"After having fun to follow along the music history lesson from the 1980s, the New Wave, a teenage girl asked her best friend, 'What’s an uncle’s favorite type of music?''Nephew-wave!' answered the bestie.""There is already a mass of ideas available in the academic and professional literature about what leaders should do and how they think," said Cananga while resetting pieces on a chess board in the array. The game of chess is a good modern symbol of leadership. A leader must be able to see the big picture and have a vision for success. A leader must also be able to concentrate on the task at hand and not be distracted by side issues. The fundamentals of chess are strategy, concentration, and planning. The player must think ahead of several moves to succeed."Values are vital in educational leadership. If you approach your thinking about values by way of your experience of leadership or your reading about it, you may bring various preconceptions with you. ‘Values’ is not a technical term. In talking about values, we are talking about something which is part of the experience of everyone. You already in your life have a lot of experience of values, though you may not have spent a lot of time thinking about your values or articulating them.When we are talking for the moment about how we use words, they can be used rather differently by different speakers. A value has to be something less tangible than a physical object: it might be justice, it might be our relationship with our family, it might be having a comfortable house, but it is not the house itself.We are more likely to talk about values–actually using that word–when we think there is something of importance at stake. Values are not physical objects but ideas about what is important or what matters to us. Values can also affect what people do. If you value harmonious relationships within your family more than success in your job, or the other way around, this is likely to make a difference if you have to choose, say, whether to apply for a promotion that will take you further away from your home.Values may be distinctive of an individual: perhaps some personal experience has given you an aspiration for your own life that other people do not share. But values can also be distinctive of a group. A religious community, for instance, may hold certain values which are different from those of other groups. Values are conceptions of what is desirable. ‘Desirable’ means something like ‘worthy to be desired’, and this may be different from what is desired. If you are a smoker, but you think you ought to give it up, then you will often desire a cigarette but what you think is desirable is that you stop smoking and cease to have a craving for cigarettes. Then being free of such a habit is one of your values–one of your conceptions of what is desirable. Values may be explicit or implicit. If you say that one of your values is justice or truth then you are making this value explicit. But in your choices and actions, you will be influenced all the time by what you take to be preferable or important, whether or not you spell out to yourself or anyone else exactly what ideas are influencing you. If someone says that something is important but does not act accordingly, then we refer to the idea of paying lip service to values.Several writers on values in educational management have cited Kluckhohn's 'values' definition, 'Values are conceptions, explicit or implicit, distinctive of an individual or characteristic of a group, of the desirable which influence the selection from available modes, means, and ends of action.'Most people think that there are many questions of values that cannot be reduced to personal preference. Suppose you came across someone who said he enjoyed smacking children, especially small children, and that he would take every opportunity he could find to do this. That is his preference. But if you want to get him to stop doing this, you surely want to do more than tell him that your preference is for him not to smack small children. You will think that he is doing something wrong, that he is offending against values that in some way are not just matters of personal preference. It is at this point that we are beginning to talk about matters of right and wrong, about values that people ought to follow regardless of their actual preferences. It is better not to assume in advance that the fields covered by ‘values’, ‘ethics’, and ‘morals’ or ‘morality’ are all the same.There are various ways in which people may try to separate what is a moral or ethical matter from what is not. It may be useful to distinguish ‘moral’ and ‘ethical’. The term ‘ethics’ has some specialized uses. It is used to refer to professional codes or responsibilities, in the phrase ‘professional ethics’, though there is perhaps no good reason why the standard phrase could not be ‘professional morality’. ‘Ethics’ is also the name of the branch of philosophy that deals with matters of morality; in this sense ‘ethics’ is equivalent to ‘moral philosophy’. In distinguishing moral from non-moral matters, here are some considerations that may have occurred to you: Moral matters seem to be about how people are treated–how people behave towards each other. So judgments about one picture being better than another are not moral judgments; While moral values, like other values, are conceptions of the desirable, they often seem to be more than just that. We may want to say, for instance, that being kind rather than cruel is not just desirable–it is obligatory. We have the idea that morality is binding on people in ways that other conceptions of the desirable are not.Morality, then, cannot ultimately be a matter of personal preference (despite what some people may say about it). If there is something that it would be right for me to do (even in the face of my preferences or inclination), or something that it would be wrong for me to do (though it might suit my convenience) then by and large the same things will be right or wrong for other people too (of course, personal circumstances may make a difference, but not all the difference).Since morality is not a matter of personal preference, it is possible to argue about what is right or wrong. We expect to be able to give some sort of reasons to back up opinions about right and wrong. But at the same time, not just any kind of reason will make something a moral matter.Values, as conceptions of what is desirable, can be shared among people. When a particular conception of what is valuable is shared quite widely within some group of people, we can say there is a consensus on it. Sometimes we see consensus as sufficient backing for a value. If a community collectively considers