The Principleship
The Principalship which written by Sergiovanni is about the key improvements or the concepts of managing the school, institute or organization and being a good leadership for the principalship. The author put and combined together a lot of the good perspective and experiences from the effective and successful principals and leaders of the successful institutes or organizations in order to let the readers understanding how to be a good and effective principal, leader, or teacher and how to create the successful school, organization or institute.
Chapter 1
Setting the stage: Administering as moral craft
In this chapter, the reader will know that principal have the important role to develop one organization to be successful institute or school. As well as, good principal have to be an effective or skillful leadership. To start a successful organization; it will depend on the leader who is strong capacity, responsibility, courage, and morality. Also, leader is ready and willing to sacrifice him/herself to serve his/her school or organization. Moreover, we will know the three linkages of leadership–The Heart, Head, and Hand which refer to the believe or vision of achieving or creating plan to do something and then using their brain, knowledge or theory to do and to reach the goal; finally, taking action and implementing it on the right track by following their believe and theory.
Other important concepts that the author wants to show in this chapter is about the characteristic or moral of leadership. It is all about the freedom of leadership. Leadership cannot be forced. To be a good leader or leadership, they may choose their own different ways to develop or serve their organization up to a specific situation, time, and place. They cannot just follow guideline or rule of someone without any sensitive consideration to situation. Similarly, you will also find out that principal leadership is not all about doing thing alone or relying on governmental authority; in contrast it is all about creating a good culture, sharing value, and creating a learning community.
One last thing is that, this chapter will clarify you that leadership has to take more risk, more work, and more time than the followership; and is considered to be servant leadership. Thus, it will produce a good quality of leadership principal. Due to brief above, you see the big picture of how to start or bring a good leadership in the principalship in this hold chapter.
Chapter 2
View of the principal’s job
This chapter will tell you how and what you see as a principalship’s role or task. What are principal responsible for? You will aware about the important thing that principal has to do as a good leader. According the changing of the world, the principal has to be flexible to adapt or change his/her role to fit the changeable situation in order to make their school work well and effectively. Also, the principal must plan the goal, then sharing and providing it to his/her subordinators and motivates or lead them to practice the plan successfully. Again, the principal have to recheck or review how the process of work is and give feedback in order to accomplish the goal.
Another conception in this chapter is the values-based approach which is used to define what the principal should do or should not so as to improve the school to be standardized or not let any mistake happen. In addition, the thick vision which is identified by values approach is how the principal or the communities as teacher, student, parents, and subordinators together make the school success. Additionally, this chapter will let you know about the three things that the principal must do. First, the demand, principal must do and follow the rule in order to meet the legal requirements that are set. Secondly, He/she has to control the thing in stable not over the limitation of the rule set, is called the constraints. However, the last important is the choices, which provide some opportunities to do vary things that not in the rule set. Those opportunities will reduce demands and constraints and make the principal use his/her own difference ideas or theory that he/she experienced to create or improve the school to be effectiveness.
The principal’s role has to change or is changing because of the need of market and political involvement. The principal has to add or change his his/her job to help, share, and supervise in the relationship of teachers, parents, students, and communities to meet the market’s needs and political changes.
Chapter 3
The limits of traditional management theory
In this you will know that how the principals are more effective than others because they are people who have the abilities, knowledge, and alternative theory through the experiences they overwhelmed and practiced. This chapter, the author wants to show how the principal make decision on something are the effect of their mindscapes of practice. Sometime principal decide to do something base on his/her believe or feeling which we cannot be easily understand and sometime base on theoretical knowledge and research-base. Principal will face with many messy situation and must deal with this situation by increasing his/her understanding, discovering, and communicating from the around environment.
