EDLDR480:
Lesson 5: Decision Making Part II
Lesson 5: Decision Making Part II
A leader is best when people barely know he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worst when they despise him. Fail to honor people, they fail to honor you. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aims fulfilled, they will all say: we did this ourselves.
—Lao Tzu
Lesson Overview
In the previous lesson you looked at some decision making models and theories that can help you handle the various problems that confront professionals in school systems. You were further introduced to information about variables that may influence our decisions. Lesson 4 made explicit that although there are concrete steps for attacking problems, variables like rationality vs irrationality, leadership styles, Mind Styles™, time constraints, learning from past experiences, successes, and failures all combine to make decision making a dynamic process and skill. It's definitely not static. And important decisions should not be the burden of a single person. Complex systems benefit from leadership coordination.
Studies of effective schools consistently emphasize the importance and value of the leader. At the building level, that is the principal, assistant principal, headmaster, or director. Other titles may be assigned. At the district level, the superintendent, or chief operating officer, or another title may be in a formal and key leadership position. But educational leadership is not the sole responsibility of school principals. If school-wide change and improved student achievement is the ongoing target, then the system requires that leadership be shared or distributed throughout. Recognizing the importance of teacher leadership is not new, but tapping into teacher leadership talents and/or teams, and fostering leadership at all levels of the organization is, in this author's opinion, far from being operationalized and a part of defining a school's culture and management profile.
This lesson is designed to illuminate the change in leadership concepts of shared decision-making and distributed leadership. They are not one and the same, but both constructs offer underused and long overdue structures to address the ongoing challenges and criticisms of public school education.
Lesson Objectives
After completing this lesson, you should be able to
- assess the merits of site-based management (SBM);
- process the dynamics of group decision making;
- examine and evaluate shared decision making principles and models;
- examine and evaluate distributed leadership models and perspectives; and
- apply decision making strategies to case studies.
Lesson Readings & Activities
By the end of this lesson, make sure you have completed the readings and activities found in the course schedule.
5.1. Shared Decision Making
A new superintendent stood in front of her administrative team and discussed how she viewed decision making.Decisions called A Type decisions were ones that the team were invited or encouraged to participate in; in addition, they were the decisions in which the superintendent herself would have an equal voice; her position of authority would not be exerted.
A Type decisions were democratic in nature.
B Type decisions were ones that the group would be given the opportunity to share their ideas and thinking and provide input. But input was not to be mistaken for acceptance of ideas. The superintendent explained that she would decide whether to incorporate the individual or group think ideas—or reject them. Her position of authority would ultimately provide her with the power and responsibility to finalize a decision.
C Type decisions were hers alone. No input would be asked for and it was not desired.
Over the course of time, there was often debate amongst team members about A, B, and C decision outcomes. The majority, however, strongly supported knowing in advance how decisions were to be made, even if the desire for more A Type decisions was preferred, but not realized.
Nothing frustrates professionals more than expending time and energy on problem solving only to believe that their input was ignored. Leaders often fail to identify the necessary changing roles of stakeholders in making decisions, and their rationale for the same. It takes a lot of emotional energy to invest in organizational change of any kind. If that energy is perceived to be of little or no value, then it should be no surprise that the staff becomes reluctant, resistant, or indifferent to the idea of shared decision making.
The former CEO of a Philadelphia hospital added to the commentary about decision making and, specifically, resistance to administrative decisions by defining the latter as "too many dashed hopes." If shared decision making has merit, then the challenge is not just in getting people to work together toward a common goal for the common good, but it also requires building momentum and sustaining a shared leadership model that will change the structure of leadership and school governance in new and more meaningful ways.
The readings offer a comprehensive overview of the upside and the downside of shared decision making. Although the text provides a quality technical or clinical understanding of decision making styles, models, constraints, and cautions—all of which are of value—the deep, complex, and real human side of a shared leadership model is needed as well to improve a school's effectiveness.
5.2. Site-Based Management
Site-based management (SBM) is also referred to as school-based management. Like leadership and decision-making, it has multiple models. Generally speaking, it is a way to shift the organizational structure of the individual school within a district from a centralized to a decentralized system, and to thereby grant greater responsibility and control for decision making to principals, teachers, parents, and students. Examples of this control, with primary emphases on teaching and learning goals and outcomes, may include professional development, staffing, instructional decisions, budgeting, instructional materials, and scheduling. Site-based management involves creating a representative, collaborative, decision-making council at the school.[1]
The collective literature on SBM establishes a distribution of roles and responsibilities to aid schools with implementation. General responsibilities are articulated for school councils, teachers, the collective bargaining unit (union leadership), principals, parents, central office, and the school board. Although the shift in decision making and responsibility is closest to those who work directly with students—the school—the entire system has an important role to play. Everyone needs to be trained in their new roles within the framework of a decentralized school governance structure.
Characteristics of successful SBM schools include the need for strong and consistent leadership, a culture that supports the effort and focuses on improving student learning outcomes, time to make all the pieces come together, alignment within and across the system, professional development on what SBM is in a given district, and the necessary skills to support the changing roles and responsibilities. And skill in a different kind of collaboration and decision making than is the norm in a centralized, more top-down organizational structure.
There is an abundance of research and literature about site-based management and its promising results in the effort to improve public schools. And your textbook offers excellent information to guide administrators and teachers in the who, what and why of decision-making that empowers teachers. Review carefully the key assumptions and principles at the end of the assigned reading. But before the chapter, literally and figuratively, is closed on information about site-based management, read this personal observation.