that something is to be done in a certain way, often, at least within that community itself, that will be sufficient reason for doing it this way. Norms get established within a community, and the community comes to expect conformity to its norms. While consensus is important, we can also see that an actual consensus within a particular community does not have to be accepted as the final answer on the question of where norms come from and how they can be justified. This is clear partly because there may be a different consensus in different communities. For instance, in some places it may be accepted or even expected that a person in a position of authority making a professional appointment will give some preference to his or her own associates or family members; in other places, this will be called nepotism and frowned on as violating norms of professionalism and equity.People sometimes suggest that ethics is relative to cultures. What is certainly true is that different cultures are different from each other in some of their values and norms (that is part of what makes them different cultures). If consensus were the last word on whether particular norms should be followed, then we could accept that all norms are relative. But in fact, we can see that consensus does not have to be the last word because a particular consensus can be criticized. If, for instance, there is a consensus within a particular community that women’s place is in the home, then it is still possible for that consensus to be criticized by appealing to some other considerations.One sort of consideration is an appeal to consequences. In this particular case, we might argue that a condition of society in which women’s talents are not fully used does not in the long run bring the best consequences for everyone concerned.People sometimes think that appealing to consequences is not giving a moral argument. But when you are thinking about what you ought to do in some situation, wouldn’t you usually give some attention to what the consequences will be of one course of action or another? If you are thinking morally about what you ought to do, of course, you should not be concerned only about the consequences for yourself, but you certainly should be concerned about the consequences for other people who will be affected by your actions. We often consider that someone has acted irresponsibly if they have not taken the consequences for others into account.The point about consequences is important in education, and not least in educational leadership, because education always has to have an eye to the consequences for students of one way of teaching rather than another, one syllabus rather than another, and so on, and educational leaders have to look to the consequences of their decisions for all the people they are trying to lead.Education is a matter of some people deliberately exercising influence over others. This already makes it a matter of which judgments of what is morally good or bad can apply. Treating people in one way rather than another–especially when the people concerned are vulnerable, as children are concerned adults–is not just a matter of preference. There are obligations involved here. Society owes it to its young people to bring them up and teach them in desirable ways (that is why we say that children have a right to education, not just that it would be a good thing for children to receive an education). So the purpose of education is one that society has to pursue, and society puts much of the responsibility for pursuing that purpose onto schools.Schools are not the only institutions that have responsibilities towards particular people, discharged on behalf of the wider society. We might say, for instance, that hospitals have such responsibilities, at least within a health service that is publicly run and funded. But there is a further point about the purposes of schools. Schools that are concerned with the general education of young people – unlike, say, a driving school or a swimming school – are trying to promote learning that is not ethically neutral. They cannot avoid, for better or worse, having an influence on the values, including the moral values, of young people; therefore they must do their best to influence these values for the better. This is a further dimension in which the purpose of schools is rightly considered a moral purpose.When we are talking about leadership, to be able to pursue a moral purpose, a leader needs some sort of authority, but need not have the power of a despot. When we say that someone has authority, an issue about values is already implicit. In everyday discourse, authority is not always distinguished from power, but it helps to bring out the value issue if we make that distinction. What the notion of authority helps us to do is to distinguish between right and wrong exercises of power. ‘Authority’ is a value-loaded concept; roughly, it equals ‘legitimate power’. The idea of authority as legitimate power gives us a starting point in thinking about how authority relates to leadership. The exercise of power in human societies is very widespread and probably quite inevitable; almost anyone may be involved in the exercise of some power over somebody at some time (the twentieth-century French theorist Foucault has become particularly associated with the idea that power is very widely distributed). But, of course, some people have more power at their disposal than others. Leaders could not be leaders without the possibility of exercising some power (in the value-neutral sense, this only means that leaders are able to get other people to do what the leaders intend them to do), but if people are trying to exercise power over us we want to know if they are entitled to do that. When we recognize someone as a leader, we recognize that their exercise of power is legitimate; that is we recognize that they have, not just power, but authority over us.Why, then, do some people recognize that others have authority over them? Many people in the world have exercised the power that others have recognized as legitimate simply based on tradition. But, in the modern world, tradition has increasingly been questioned as a source of legitimacy. Instead, we have systems of rules (including the legal systems of states) that give positions of power to the people holding certain roles, occupancy of those roles is subject to some form of qualification and the whole system can be seen to be justified by broader considerations such as the general welfare. ‘Bureaucracy’ – as a sociological term, not necessarily pejorative–is the general term for systems of this sort, and the kind of authority involved is ‘rational-legal’. It is part of a system of