In the Shadow/From the Shadow

The Context

In Trinidad and Tobago, educational change has been rapid and unwieldy. Initiatives funded by external donors have lead to significant curriculum and policy changes that have fundamentally affected the conditions of support and empowerment around teachers, students, leaders, and schools more broadly. Increased demand for accountability and competition between schools has ensured that leading, as a practice, has not escaped the notice of policy reformers; more particularly, there has been increased emphasis on the relationship between leading and school transformation and leading and student achievement (Albright, Clement, & Holmes, 2012; McMaster & Elliot, 2014; Weinstein & Muñoz, 2013).

Corner Stone Government School is 1 of 481 government primary or elementary schools in Trinidad and Tobago. It is listed as a small coeducational government school, with approximately 150 students with less than 15 staff members (including the principal, auxiliary staff, and security personnel). Given the size of its student population, the principal is assisted by a senior teacher, as the numbers are not large enough for an allocation of a vice principal’s position. The school is located in the heart of a large urban city, in a high crime area. The school building sits amidst seemingly ghettoized housing structures. It experiences high student mobility due to rapid and sometimes unexpected domestic changes in the family. The school has, over time, built a reputation for individualized care and attention and as such also receives many transfer students, many of whom are thought to have challenging behaviors, coming from other schools within the educational district.

Like all primary schools in Trinidad and Tobago, Corner Stone Government School comprises an infant department (first year, 5-6 years; second year, 6-7 years), a junior department (Standard 1, 7-8 years; Standard 2, 8-9 years; and Standard 3, 9-10 years), and a senior department (Standard 4, 10-11 years; Standard 5, 11-12 years). Being the principal of this school, Mrs. Greer is faced with many challenges, some of which are local to the school and its circumstances and others originating from within the ministry of education (MOE), given recent policy changes made to public educational delivery.

In the last year, there has been a shift in the traditional expectations of leaders: one that has seen the implementation of policies, where leading no longer resides only in the capacity of the positional leader where the common expectation from the community writ large was for a principal who was a maximum leader; one who was able to command and demand the respect of the staff, students, and community and knew what needed to be done and how to go about getting it done.

A drive for development into and as a knowledge society (Draft National Strategic Plan, Vision 2020), where educational reform is constructed as a key to facilitating a seamless education system and preparing learners for a globally competitive and innovative workforce (De Lisle, Seecharan, & Ayodike, 2010), has seen the principal being positioned as a leader in the midst of partnerships in education, with a new leadership role that has to be navigated and constructed in the minds of the educational partners themselves (formerly called stakeholders).

Surrounding the principal is a new discourse of school-based management (Government of Trinidad and Tobago [GOTT], 2007) that has been superimposed upon a former construction of principal leadership. This is changing the face of professional and organizational socialization for principals in Trinidad and Tobago (Bristol, Brown & Esnard, 2014), and is instead characterizing leading as a practice where the leader is “is able to put to work, for the sake of the school, the abilities, experiences and knowledge contributions” of partners (p. 22). With excellence, an expected feature of 21st-century schooling (GOTT, 2008), Mrs. Greer is now expected to work in and with a community of partners in such a way that her leading practice is an illustration of distributive leading (Hall, 2013; Spillane, Halverson, & Diamond, 2001; Sullivan, 2013; Torrance, 2013) and shared responsibility (Kemmis et al., 2014) as opposed to instructional.

The Problem

The blue Toyota pulls up to the school gates. Alys Greer exits; she thanks the principal who gave her a lift back to the school. She is returning from a schools’ district meeting. She arches her back, gazes up at the school sign, and nods in greeting to a passerby. She is comfortable on Forsythe Street where the school is located. She grew up in the area and has taught at the school for more than 20 years. The small school, in the center of the city is where her heart is.

She takes a breath and considers what to say and how to say it to the parents and staff attending the Parent Teachers Association (PTA) meeting that afternoon. The pressure is on from the district office; there are grave concerns with the performance of some primary (elementary) schools on the National Test, a high stakes test done in Standards 1 (7-8 years) and 4 (10-11 years) in all primary schools to map the school’s ongoing performance and determine if intervention at the national and district level is needed.

Her school is not underperforming, but her students come from challenging circumstances that affect their academic performance. Despite its rich history and cultural traditions, the area has “developed a reputation for poverty” (East Port of Spain Development Company Limited, 2008, p. 1) with residents living in moderate to very poor circumstances, locked in a cycle of low-income jobs and seasonal employment. The Minister of Education is demanding improved student performance across all schools in the country and significant attention has been paid to the performance of primary schools in her school region. Her teachers and students are under the hammer of accountability; she is preoccupied with thinking of ways to significantly improve teacher professional learning to enhance students’ academic performance.

