Nurturing Opportunities for Educational Leadership: How Affordance and Leadership Interconnect
by Ilana Margolin
Levinsky College of Education, Tel-Aviv, Israel
Correspondence: Ilana Margolin, Levinsky College of Education, Tel-Aviv, Israel. E-mail: mnirim@zahav.net.il
Received: December 26, 2012 Accepted: January 22, 2013 Online Published: May 20, 2013
Abstract
This qualitative ethnographic study focused on the affordances that facilitated the emergence of leadership, capturing a range of perspectives on leadership and leadership development of four groups: district superintendents; teacher-educators; mentor-teachers and graduates. The term ‘affordances’ implies a reciprocal relationship between organisms and features of their environment thus, becomes a critical element in leadership.
The findings indicate that (a) there seems to be relationships between affordance and leadership development, but they are not obvious; (b) the kind of leadership educators adopt is based on previously experienced models; (c) variations in the leadership styles educators adopt are defined by the models they create and their exploitation of
affordances.
An implication of the study is that one of the leader’s main roles is the establishment of infrastructures and affordances with myriad accessible opportunities for action. The ultimate goal is to create distributive leadership in which the practice of leadership is shared and realized within extended formal top-down and informal bottom-up groupings and networks, and endures beyond a few leaders’ tenure.
Keywords: distributive leadership, affordance, sustainability, ecological perspective, partnership
1. Introduction
Scholars have recognized the need for a critical sustainable mass of education leaders: policy makers, practitioners and researchers in order to lead meaningful reform in the field of education and to solve the leadership succession issue (Fullan, 2005; 2006; Pascal, 2009). Thus, a top priority is developing and investing in the next generation of system leaders by nurturing and expanding capabilities and talents across all levels of the educational system in order to achieve and sustain success (Fullan, 2005; Harris, 2009).
However, coping with the practicality of this complicated issue is not a trivial matter; thus, this research concerns itself with how to establish a culture in educational institutions where leaders are nurtured and develop. Drawing upon the idea that individuals have the capability to proactively shape the environment, rather than merely react to it passively, this paper enquires into some of the daily opportunities educators have or create to demonstrate leadership and the kind of leadership that these opportunities entail.
2. Theoretical Framework: The Ecological Perspective
This section begins with a presentation of the ecology and sustainability perspective that is the overarching conceptual framework of the study. Then, the two sub-theories derived from the ecological perspective are presented: distributive leadership and affordance theory.
The ecological perspective refers to the totality of the world as a whole, where connections, relationships, interactions and mutual influences emerge among people and between people and their environments (Mitchel & Sackney, 2009, p. 4). According to the ecological perspective that is rooted in Capra’s (2002) seminal theory, the world is a network of diverse interconnected and interdependent environmental systems in which each element is affected by and affects all other aspects of the universe (Bronfenbrenner, 1977). Moreover, within an ecological perspective the focus shifts from looking at distinct parts of an educational event or system to thinking about holistic representations within an educational space. Researchers combine the terms sustainability and ecology and use them within the same context (Capra, 2002; Hargreaves & Fink; 2006; Mitchel & Sackney, 2009).
Sustainability is about the ways in which people notice disturbances in their organizations, see compelling reasons to act, and move forward in meaningful ways to make something new as a purposeful response to meaningful disturbances. Sustainability maintains that leadership is an ongoing process leading to continuous improvement consistent with moral values of human purpose and aims at creating the succession of leaders for future generations (Fullan, 2005, p. ix; Mitchel & Sackney, 2009, p. 183). Capra (2002, p. 215) argues that from an ecological perspective, sustainable improvement is a property of the entire system that impinges on life and learning in educational organizations.
This view of educational organizations as systems that make a difference in the lives of individuals (Fullan, 2006; Hargreaves & Fink, 2006) affords a rich perspective for understanding the sustainable leadership issue.