- Lesson 2 included an anecdote and a quote from South Africa's Mr. Clive Roos: "Structure without capacity is only ornamentation and distorts the system." I would add that capacity without structure is also ornamentation and distorts the system. No matter how many pieces of the whole are effectively implemented in a SBM change effort, it takes both to make it work.
- Mr. Roos also discussed his belief that educational provisions and initiatives are almost always fitted around political solutions and compromise. I didn't understand the relevance of this statement as clearly as I do now after watching the havoc that plays out when politics drives too many decisions and gets in the way of a restructuring effort. Politics can quickly undermine and weaken the very structure that it supports as a "fix" to what the politicians assert is broken.
- There are far more teachers who are willing to embrace a new decision making model and accept the new roles and responsibilities that go with this model than I could have imagined. But when continuity of leadership breaks down regularly, the support that teachers need disappears, too. Energy is zapped. More dashed hopes infiltrate the collective psyche of the staff.
- Decentralizing decision making and opting for a SBM governance structure is analogous to being in a room with two exit doors. Door A is the way we have always done it; it's comfortable, predictable, and safe (even if it is wrought with concerns or minimum levels of effectiveness). Door B is SBM. It's new, requires significant change in roles and responsibilities, as well as a significant amount of ambiguity. But it offers hope, promise, and great potential to benefit the students in ways that the current system doesn't. The problem, however, is quite simple: Door A has an exponentially greater gravitational pull on it than Door B.
Source: Dr. Sandra Griffin, course author.
[1] www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/envrnmnt/go/go100.htm "Critical issue: Transferring decision making to local schools:site-based management." NCREL
5.3. Distributed Leadership
Distributed leadership has its own structure and definition, albeit similar to SBM in its foundation of using data to drive instruction, incorporating high degrees of collaboration, being strategic, and making decision a shared experience. Leadership is distributed to teams or groups based on the idea that the complexity of school organizations are beyond what the principal—or a given single person—can reasonably, effectively, and/or or optimally handle. Elmore (2000) has led the way in discussing how and why leadership can be undertaken in diverse contexts.
One of the largest distributed leadership projects was originally funded by a $5 million dollar grant from the Annenberg Foundation to the Penn Center for Educational Leadership in 2005. It targeted 16 Philadelphia schools to improve teaching and learning though a distributed leadership intervention initiative. Measured success in the Philadelphia public schools was followed up by a request for a four-year, 3.4 million dollar distributed leadership initiative in 19 Archdiocesan Philadelphia schools (DeFlaminis, 2009, 2011, and 2013). The Philadelphia Distributed Leadership Initiative contains 13 curriculum models and 77 hours of leadership training.
The Philadelphia Distributed Leadership Project has captured the attention of other school districts and its successes offer another level of hope and promise to financially, academically, and politically distressed districts. This multi-year project is research- and evidenced-based; in addition, it is supported by highly experienced practitioners and researchers. It is my hope that it will rescue school systems that otherwise don’t have the capacity to do so alone. Working in isolation isn’t only a problem with individual teachers in their respective classrooms, it can also be a problem for an entire district. Collaboration and shared decision-making can build system capacity, not just teacher and principal capacity.
Lesson Activities
Task 5.a. PLC Discussion - Promises kept or opportunities lost Case Study (eBase Group)
Promises kept or opportunities lost: A wicked problem in educational leadership.
Please complete the required case study reading for this shared decision making lesson, by Karen Stansberry Beard [Journal of Cases in Educational Leadership, 2017, Vol. 20 (3), 86–103] by, then respond to the following questions by Thursday at 11:59 p.m. (ET).
- If you were principal Jeff James, how would you resolve this issue after having heard the superintendent’s response?
- What are the key elements of this case that suggest the principal may have a “wicked” problem on his hands?
- In the article, Beard cites Maxwell (2014) who suggests three questions to pose when attempting to resolve leadership problems: Why are we facing this problem? How do we go about solving it? What specific steps need to be taken? Consider this case in relation to these three questions as well as how this problem might be avoided in the future.
By Sunday at 11:59 p.m. (ET), interact with at least two other course colleagues.
Task 5.b. Commentary Activity (eBase Group): School-Based Shared Decision Making
Lesson 5's theme is shared decision making. In this commentary assignment, you are asked to capture three or four of the big ideas that are most relevant to you. Specifically, share your thinking in your two-page paper and include:
- Examples from your experience that illustrate the merit of shared decision making in an organization/school.
- Learning is emotional. What struck you in the readings—that grabbed you emotionally—that you continue to process?
- What questions do you still have (or) what else are you curious about that remains unanswered based on your experiences to date in combination with the literature?
Upload your completed responses to the questions to share them with your eBase Group.
Task 5.c. Reflection Paper - First Half
Instructions
Following the prompts associated with each Lesson Reflection, compose and save your responses in a word processing application. Reflections for the first half of the course will be submitted on the last day of Lesson 6. Be sure to label each reflection in your document.
Lesson 5 Reflection: Decentralized School Governance Models (SBM and Distributed Leadership)
The purpose of this lesson's reflection paper is to have you stop and think about the structures and philosophies of site-based management and distributed leadership. Please respond to the following question prompts but feel free to add additional thoughts, musings, or insights:
- If you were in a school that the superintendent had targeted to be decentralized via either SBM or through a distributed leadership change initiative, what would you most excite you?
- How do either of these models relate to what you already know and believe about leadership?
- What areas of professional development would be critical for you to have to help you grow as a professional?
- Other reflections?
Label and hold the Lesson 5 Reflection until you are ready to submit all reflections for the first half of the course.