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Leadership for Shaping Positive Culture and Ensuring High Levels of Student Engagement
by Mike Dappolone, 2010

The first third of the year 2010 has turned out to be one of the most trying periods in recent history for New Jersey teachers. During that time, the governor of New Jersey, in an effort to eliminate a crushing state deficit, made huge cuts to a large number of public programs, not the least of which was education. As a result, most districts found themselves facing huge budget gaps that they were forced to close by a variety of means which, in almost every case, included a substantial reduction in the number of teachers and other staff working in the schools. With these staff members went a myriad of programs, from athletics to gifted student programs, and, in some extreme cases, whole school buildings would be closed for good.

This extreme (some might say dire) financial situation, while certainly not good in any sense of the word, has the peripheral benefit of emphasizing more than ever the need for strong and positive leadership in our schools. Teachers and staff are frustrated, worried for their jobs and for their students, and above all deeply troubled about the long term consequences of the sweeping changes in the financial structure of New Jersey schools. In this climate, teachers need to be reassured repeatedly that their work still has meaning, and this can best be accomplished by encouraging teachers to continue to focus on the goals and standards that their districts established before any of these changes began. Despite the loss of money and, by extension, staff and programs, it still falls to teachers and their leaders to continue to focus on the curriculum and prepare students to pass standardized exams, excel at the college application process (for those following that path), and obtain the life skills necessary for meaningful and productive citizenship.

Excellence in the classroom begins and ends with positive culture in the school. The leader’s primary responsibility is to create and maintain an environment that is physically and emotionally safe, academically rigorous, and richly diverse. Students and staff must be free and relatively unconstrained in their ability to exercise their creativity and speak their minds in the classroom – Sir Ken Robinson, in his book The Element (2009), postulates that “…the highest form of intelligence is thinking creatively.” What better venue for creativity, then, than in the classroom? Of course, such creativity and free-speech can exist only to the point where such freedom is beneficial to the learning environment – some structure must persist. Too much disorder in the classroom will be counter-productive; as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990) says in Flow, “Entropy is the normal state of consciousness - a condition that is neither useful nor enjoyable;” however, even though “We cannot deny the facts of nature…we should certainly try to improve on them.” It is the natural tendency of students (and of teachers) to seek a lack of structure and order in the classroom and in the school, so that they can pursue what interests them most (which, frequently, is not specifically in the lesson or the curriculum), but this will not result in real, sustained learning.

A school leader, then, must create an environment that allows for the best of both of these worlds – the freedom to be creative and speak freely while simultaneously providing sufficient structure to promote learning. The answer lies in motivation, but not in the way it is traditionally thought of by many educators. Motivation is frequently seen as changeable – students can be “motivated” to do their homework or sit in their seats or come to school with the proper prodding, most commonly by prescribing punishments for failing to deliver in these areas. In some cases, this may be so, but external motivators – especially negative ones – have limited effectiveness in such a situation. In fact, according to Daniel Pink (2009), external rewards are most effective for algorithmic tasks, and offering incentives may as a result actually reduce creative work to an algorithmic form, which would in most cases undermine the point of such work in the first place.

My experience working with students and other teachers and administrators has led me to formulate my own theory about the motivation of students and teachers (which really applies to just about everyone). My theory is that much as students have different learning styles, and as much as leaders have different leadership styles, people in general show what I call “subordination styles” – that is, the way they respond to the leadership imposed by others. Richard DeCharms (1968) wrote over four decades ago that he believed that the key to intrinsic motivation was for people to originate their own work, rather than serve as a “pawn” to be manipulated by others. I do not believe that this a black and white issue – in fact, I believe people fall into four broad groups with regards to their styles.

The first group is the comparatively small number of people who just want to be told what to do and how to do it, and they will do it to the best of their ability – these are the “automatons” that free-thinking people tend to look down on, but they are as integral to a successful society as everyone else. No one wants a fast-food employee taking any liberties with his cheeseburger – just make it like the one in the picture, every time.

