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What is success? What is failure? What is happiness? What is love? What is improvement?
Each of these is difficult to describe. In attempting to do so, a discussion about any one of them will often result in trying to break down the concept into parts. For example, success might be broken down into parts of financial, family, social, professional, spiritual, and intellectual success. If a man is successful in all areas except one—family let's say for this example—is he successful? Some would argue definitely not—others would disagree.
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| For more information, read Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity, by Jamshid Gharajedaghi |
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Jamshid Gharajedaghi, in his book, Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity, classifies these terms as emergent properties. Emergent properties are understood as a whole, not as the properties of the part. Gharajedaghi writes, "...they are a product of the interactions, not a sum of the actions of the parts, and therefore have to be understood on their own terms. Furthermore, they don't yield to any one of the five senses and cannot be measured directly."
What is improvement in schools? Is it measured by ITBS results? What are other potential components of improvement in schools: culture, learning, cleanliness, pride, trophies, graduates? Would it mean fewer aborted change efforts, fewer examples of uncoordinated staff development, and less wasted effort and resources? There are many potential components of improvement.
As a leader continue to ask yourself and others how to bring about balance in improvement. Ask yourself, how do we enjoy the process of improving? And how do I develop a culture in my school that gets people to understand what they can do together to help students? There are numerous examples of schools that have improved on large-scale test results. But that is only one measure of improvement. What about other measures such as morale, capacity building, commitment? Michael Fullen writes in his book, Leading in a Culture of Change, about the importance of building that internal capacity for long-term change. He writes, "...those dealing with failing schools have drawn this very conclusion: the need for external intervention is inversely proportionate to how well the school is progressing. In a case of persistent failure, dramatic, assertive leadership and external intervention appear to be necessary. In the long run, however, effectiveness depends on developing internal commitment in which the ideas and intrinsic motivation of the vast majority of organizational members become activated."
Go back to your philosophy of leadership to uncover the elements that are important to you about the school or district you lead. Few of you probably wrote a philosophy of leadership centered upon only ITBS or ITED results. Look for the improvement you are working to achieve, determine indicators of how you know if you're getting better with those things, and share the results of those indicators with staff in your building for the purpose of engaging everyone in looking for ways to improve. |
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