Engaging with School Leadership Behaviours, Perceptions, and Cultures to Lead Self and Others

Invited as a consultant, at NCSL – NUEPA Delhi, to work on the “Roles and Responsibilities of School Heads – A National Perspective” was exciting! Within a brief span of six months, even while analysing documents for the project, I was skilfully and enthusiastically led to collaborate with a fascinating range of teaching and learning activities related to School Leadership – Tutorials and mentoring for the participants of the maiden Post Graduate Diploma in School Leadership Management Programme, participation in National and International Seminars, facilitating School Leadership Development Capacity Building Workshops for State Resource Groups in - Tripura, Manipur and Mizoram and coordinating the NCSL - SLDP in Tamilnadu, if that sounds ‘too much’, add in, the many opportunities to participate in insightful colloquiums, interactions with faculty and friends and visits to a well equipped and staffed library ... ought to sum up life at the NCSL, well not entirely! 

Journeying with NCSL – NUEPA, for me, entails a constant discourse with ‘School - as places of possibility; as sites for myriad expressions of leadership’. This has fuelled my desire to create and be a part of an organization that “anticipates” learning opportunities, particularly the process of systematically improving performance by identifying, understanding, and adapting professional school leadership knowledge, practice and engagement.

Facilitating School Leadership Development Capacity Building Workshops meant addressing the calls for shaping an effective training experience. Training means that the participants will be able to do something they could not do before. I wonder if I can confidently state, what that “something” is.  I have discovered achieving a golden mean between presentation and participation - is both challenging and rewarding.

The facilitation experience while allowing me glimpses of “resistance to change” where initially reluctant and anxious individuals (participants) expressed varying levels of doubt about the changes they were led to encounter also privileged me to witness how these same participants gradually willed themselves to “let many leadership styles bloom”.

The predominant fascination with the heroic model of a leader has effectively blotted out of focus the transformative qualities of Leadership – missing the forest for the trees. School heads have a definitive need for accessible, useful processes and tools that can assist foster school improvement. Despite their strategic position to focus on providing direct program services or capacity building activities, school heads often do not have access to the research skills or other resources that corporate or academic institutions use to identify effective practices. The SLDP of NCSL – NUEPA, Delhi, through its experiential capacity building workshops explicitly empowers participants towards professional knowledge, practice and engagement, to acknowledge that there is no one type of leader who is most successful at creating a high-impact school. Instead, many different styles can succeed (charismatic, humble, strategic, and detail-oriented) if leaders are willing to put their cause, and their school, above their own egos.

Ideally, a consultant brings an independent perspective to an organization sans the direct power to make changes or implement programs. My brief engagement with Tripura, Manipur and Mizoram, has prompted in me more questions than answers, for example “are we asking the right questions about school leadership in the North-Eastern states of India?” Schooling in India is a complex and diverse landscape. An ever present danger in engaging with the complexities of school improvement in the North-East, this could well apply to the whole of India, is the naive realism that dilutes rigor. I have reasons to believe that applying the principles of quality questioning to four critical leadership functions: maximizing, mobilizing, mediating, and monitoring – would help identify practice needs among school heads, identify existing practices, identify and validate new practices, promote and implement effective practices. Questions and not answers would serve to help drive school improvement in the North-East.

Towards ‘Engaging with School Leadership Behaviours, Perceptions, and Cultures to Lead Self and Others’ is a call to a lifetime journey of exploration, practice and discovery. An invitation to collaboratively imagine with learners our journey toward co-creating, fostering and maintaining an atmosphere for the curious, critical and compassionate interrogation of inequality, justice and change in school education.

* Anthony Joseph PhD - Senior Consultant with the National Centre for School Leadership - NUEPA, Delhi, since Feb 2015.