The vast majority of people fall into a second, broad group that would rather be told what needs to be done and roughly how to do it, and then they can have a little freedom to work at their own pace and maybe modify the procedure as they go, generally to make the task easier or take less time. In my opinion, most high-achieving students fall into this category – students who complete assignments on time, but “modify” the assignment by going a little above and beyond to give them an extra edge at grading time, or maybe even by negotiating for an extra day or weekend to “Really make it good.” Conversely, I also believe that those very bright but seemingly unmotivated students whom teachers are quick to label as “lazy” or “disinterested” also fall into this category – when pushed, they’ll do what they’re asked to do, but their modifications will be to adopt a minimalist approach to avoid the negative consequences associated with noncompliance. This dichotomy warrants further investigation,, I believe, but this description is sufficient for the context of this paper.

The third classification is a small (but, I believe, growing) group would prefer to be told what to do, but then be left alone to work out how exactly to do it. These are the staff engineers and computer programmers working for monolithic companies like Microsoft and General Electric, or the creative designers at Apple Computer or Palm who figure out just how sleek a new device has to be to appeal to the next generation of consumers.

The fourth group is also small but growing – this is the group that wants to figure out what to do in the first place as well as how to do it. This is where true “free thinkers” fall, but many people who are not in this group believe that they are “free thinkers” by virtue of their own perception of the work they do – and can prove to be great obstacles to a school’s leadership. This is the group to which school leaders must belong if they desire genuine success. For these people, it is “…almost inconceivable to want something badly, think you have a chance to achieve it, and then do nothing about it” (Dweck, 2006). They must be forward-thinking problem solvers who can identify the most pressing issues in their schools, even when they are not obvious. Research done at the University of Rochester “…indicates that self-motivation, rather than external motivation, is at the heart of creativity, responsibility, healthy behavior, and lasting change” (Deci and Flaste, 1995). Above all, they must be aware of the fact that to create the all-important positive culture, they cannot directly affect the motivation intrinsic in each person. Instead they must create a culture that stimulates the intrinsic desires in each individual, allowing them to motivate themselves (Deci and Flaste, 1995).

Research also shows that external incentives are not nearly as effective intrinsic ones. External motivators typically take the form of rewards – frequently financial rewards – in exchange for performance. However, these types of motivators – promising bonus cash for a job completed ahead of schedule, a monthly luncheon for teachers whose students improve on benchmark exams – have actually been shown to narrow people’s focus, restrict creativity, and cheapen the problem-solving process. “The problem with making an extrinsic reward the only destination that matters is that some people will choose the quickest route there, even if it means taking the low road” (Pink, 2009).

School leaders must, therefore, transcend the urge to offer external rewards for performance, and instead create the environment for all participants in the educational process – students, teachers, and even parents – to find the aspects of that process that most stimulates their innate motivation and subsequently capitalize on them. This must be accomplished through the promotion of an environment that respects professionalism and collegiality, supports and improves teacher content knowledge and praxis, fosters school (and district) spirit, and ensures each by way of a comprehensive professional development plan.

There’s an old saying – If the team doesn’t do well, fire the coach. In a school environment, these words are especially meaningful. If the students are not learning, can a school leader simply blame those studnets and write them off? Of course the answer is no, so where does the problem lie? Does it lie with the teaching staff? Maybe. Does it lie with the leadership team? Maybe. Both of these possibilities must be investigated and some sort of intervention plan developed and implemented.

I submit (admittedly not with much profundity), however, that the leader’s job is to prevent arrival at such a situation in the first place. Proper support of teachers, communication with other leaders, interventions for students before their situations get dire, and an open forum to maintain robust communication about all of these things must by their nature divert a breakdown of the school’s system.

The influence a school leader has on the staff, for good or ill, is remarkable. With a single comment or a misspoken word, a school leader can set off a series of rumors and gossip that would be the envy of tabloid magazines. A single “good job!” at a staff meeting can inspire people to step up to participate in the next big initiative. Scolding or constructively criticizing a teacher or other staff member can set off an avalanche of mistrust, contempt, and even formal grievances. This influence is not to be underestimated, and should be exploited for building positive culture and initiating positive change whenever possible.