She extends her hand to open the gate and enter the school, but pauses when she hears her name being called out, “Mrs. Greer!” Her gaze moves up the narrow city street, past the row of twisted galvanized and concrete fences in front of closely packed houses.

“Mrs. Greer!” Mona a parent at the school hastens toward her. Mrs. Greer taught Mona when she attended the same primary school that her child is now attending. Mona has a 5-year-old son in the infant department (5-6 years). Mrs. Greer smiles at Mona in greeting and then stands for 10 minutes as she intently listens to Mona launch into a complaint about her son’s teacher not being sensitive to the family’s circumstances and not being approachable.

Mrs. Greer is reminded of the complexity of her school’s holistic transformational agenda: from the district office, to raise the academic achievement of the students in the school; from the community, to ensure that the experiences at school provide a buffer between the students and the attractions of gang violence and drug use; from the parents, to get the teachers to be more sensitive to the social circumstances of the students; and from the teachers, to increase parental participation in the educational lives of their children. Mona’s complaint completed, Mrs. Greer asks about the welfare of the extended members of Mona’s family who she is familiar with, the children’s father, Mona’s mother and siblings.

Mrs. Greer pushes the gate open and enters the school. She stops for a brief moment to catch up with the security guard, sitting in the shade at the bottom of the steps to her office. With no significant security events to report, she moves on up the stairs, and enters the top floor of the concrete two-story school building. She looks around and notes the wooden floors and open plan with blackboards as screens to separate the classes. This floor houses the Standards 2 to Standards 5 (8-12 years) with two classes at each level except for Standard 5, which has only one class. She sees teachers on task and uses her eyes as laser beams to get two boys to focus on the teacher in front of the board. She goes past the small kitchenette and her clerical officer, who she chats with for a few minutes to ensure that everything is ready for the PTA meeting.

She enters her self-contained office, pulls the door in but does not close it, given her open door policy. She drops into her chair, places her hands on the desk and begins mapping strategies; crafting discourses, she creates in her mind (given all that she knows about the school and the expectations for her school) a pathway to realize her “100% vision”; this while ensuring that everyone is able to share in creating and implementing the vision with her. Her eureka moment as a leader comes when she recognizes that she tends to judge the teachers by her own standards. She realizes that she had to learn to navigate and bridge the space between the teachers telling themselves they were giving the job, and their students a 100%, but for her it was really like 50%, 60%, or 70% and not her expected 100%. She adjusts to the reality that she had to work with them to modify their pedagogical and relational practices to suit the learning and aspirational needs of the students. To do so she had to learn to be patient, identify the learning needs of the teachers and support them in the transformation of their own professional practices.

As she sits in her office reflecting, she determines that her first task is to promote the professional learning of the teachers to improve student learning. She selects to engage with transformational leading and employs action research with the teachers to develop dispositions and practices of shared responsibility for the outcomes of learning and the academic performances of students in the school. For her and the school it is important to engage in leading through partnerships and construct leading as shared responsibility (Grootenboer, Edwards-Groves, & Rönnerman, 2014). Her focus is on ensuring that teachers are empowered to employ research-based practices to modify their teaching and learning practices and consequently improve student achievement. The pressure to do so comes from a variety of sources, the community that the school serves, the district/regional educational office with oversight for the performance of schools, the needs of the learners themselves and the teachers who are uncomfortable with the state of their practice, and their day-to-day working experiences.

The clang of the bell shakes her out of her reflection. The school day has ended early to facilitate the PTA meeting; there is only one hour to go.

The Action—Reflecting Practice-Reflecting on Practice

Mrs. Greer selected to enrich the outcomes of the students by enhancing the pedagogical and leading strategies employed by the teachers. As such, she acknowledged the value of action research and used it to promote outcomes in the school. Her use of action research as a collegial support technique coincided with her school-based capstone project, which was in partial fulfillment of her master’s in education, a degree that she was pursuing at the time of this study.

She wanted the teachers to find out for themselves, that practices and curricula needed to be tweaked on a regular basis. Thus, in promoting self-discovery for the teachers, she realized that her initiative was not going to work as a model for sustained quality practice if it was simply hand delivered to them as a ready to implement package. Through action research and reflective practice she encouraged the teachers to experience the twists and turns that they had to make to suit themselves, the school, and the class. She wanted them to experience the success of the struggle, to find out that the best way to learn was through action, working, and planning together in teams.

