicly debate consequential issues about leadership.