Other important part of this chapter is about the reflective practice, the connection between professional knowledge and scientific knowledge. This will tell us that in real world or real situation, thing does not go stable, it always changes; thus, the principal cannot base on science or traditional management theory to do his job. He/she has to use it and create new management theory with wisdom and professional experiences by himself/herself. Additionally, the traditional management and mindscapes are still problems when it cannot adapt itself to new situation or cannot be reinvented itself. However, there can be mistake if we give up the traditional management theory because it has its own advantages that the principal can learn from it. If the principal use it limitedly and observably, he/she can take it for the improvement.
Other opinions are the traditional management theory that can be no longer advantages or useful because of the new theory or new condition start happening, nonlinear condition and loosely structure condition. These two conditions will make a change of the traditional rule and limit it.
Chapter 4
A new theory for the principalship
For the new century and high technology today, the traditional management and leadership have to be changed but not completely hundred percent. We can include and change some old theories and create new theory for the present. In this chapter, you will see the solution or the discussion of issues and ways to solve the problems by using the traditional rule and the alternative rule which is a new theory. The first issue is about how schools are structured. As traditional rule, the schools are managerially tight but culturally loose. Problem in this is that the people cannot show up their own belief and feeling and then just stick to the rule; thus this school will work well but not more improvement and development. Conversely, in the alternative, the teacher, student, subordinator, and principal can use and share their own belief and experiences and then lean from each other for the school managerial enhancement. Besides, there are other issues in this chapter such as strategic planning, where to put into the improvement planning process, how school are led, and so forth which you can find out by yourself.
Moreover, the management and leadership are worried about the controlling, for both traditional and new theory, which are needed to increase the reliability and predictably. Controlling is really necessary to manage and lead people or school to be success and organized. In traditional management and leadership theory, they control over event and people mean everything depending on order, rule, and leader command. On the other hand, the new theory is control over the probabilities of sharing goal and purpose to subordinators. Then, the subordinators know what to do and do not depend on the command form leader because they also know the goal and the purpose to development.
Chapter 5
The school as moral community
This chapter, you will know that school can act many roles in community. Here it talks about the school as moral community. School is a place where people go and meet for learning a good characteristic, morality, culture, problem solving and social values; sharing values, ideas, goal, experiences, and love; and communicating people including principal, teachers, parents, students, staffs and so forth.
Also, you will know that why people have much attention involving in school because there is a social contract that could be the values and the benefits which people want from the school. That contract is the key lock of the principal use as motivational devices that keep the school live on, popular, and important. One more thing is about the social covenant that can lead people to achieve and find a good way in life and their belief and have connection together well.
Moreover, this chapter also clarifies about a theory of community. Community is defined many differences up to altered disciplines. The author defines that the communities are the collection of individuals to share ideas and ideal and get naturally meaningful and significant found from these communities. The community was formed into three groups by Tonnies (1957); the community of relationship, place, and mind which represent meaning that bond people together by building a special wisdom of belonging and a strong mutual identity. There can be some problem in the community theory by its own nature. It is about the inclusive and exclusive. It can be harmful and helpful, produce people with good result or worth result.
Chapter 6
The forces of leadership and the culture of the school
In school position, the principals are the important part in maintaining and improvement school quality. The schools become effective and successful because of the leader and the leader here is refer to the principal. In this chapter, you will know five forces of leadership that the principal use to empower the school to become more effective and stable. Those forces are technical, human, educational, symbolic, and cultural.
The technical force refers to the managing, organizing, making plan, and scheduling in order to ensure that school will work and work well. The human force here focuses on the flexibility of leader to provide support, motivate, and build trust and good relationship with the subordinators, teacher, and students. The educational force relate to the knowledge, abilities, and leadership skill of principal that use to manage and control the school. These three forces will make the school work well; however, it cannot be best for the present day so it needs to be the extra two forces, the symbolic and the culture force, to get more glorious. The symbolic force addresses the way that the principal have to pay more attention to what is important to school development. The leader has to make close relationship to teachers, students, parents, and community by acting good behavior and politely speaking; and letting them know the meaningful, values, purpose of the school and then this will causing to work motivationally and commitment. The last one is the cultural force, is about building a good culture such as values, symbols, beliefs, and sharing meaning of parents, students, teachers and others consider as school as community.