My role as a school leader will require that I take advantage of this influence to be a manager, an evaluator, a coach and mentor, a teacher, an accountant, a disciplinarian (for students and teachers), an advocate, a public relations specialist, and, in some cases, a parent. My growth over the course of the last year is staggering; I say this in the sense that I look back on the person I was just eight months ago and can barely believe that we are the same man. My judging personality has softened considerably, and I find that I have a deeper appreciation for things that were once outside my tolerances (such as the high school music and art programs) and a more sympathetic stance when it comes to working with students and teachers who are not performing as they should be (for example, understanding the sometimes complex personal reasons responsible for the problem).

The result of these changes, I think, will allow me to serve the various roles mentioned above with greater effectiveness. As a leader, I will need to promote positive change, and my old mindset would not have permitted that I do that without there being a substantial amount of friction with certain elements of the staff. I began my foray into school leadership with a certain frame of mind and a certain set of values and beliefs, and, because I kept an open mind, I was able to evolve over the course of my work. “…each person has a unique genetic endowment. People may start with different temperaments and different aptitudes, but it is clear that experience, training, and personal effort take them the rest of the way” (Dweck, 2006). This is exactly the path down which my studies have directed me.

These changes in my perceptions, temperaments, and appreciations bode well for my responsibilities as an evaluator of staff and as a coach and mentor. My experiences have shown that I have the “growth mindset” that Dr. Dweck describes as so important for success, and my continuing evolution will serve me well as I sit in on teachers in their classrooms and attempt to generate a meaningful and professional commentary about their work. I am confident that my shifting perceptions towards the creative and artistic subject will aid me in seeing nuances in teachers’ styles that I might not have before, and that these nuances will serve to provide more accurate and useful feedback.

Asking people to change puts a substantial load on them – it sets off a series of emotional responses to which different people react very differently. Frequently (usually), change is seen as loss rather than gain, and my role as a coach is critical to helping teachers (and students) overcome this initial fear and see the benefits of meaningful change. New teachers especially must be carefully mentored to understand that any time they make a change they’ll experience what Michael Fullan (2001) called “the implementation dip…literally a dip in performance and confidence as one encounters an innovation that requires new skills and new understandings.” There was a time when my tolerance of inefficiency would have potentially made me blind to this phenomenon, but now I feel that my experience, limited as it is, will prove beneficial to those who look to me for leadership.

Over the course of the last few months, my thoughts have coalesced and allowed me to formulate three guiding principles of my own, wisdom and philosophies that I can impart on those whose evaluations and coaching become my responsibility. These do not by any stretch of the imagination represent the limit of my expectations, but they are the ones most relevant to this paper.

Services can never be denied to a student.
Regardless of the political or financial situation in the state, regardless of the drama going on between teachers or administrators, no matter how angry teachers are about the collective bargaining process, about the voters, or about the Governor, as educators we need to maintain the standard that we intrinsically agreed to when we took the job. We (teachers and administrators) are here, foremost, to serve students’ needs. Yes, we need to make a decent living. Yes, we need to be treated like adults. Yes, we need to get our thoughts and arguments out there. But our students are not the enemy. We cannot take out our frustrations and anger on them. Yes, their parents may have voted “No,” but in education, we don’t punish for the sins of the father. We are here above all to educate students and to support their academic, professional, and emotional development. We will do that no matter how bad the political situation gets.

Teachers across the country are under fire for a variety of reasons, and many of those reasons are created by a small percentage of those teachers acting irresponsibly and unprofessionally. With these few teachers’ power to cast the entire profession in a bad light, teachers subordinate to me must understand that we must do everything within our power to project a positive image to the community at large, and that begins with unbiased, unrestricted service to our students and their families.

School spirit is the key to ensuring that the community views the teachers and school in a positive light. By promoting teachers to be involved in extra-curricular activities, to show up at sporting events, and to advise and manage clubs and other student organizations, the community will get a look at the true philanthropic soul that all teachers must possess. Building school spirit in the student population makes the students happy to be here, makes their parents feel as if something good is happening behind those walls, and gets teachers involved beyond their homework and their paychecks. I must make every effort to provide ways for teachers to build their own spirit and encourage spirit in the students with whom they work.