rational-legal authority that it is not an arbitrary matter of which people get into which positions. The system makes the occupancy of positions of authority dependent on some sort of qualification. People normally have to apply for a position of authority, in competition with others, and show that they are qualified to do the job, either by virtue of their experience or (increasingly in modern systems) by having gained certain formal qualifications.It follows that, if the system is working well, everyone who is in a position of authority will be qualified for that position. Nevertheless, it is still the case that the authority that someone has by virtue of their position within a bureaucratic system does not automatically go with the actual power to get things done. If you gained your leadership position because you were recognized as a good teacher, this may be an element of traditional authority in action – this is the way it has generally been done. If you gained your leadership position because, even before you were in that formal position, people tended to look up to you and to take notice of your opinions, then it may be – though you are probably not the best person to claim this about your- self – that you have certain special personal qualities!In the discourse of educational leadership in recent years, the idea of vision has become prominent. Perhaps the commonest use of the word ‘vision’ is to refer to the ordinary capacity for seeing; for instance, like many people, I wear glasses to correct a deficiency in my vision. Since vision in this everyday, literal, sense is a normal capacity of human beings it is not likely to be very helpful to a consideration of any special qualities needed in leadership. But it is possible to refine this ordinary notion of vision into something more special by making it metaphorical. Then, when we say that a person ‘has vision’, we mean that he or she has, not just the ordinary capacity of sight, but the ability, to a greater extent than most, to see how things could be. We might call this quality ‘imaginative perception’. In the context of schools, it could be the capacity to see the possibilities that are open in the future of a school, perhaps to see possibilities that others might overlook, and to see how the school might get from where it is to a desirable future. A head with this capacity might be described as visionary.When the notion of vision is used in contexts of educational leadership it often has connotations both of the capacity to see something beyond what is immediately present–the current status quo–and of that which is seen–a representation of the future. When we speak of a person’s vision for her school, we are speaking of her picture of what it could be or will be like in the future. But to put it that way is to make it seem rather mundane. Anyone could have a mental picture of what a school will be like in the future, but in many cases, the picture might not be of a kind that would motivate or inspire people. If we use the term ‘vision’ for just any picture of what a school will be like, we will lose the sense that there is something special about a vision.In educational contexts ‘vision’, like ‘purpose’, denotes that something is being aimed at. Also, like purpose, vision can give a sense of direction and motivation. But vision differs from purpose in that it presents a picture of how things will be at some point in the future, which purpose does not necessarily do. A sense of purpose might be focused on something relatively narrow, such as improving test scores or improving recruitment to the school. Or a sense of purpose might be broader but quite ill-defined–if, for instance, a head wanted to keep her school improving, but had no very clear idea of what the school would be like after a period of improvement. A leader’s purpose could even be to keep things much the same as they are if the leader considers that the way things are is already quite good. But to have this sort of purpose is not to be driven by a vision of how things might be.Communities are healthy when they are learning; the definition of a community would have to include a capacity to grow and develop organically. There is a symbiotic link between schools and their communities—children. The school becomes a microcosm, a model, of the ideal for the community. Schools need to be successful with their communities, not despite them. Educational leaders are very well placed to provide leadership in the community—schools as institutions usually have very high social capital. They need qualities like vision, empathy, adaptability, and communication. They take a comprehensive, evidence-based, relational approach to problem-solving and play a crucial role in promoting equity and ensuring that all students have access to quality education.Educational leadership involves applying knowledge and skills to transform communities and outcomes in various educational contexts. The impact of educational leadership is felt throughout schools, nonprofits, and private sector organizations. Effective leaders can transform whole communities through their meaningful work. Educational leadership is fundamentally concerned with values and is essentially aspirational. In many communities, schools represent the biggest single public investment and are the best-resourced organizations.There is a profound ethical base to such leadership. At its heart are the principles of equity and entitlement. This is extended into the belief that a crucial component of the educational process is the fight for social justice. Economic, social, and cultural poverty is a major barrier to educational opportunity. Leadership in this context is about more than fighting discrimination—it is about the active promotion of a society based on positive acceptance and engagement. Leadership is a moral process firmly rooted in the viability and sustainability of communities. Leadership is thus an agency for social change, community renewal, and the creation of communities of learning—both formal and informal.And before we continue to the next episode, let's build our hopes that even after completing a task or overcoming challenges, there’s still a path to discover or explore. In every ending, a seed of beginning. Though roads diverge and shadows play, we'll find our way. The journey continues, seeking new horizons. Even when we're done, we'll find out our way. Insha Allah."
Citations & References:
- Graham Haydon, Values for Educational Leadership, 2007, SAGE Publications
- Tony Gelsthorpe & John West-Burnham, Educational Leadership and the Community: Strategies for School Improvement through Community Engagement, 2003, Pearson Education
[Episode 15][Episode 15]