Chapter 7
The stages of leadership: A developmental view
The situation is willing to change in all circumstances. One leader cannot use the same strategies to solve or control problems so leader should change according to the changing of those circumstances. This chapter is regarded to forth leadership strategies and tactics for those changing circumstances in developing an effective school. There are Bartering as exchanging benefit together within school, teachers, parents, an community; Building as motivating, building trust and supporting for teachers and students; Binding as creating good relationship, sharing values to each other; and Bonding as making people to feel comfortable, trustable, and self-sense that everything in school is about together.
This chapter also tells about source of authority for leadership which can be a bureaucratic authority, personal authority, and moral authority. Bureaucratic authority is the way the principal provides the rule and the subordinators have to follow the rule in order to make the school work done but not well. Moreover, everything is under the monitoring of the principal and the principal takes important role and more times to closely supervise the teacher to work. Personal authority is the way to exchange a benefit to subordinators, offer teachers the external rewards and make them feel that when they have a good job, they will get a good benefit and they will feel pleasure to get the job done. And the moral authority is considered a major source because this source is to make the subordinators or teachers feel obligation to get the job done by their self-motivation and commitment. The principal motivate them by offering the internal rewards, sharing beliefs, values and commitments, making the followers feel that they have a role as leaders too, everybody is a leader. In addition, you will know about the main leadership type, one is transactional leadership which mainly focuses on extrinsic intentions and desires, while the transformative leadership focuses on intrinsic encouragement as moral motives and needs.
Chapter 8
Becoming a community of leaders
This chapter show us the way that the principal or leader want to create the community of leaders mean that making everybody in one community to become leader and responsible citizenship by sharing and expressing them goals, purposes, ideas, and ideals. For instance, we have to create learning and learner communities for teachers, make them understanding the reality, and involve in school improvement and development. Furthermore, the names of leadership not only leads but also a doer mean do more than position.
Leadership as a practice is to share leadership. This means that the principal have to entitle the teachers to act also as a leader; then, he is willing to take responsibilities to help and achieve the goals by themself in a particular place and time. The best thing to accomplish this is to create a new leadership values for the principalship by purposing and sharing values. If teachers only follow or respect order from rule under the principal management or order, the jobs only gets done. On the other hand, if the teachers or follower respond to the ideas, ideal, values, and purposes which shared by principal, the jobs will get done well. So when people do task with the satisfaction from heart will be better than doing task by following someone’s order. That why instead of leadership, it have to be ready for building followership by making and motivating your subordinator or the follower be a good manager or leader. Thus, they will get the things done by themselves. Let them do the job autonomously and only share goals and purposes; motivate and provide support and training as they need in order to achieve and make jobs done
One last thing is, to avoid using power over your followers; this will make the job done but not in good way and for long; try to make a good relationship with the follower, share a goal and develop mutual purposes together and intend real change together.
Chapter 9
Characteristics of successful schools
In this chapter, the author tries to reveal and discuss about the characteristic of successful school. How can we say that one school is the successful school? It can be an effective school or good school. In this, they have not defined clearly yet between effective school and good school. The effective school can be addressed by whose students attain well in basic and specific skill or basic proficiency standards as measure by completing test. For the good school means everything is good like good students, teachers, good score, good quality, and good relationship with teachers, students, and parents and so forth. Sometime, we say one school is effective but may not be good.