Every teacher needs to understand that if they cannot live with these realities, it may be prudent to seek work in another field.

I cannot support unsupportable behavior.
This is a quote from Dr. Warrren Mata (2010), from a class lecture on 2/17/2010. It is my job as a school leader to use every resource at my beck and call to support the staff in my building and to offer the students under our care every conceivable advantage. However, when it comes to social, ethical, and moral behavior, for the good of the rest of the professionals in the school and in the district, I cannot stand behind any teacher whose actions damage the reputation of other teachers, the school, the district, or the profession. If I believe that a teacher’s actions were professional, ethical, and legal, however, I would be willing to put my own reputation on the line in support of that teacher. This is the strength of my resolve.

School leaders must educate students and teachers about the way decisions are made, for this will help demystify many of the specific decisions to which they are subject.
I am not an advocate of fiat, and, pursuant to that, would rather have a buy-in than a walk-out. I remember saying in my interview for the Aspiring Leaders Program that one of the things I looked forward to was becoming privy to information that would help me understand some of the seemingly irrational decisions that come from the building or district administration.

This type of information sharing would best be presented in the form of formal professional development. A good leader bases his decisions on information provided as a result of data analysis. When teachers understand the data collection methods and the information gleaned from such tests, they are more likely to buy in to the resultant decision. Teachers must understand that all such data comes back to their own performance: “…data analysis can be the beginning of a professional development system that directly links past teacher behaviors to evidence of learning” (Rhoton and Shane, 2006). If teachers understand the process by which a decision is reached, then in the worst case they may be more accepting of it (even if they still do not see the benefits), and in the best case they may change their opinion and become an advocate for that particular decision.

School administrators cannot exist in isolation, handing down orders with the expectation that they be followed unquestioned and to the letter. This is a corollary to my theory about subordination – it is unprofessional and irresponsible to expect people to conform to a style of subordination that fits the leader’s leadership style but not htat person’s subordination style; in fact, it is essential that both parties – the leader and those being led – adjust and meet somewhere in the middle. This is imperative to ensure that teachers do not adopt an “us versus them” mentality when it comes to their leaders – no one, least of all the students, benefits from such an adversarial relationship. I must foster an environment of trust, where I can let teachers in on some of the details to help them better understand why we do what we do. When this occurs, the feedback that comes in from the teachers may actually help to amend and strengthen those decisions.

Of course, these are just abstract philosophies, and without a tangible goal, they are meaningless. That goal, obviously, ultimately, is student achievement. For the context of this paper, mathematics and science achievement are at the forefront. Teachers require very specialized professional development to ensure student success in these subject areas. However, before entering into a specific discussion of mathematics and science, it is important to entertain some generalizations about student engagement in the classroom.

I submit that student engagement in high level learning looks very much the same no matter what classroom or subject it takes place in, and leaders are just as responsible for this as are the teachers. Effective leaders foster a learning environment which relies heavily on inquiry (an instructional style which finds its roots in constructivism). “At its heart, inquiry in an active learning process in which students answer research questions through data analysis” (Bell, Smetana, & Binns, 2006). Inquiry investigation, in science and other subjects, is critical in promoting true understanding of subject matter for students. Inquiry requires students to “…be involved in constructing rather than reproducing knowledge through disciplined and sustained involvement in tasks resembling real-life problems” (Hanover Research Council, 2009).

Inquiry requires that students are willingly engaged in the activity at hand – they must see the stock they have in the problem and the learning that can result. This is supported by the idea that inquiry allows students to study particular concepts in the context of their own interests, which further supports the idea from above about how students need to find a way to motivate themselves, and that teachers can only create the environment for such self-discovery. Connecting concepts to the students’ lives whenever possible goes a long way towards this goal. “Students typically get very little practice in designing their own investigations; therefore, guided inquiries have the potential to take student engagement and ownership of the lab to a whole new level” (Bell, Smetana, & Binns, 2006). When evaluators indicated that they witnessed true inquiry going on in a classroom, they reported that “…teachers listened more and talked less” (Nelson and Sassi, 2005). Students’ work provokes thoughtful and insightful questions that they ask of their peers and teachers, and they are given an opportunity to question the ideas of others – even if they are the teacher’s “expert opinion.”