Her pursuit of knowledge and her positioning of herself as a lifelong learner shaped the ways in which she led. Mrs. Greer characterized herself as a leader of leaders, not a leader of followers. Thus, she provided the opportunity for teachers to take and share responsibility for the focus and success of the school. Teachers in teams were tasked with developing school policies, chair and coordinate staff meetings, and plan and design curricula across the different levels of the school for the term initially, and modified on a weekly basis to suit the needs of the learners. She encouraged a practice that created the time for teachers to talk in ways that focused on problem solving, supporting each other, and initiating professional advocacy (Bristol, 2012, 2014)

Mrs. Greer appreciated the need for a leading practice that was shared and relevant to the needs of the school. Thus, she redesigned the practice architectures and conditions (Kemmis et al., 2014), which enabled teachers’ practices as teacher leaders. She affected the existing cultural-discursive arrangements (sayings) through the implementation of transparent communication procedures, with continuous updates via school-circulated memos. This prefigured the sayings of the staff to the extent that they developed a shared language and communal ownership for the vision and direction of educational development at the school. Different teachers took responsibility for developing school policy, for example, a discipline policy.

These redesigned sayings triggered a concomitant shift in the material-economic arrangements (doings) of the staff. Opportunities were created and capitalized upon for teachers to engage in collaborative teaching and learning practices, constructing grade-based curriculum teams to provide mentorship and professional support in the fashioning of subject programs, units of work, and lesson plans.

These doings created an alternative communicative space where teachers in community engaged in reflective conversations that were engineered toward the promotion of student achievement and quality teaching. This in turn facilitated the realization of new forms of social-political arrangements (relatings) where teachers began to experience increased levels of autonomy and capacity. These new ways of relating with self and others in community promoted a culture of professionalism, which was supported and sustained through an encouragement to pursue higher education qualifications. The culture of the school changed and professional development became embedded in practice.

Mrs. Greer framed these initiatives and realigned the practice architectures of her leading within a form of reflective practice contrived to deliberately connect good leading practices to effective schools or, as encouraged by the GOTT (2008), schools as centers of excellence. Thus the reflective practices of the school principal and her staff collectively worked to facilitate a project of transforming the social and educational status of students, teachers, and community in this small urban primary school. By providing the conditions necessary for the teachers to become leaders in themselves (Day, 2000), Mrs. Greer ensured that teachers engaged in critical and creative thinking in community; an aspirational agenda that supported the teachers in their mediation of the demands of the various educational partners while ensuring that they gained fulfillment in and through their professional practices.

Mrs. Greer facilitated continuous reflective practices and enabled the creation of safe, constructive, and progressive spaces for teachers to reflect on their practice, these she saw as critical to school change. She believed that reflective practice and action needed to become the cultural norm within the school (Dalgiç & Bakioğlu, 2014). Over the course of the year this sustained practice of engaging in education through reflection went on to influence the practices of the educational partners. For the community, it shaped a practice of engaging with the circumstances of life—helping parents, students, and the extended community to make different choices and so aid in the development of the community in which the school was a part. This in turn went on to improve parental participation, and the collegial relationships between parents and teachers. For Mrs. Greer, this was at the heart of the reciprocal relationship between the school and the community, so much so that parents began recommending the school to other parents: a notable 180° change in public opinion about the effectiveness of the school.

The Result—In the Shadow, From the Shadow

A practice theory perspective and a site ontological approach framed the understandings gained from this case, specifically practice architectures (Kemmis et al., 2014).The activities associated with Mrs. Greer’s practice of leading in this social context helped us understand how she engaged reflective leading and action research to facilitate school transformation, encourage shared responsibility and improve student learning experiences. From a practice architectures perspective, practices are located within sites of social interaction among and between people, objects, traditions, and histories. These are the intersecting reflecting shadows that create a niche where educational practices get constructed as sites of tension. The nature and form of leading response possible (the practice) is enabled and/or constrained by preexisting and prefiguring shadows—the orders and arrangements in the site. These orders and arrangements exist in an intersubjective realm between the individual and the social. They are the cultural-discursive (sayings), material-economic (doings), and social-political (relatings) arrangements brought to or already existing as a part of the practice traditions and practice landscapes within the site.

To erode poor practices and transform and sustain quality professional and learning practices in the school and amongst the teachers and students Mrs. Greer had to apprehend, at the level of the site (and among the shadows), the means through which the practice architectures make a practice such as reflective leading intelligible. At Corner Stone Government School, a practice of leading as reflective and shared was needed to cast light on the shadows (the orders and arrangements), their movements, and their relationships. Her leading practice was being conditioned by policy imperatives for school-based management and the creation of schools as centers of excellence (sayings), the creation of curriculum teams (doings), and the entrenching of peer-support and shared responsibility (relatings) as a part of the normalized culture of the school.