In addition, this chapter focuses much on the effective school and here there are many research revelations which relate to the effective schools and what are the elements of successful and effective schools. Effective school provide student centered program which help student to share ideas and experiences to each other, cooperate with friends , and to have a good relationship between teacher and students. Effective schools offer the academically rich programs and instrument that promotes students learning which help student to feel of study and learn with a good curriculum, contents, and environment. Effective schools have a positive school climate which all students, teachers, staff, and principal commit to behave and respond to a learning and learner community. Effective schools foster collegial interaction which allows teachers to use their talent and to share professional experience and teaching practices for ability enhancement. Effective schools have extensive staff development which focuses on how to help to develop and improve skills or abilities of teachers and staffs. Effective schools practices share leadership and foster creative problem solving which means everybody in school can come together to make decisions on solving problems or creating new program to develop the school. The decision making must be together not depend on principal alone. The last one is effective schools involve parents and community means all students, parents, teachers, principal, and communities have to create a good relationship.
Chapter 10
Becoming a community of mind
In order to build a successful school, it needs to build human capital and social capital. Social capital will help students engaging in learning and academic success. Building capital in schools is influenced by largely on the cultivation of a community of mind. To construct the community of mind is to tie people up to be together and share ideology in specific purposes. Those ideologies will shape what principals and teachers believe and how they practice to influence the norm structure and behavior of students.
The important thing of community of mind is the goals because the goals are set by the principal in order to achieve to be a successful school. One school can have multiple goals and goals are set to be success in different ways. Then when we plan to reach those goals it may be the conflict happening during implementation, however, the principal have to shape all ideologies of teachers and community to straight to one direction. In addition, the principal have to be well defined and use the educational platforms to make decision of what to guide and how to guide all teacher and subordinator into one direction. Becoming a community of mine, this will create a school culture with a basic for all decision making and the basic for moral action.
Community of mind can be other ways that we motivate teachers or subordinators as the important part of this community or school. We push them to feel obligation to works by their self-interest and self-motivation. Everybody become a community of mind have to know and share the purpose together due to purposes will let people know the process of school is going, why we do it and how it is working.
Chapter 11
Making standards work
All people want their school to be a good school, effective school, or successful school. To define a good school is to have a look into the processes inside the school. One way to make a good school is to make good standard and assessment. The school with a good standard will become a good school. Setting the standard has to be involved from the ground floor or the bottom up. The standard must be fit to every local in the whole state or country and make that it will work well every corner of the country. Especially, the lifeworld of each school or local community really have the strong effect in setting the standard. School’s local values, traditions, meanings, purposes, rituals, norm and school’s culture are considered the lifeworld.
So to make the standard work, we have to set it appropriately up to time, place, and situation of each local community. And we test the standard to make sure that it will work in many condition and situation before we implement it. When we standardize the school standard to all school in the whole state or country, we expect that all school will meet the standard we set; however, the standard cannot be work well with all school if the standards are set by the states alone. So the state, school boards, parents, teachers, and students equally reasonable in setting standard. That the reason we include the alternative standard in setting the standard so that it can facilitate each community to share purpose, aim, and goal from their different perspectives and cultures to develop an appropriate standard that fit with every school for the whole country. Moreover, the state or the ministry has responsibility to provide both technical assistance and financial resources for professional development to those who involve in setting standard.
Chapter 12
Teaching, learning, and community
In this chapter, we will know about the strategies of teaching, learning, and link to community. The teaching has to be an effective ;and teaching and learning should receive the right reward. In teaching, teachers have the most responsible for providing and sharing knowledge to students. Thus, they have to become more active as contributors in knowledge and collaborators in creating new knowledge about teaching and learning. They have to create school as the learning community by the support from their principal.
Furthermore, in order to make student understand and involving in learning, the teacher use one teaching strategy which is about the teaching for understanding. This mean the teacher give the students the opportunity for students to involve much in learning by let them answering the question, discussing, and debating meaning and implication, and engage in faithful problem solving in real context. Teaching by letting the student active learning by themselves and teacher explain some guideline, scaffolding and then facilitate them. Moreover, one thing to improve teaching and learning is to organize and prepare the classroom as the learning community. This means to help all students to build up the social community and learn a thing that link to the real work.