Promoting inquiry and teaching teachers to make proper and effective use of it requires substantial training. “Engage teachers in meaningful staff development,” as Marzano (2003) says. But “meaningful” may have a very different definition for some teachers than for others. For many teachers, especially those veterans whose careers began before inquiry became a buzz word in education, may see incorporation of inquiry into their classroom praxis as a loss-based change, especially if they have not experienced the benefits of inquiry for themselves. This is where professional development becomes critically important. Unfortunately, “Research on teacher change, however, indicates that changes in beliefs often come only after teachers use a new practice and see the benefits to their students” (Rhoton and Shane, 2006). Leaders are immediately at risk of great frustration and a form of circular reasoning. On the one hand, teachers cannot teach well using inquiry before being properly trained, but they aren’t likely to buy in to the training and the process until they have seen the success of inquiry in their own classroom.

In such a case, school leaders need to recruit and rely upon teacher-leaders to serve as the beta-testers who will convince the rest of the staff of the effectiveness of inquiry. When a few teachers who fall into the third or fourth group of subordination styles that I detailed above can be convinced (relatively easily) to try to use inquiry, they can serve as advocates (and even implementers) during sessions of professional development. “To improve student learning, professional development must consider and apply knowledge about human learning and change process, use multiple sources of information to improve and evaluate professional development initiatives, use available data to inform training decisions” (Rhoton and Shane, 2006). If teachers who have been successful with their implementation of inquiry can combine their experiences with research and other data, if the teachers being trained can have a say in the way the training is handled and focused, and if they are all allowed to participate in evaluating the effectiveness of the program, success can be nearly guaranteed.

“The inquiry scale should be seen as a continuum, so ideally students should progress gradually from lower to higher levels over the course of a year” (Bell, Smetana, & Binns, 2006). Students should progress through the four levels of inquiry over as the course marches forwards. In their math courses, they must abandon the old-fashioned rote approach to math education and instead adopt a more inquiry-based approach. “On the one hand is calculation; on the other, interpretation. The one reasons with numbers to produce an answer; the other reasons about numbers to produce understanding” (Steen, 2007). When students can be seen to be engaged in inquiry lessons and demonstrating true understanding, they will excel at solving complex problems - “…more complex multistep problems support stronger mathematical development” (Leinwand and Ginsburg, 2007).

Much as literacy education drives learning in all subsequent subject matter, mathematics education serves as the foundation for science education. While actual applied math is not always necessary for students to learn science, the analytical nature of applied math helps to solidify the problem solving and critical thinking skills students need for success in scientific investigations. The advantage science has over pure math courses is the relative ease of application to real-world situations, once again offering opportunities for properly trained teachers to play to the specific motivations of individual students and get them interested in science as a topic and, by extension, to learn.

The bottom line is that when students are interested and willing participants in the lesson, they will by their nature pursue higher-level thinking to satisfy their own curiosities. Inquiry, by its design, plays to the third and fourth groups of subordinates I outlined early in this text – people who want to “do their own thing” in a context that is meaningful and interesting to them. Schools that are capable of promoting this classroom environment all share common characteristics – most notably the use of inquiry investigations. Schools seeking to increase math and science achievement – in fact, academic achievement in general – must emulate these characteristics, but all with careful consideration of the barriers of current culture and institutional memory. Change can be painful, but when implemented with proper training and a consideration of the real motivations of students and teachers, the school leader has the perfect opportunity to “shrink the change” (Heath & Heath, 2010) and make it a manageable goal for all of those involved in the process.

References

DeCharms, Richard. Personal Causation;: The Internal Affective Determinants of Behavior. New York: Academic, 1968. Print.

Deci, Edward L., and Richard Flaste. Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-motivation. New York: Penguins, 1996. Print.

Heath, Chip, and Dan Heath. Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. New York: Broadway, 2010. Print.

Robinson, Ken, and Lou Aronica. The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. New York: Viking, 2009. Print.