In agreeing to be shadowed (Cho & Huang Gao, 2009; Le Riche, 2006) and allowing photos to be taken for the purposes of photo-elicitation (Van Auken, Frisvoll, & Stewart, 2010; Wald, Norman, & Walker, 2010) over 2 days in a period of 2 weeks in the school term, Mrs. Greer created the opportunity to access the transformation of practice at the level of the experienced (in the shadows). At various intervals throughout the 2 days of observation, she engaged in reflective debriefing conversations with us (the researchers) where she made explicit the internal motivations and site-based realities, which were influencing her leading practice.

We used two sets of information as the stimulus for this conversation: the transcripts from the conversations and a slideshow of the pictures taken during the 2 days of shadowing. Mrs. Greer selected from the collection of images the photo/s she considered to be making a significant statement about the nature of her leading practice. Together we interrogated these to identify (a) what was meaningful, (b) why it was significant, (c) what were the implications for practice, and (d) how that practice could and would be modified at a later stage. This facilitated her awareness of the shadows surrounding and internal to her practice—the connections and or dissonance between her stated practices, the lived practices of leading, and her attempts to encourage staff members to engage in low stakes action research projects.

Mrs. Greer’s leading intervention demonstrated that reflective practice (a) is a complex and contestable activity, a process that should not be taken for granted and should be appropriately scaffolded when being used to support learning (by students or teachers), otherwise it can result in superficiality (Leigh & Bailey, 2013; Ryan, 2013); (b) encourages a socially and politically responsive standard for acting wisely or prudently in the adoption of an “educative stance” (Dimova & Loughran, 2009, p. 206) in the contest between cultural and economical imperatives for educational development; and (c) is best used by practitioners, in practice, to promote the ability to “examine and evaluate practice in context” (Siebert & Walsh, 2013, p. 168)—an interrogation that facilitates self-regulation and self-liberation through and in practice.

Topic: Reflective Practice, Leadership, and School Transformation

Goals:

Activity 1—Reflecting and Interrogating: Understanding the Practice Architectures of Leading

For Hickson (2011) there is “no singular ‘right way’ to go about reflective practice” (pp. 829-830). Reflective practice has a long documented history of effectiveness when it is called into being for the purposes of improving practice, student achievement, school change, teacher capacity, and professionalism. Galea (2012) speaking of reflective teaching suggests that,

Rather than following a means-to-an end model that limits teachers to a functional role that reproduces existing cultures, and that subjects them to authoritarian and controlling mechanism, reflective teaching is perceived as an effective tool in democratizing teaching and learning process. (p. 245)

A case such as the one outlined earlier in this article can be provided to school leaders who are enrolled in (a) leadership programs and (b) informal professional networks (at a district level), as a stimulus for pair or group conversations that focus on the following:

Recommended Readings

Activity 2—Shadowing and Transforming: Identifying the Practice Architectures of Leading

School leaders can be paired or placed in teams to spend a day shadowing the other in schools and at their sites of practice. Using photography to enable the observation process and debriefing conversation is an option that can be explored depending upon feasibility, levels of disruption, and comfort levels of those involved. The learning leaders will be asked to attend to the following:

Recommended Readings

Engaging in continuous reflective practice serves to promote educational action as strategic and deliberate: socially and morally oriented. This encourages an educational stance that is a form of praxis geared toward educational quality that is worthwhile, serving a public good. This as opposed to instrumentalist notions of performance measures checked and accounted for through standardized testing and teaching. Promoting a practice of the reflective school leader within and beyond leadership qualification programs ensures that education, through its schooling practices, is able to meet its twin goals of social reproduction and social transformation.

In educational contexts, like Corner Stone Government, the one detailed above, schools and their staff members have significant moral carriage of the social, political, and economical outcomes of students and the ways in which these students then go on to serve and develop their communities. As exemplified by Mrs. Greer, principals play a critical role in creating the environment for their faculty to go beyond the stated curriculum to embrace a vision that places social responsibility at the center of their teaching.

Beyond much-needed resources, schools need to become research-rich environments that are self-improving (British Educational Research Association [BERA], 2014). There is a growing imperative that education systems recognize “research literacy as an important prerequisite for school . . . improvement and [that] a research-rich culture [is] a key feature of any school . . . designated as ‘outstanding’” (BERA, 2014, p. 7). The case outlined above is an example of a leader’s burgeoning research skills in a school that can be considered as developing into a research-rich environment, one where teachers, leaders, and researchers engage in dialogue and research relationships geared at addressing the challenges of 21st-century schooling. Thus, leaders need to be able to use research-based leading practices to engage the capacity, innovation, and creativity of staff members in service to students and the community. Reflective leading enables reflective teaching and reflective learning. It also promotes development and change as a possibility, but can only do so within a critical community of practitioners and learners.