Chapter 13
Instructional leadership, supervision, and teacher development
This chapter wants to show that the principal is a lifelong learning of the school. The principal is still a teacher or instructor, and learner of the school. He/she spend a lot of time to learn something new and movable from school to build a strong capacities and then will to teach, supervise and share those new things to his/her subordinators and teachers. In the feature of learning and teaching, for the principal, are not about consuming the knowledge but to build up knowledge.
Also, this chapter will express the model of teacher development. In training model, principal is considered the trainer or expert who has better knowledge than teacher, has a role to train and instruct teacher what to do, and has a role to improve teacher’s skill through training and practice. For the professional models, teacher more powerful than the principal and principal has to listen and decide to do what the teacher informs and teacher has important role to build professional community through problem solving and inquiry. For the renewal, the principal encourage teacher to build the caring community through reflection and evaluation. The Principal have to give many opportunities to teachers in developing their skill by motivating them to participate in the conferences, meetings and school projects.
Chapter 14
Clinical supervision, peer inquiry, and other supervisory practices
This chapter is about the practices that the principal and teacher share responsibility for leadership and supervision. This means that the principal and teacher can help each other in developing good schools. In order to achieve the school’s purpose, we have to create a community of practices. And in this community, supervision which is responsive to the needs of practice must be responsive as well as to the learning requirement of professional practitioners. Additionally, when teacher help student to be more connected to learn and to achieve at higher level and what teacher learn changes their practices, then teacher learning passes the responsibility test.
A clinical supervision is happening when there are the way at helping teacher understand and improve their teaching and collaborative. The purposes of clinical supervision are to help teachers to understand their practice better and to examine existing patterns of teaching in ways that make sense to them. Therefore, evaluation is responsive to the needs and desires of the teacher. It is the teacher who decides the course of clinical supervisory cycle, the issue to be discussed, and for what purpose.
Chapter15
Motivation, Commitment, and the teacher’s workplace
This chapter is about teachers’ motivation and commitment and their workplace. This will tell you that the changes of the school policy have an effect on teachers’ motivation and commitment. It is all about the bureaucracy in class room that make uncomfortable for teacher. Teachers have their own professional career to teach by using they own experience and effective teaching style. If they follow the bureaucracy, they will not motivate much in their teaching because the policy maker may not know about the real situation that the teachers meet in their professional work. Thus, there will be something wrong and will not easy for teacher to implement that policy.
There is a big concern about in the bureaucratic teaching; it is the isolation in teaching. This means that when teacher become isolated, he will work alone, doing things alone without sharing ideas or ideals then it will have a bad effect on our learning community. Moreover, this isolation can also effect on student learning because the teacher who belonging to a learning community have more positive views of students and are more successful in changing their for better.
Chapter 16
The change process
This last chapter is about the change process. As the world is changing, everything needs to be updated for the improvement. So does the school, the curriculum, and its policy are needed to change for enhancing the quality of student to meet the requirement of the global market. Then, when the standards of school change, teachers have to change their practice too in order to suite the new policy. Nevertheless, there is a problem in the change process which is about the way to implement the new rule. When the innovation adopts, they expect to be implement but it cannot. Teacher will need a lot of times to adapt to that new innovation. Another reason is that, the change in school has to be institutionalized, so there must be a lot work and task need to be reorganized; therefore, this will require a lot of money to support. Thus, the adoption, implementation, and institutionalization are the principal’s goal for the school improvement.
The change in one organization or one school cannot be done by only individuals. In the systems view of change, in this chapter show that the unit of change is not limited to the individual teacher, the school principal, or broader political and managerial context. In fact, even change is way to enhancement; though, change is not enough for the school improvement. When we decide to change, the thing it will not completely change through our expectation. So this will cause the sustaining improvement. In order to have a completely there must be the involving of teachers, students, supervisors, and community. Principal cannot achieve by himself/herself alone but he/she can facilitate the team to be together in one direction.