Under the umbrella of the ecological perspective, distributed leadership has emerged as an alternative to the conventional top-down heroic leadership models. If sustainability is to be ensured, the alternative to hierarchical focused leadership has to be distributed within the system and embedded within the culture. Distributive leadership involves the creative application of key democratic ideas as well as a combination of structural mechanisms and the cultural spirit of democracy (Stoll & Jackson, 2009; Woods & Gronn, 2009). As many of
the main principles of the ecological approach are realized in the philosophy of distributive leadership, it helps us to anchor the modes of coordination, collaboration and synergistic partnerships that the leaders in our study formed. The combined leadership of many individuals in the organization is greater than the sum of the parts. In this format of leadership, the inherent interrelationship of person and social structure and of agents and their environment is asserted within democracy (Woods & Gronn, 2009).
As leaders have to establish a learning environment with sustainable improvement, the term affordances, which implies a reciprocal relationship between organisms and features of their environment (Gibson, 1986), becomes a key concept. Humans can, with training, and when so inclined, perceive things about their abilities and the features of the environment (Chemero, 2003) and perform actions.
As no one leader can meet the challenges of changing the complicated educational system and breaking through the status quo, distributed leadership has emerged as an alternative option to conventional top-down approaches. As leaders have to establish a learning environment with sustainable improvement, one of their main strategies is utilizing and developing affordances in their contexts: schools, colleges and districts (Mitchell & Sackney, 2009; Spillane & Diamond, 2007; Margolin, 2012). Thus, the next section reviews the research literature dealing with these two theories: distributed leadership and affordance theory.
2.1 Distributed Leadership and Communities of Practice
In the context of the enormous complexity of heterarchical relations and role overload of leaders, scholars generated the concept of distributed leadership as an appropriate alternative to conventional top-down heroic approaches. The meaning of distributed leadership is comprehensive; it is re-created and activated differently in each specific context and is explored in each environment with its new realities. Leaders have to explore and learn not only what works but what works in their specific contexts.
Practically the realization of distributive leadership is not an easy mission inside organizations, and even more so among organizations bearing on whether and how to share leadership. Distributed leadership involves attributes such as democracy, proactivity, change, collaboration involving communities of practice, ongoing learning, utilizing affordances, and capacity building. There is evidence in the literature establishing the notion that interconnectivity and interdependence of all these features is needed for successful distributed leadership.
Many of the main principles of the ecological approach are realized in the philosophy of distributed leadership. Hence, distributed leadership is about proactivity and change of the structure and meaning of the context as well as about influence – the many rather than the few to lead (Spillane, et al., 2001; Harris, 2007). Gronn (2003) asserts that the concertive action meaning of distributed leadership, i.e., the actions performed by a number of
interdependent people working together to achieve common goals, is the most significant aspect. Wenger’s (1998) notion of communities of practice, where people are active participants in the activities of social communities, is a very close idea to distributed leadership. Socio-cultural perspective argues that learning occurs in a community; thus, communities of practice have individual and organizational influences that impact schools, curriculum reform, and teacher and student learning. Including all participants in a professional community enables a reciprocal learning process in which each member is a teacher and a learner simultaneously (Paredes-Scribner & Bradley-Levine, 2010; Howard & Taber, 2010; Wenger, 1998).
Studies describe changes in organizational culture as a result of collaborative learning and distributed leadership. As learning is a critical and central component of educational organizations (Mitchel & Sackney, 2009; Margolin, 2012) leaders have to create a safe and protected collaborative and supportive culture that gives rise to increased learning. Recent research has highlighted the most important leadership skills for organizational success in the next few decades. These include collaboration across boundaries and the ability to build effective teams (Martin, 2007). Distributed leadership allows and supports a range of modes of collaboration between actors, synergistic partnerships, coordination and role interdependencies and creates patterns of relations in which the emergent joint unit becomes more than the sum of the parts (Woods & Gronn, 2009). However, it is rare to find among the proponents of distributive leadership theory detailed engagement with the contradictory structures of the hierarchical educational institutions and the leadership of communities of practice. Moreover, studies presenting the advantages of distributed leadership in many cases avoid investigating micropolitics in organizations while engaging with standard operating procedures. Distributive leadership has to merge with micropolitics and examine conflicts that are inherent in organizations. This study looks at distributed leadership and the micropolitics that shape it and serve as a source for generating the information about what matters most (Flessa, 2009). It takes into account the micropolitics of the organizations and emphasizes the various contexts of the participants.
2.2 Affordances and Leadership
As working conditions are a main component in developing leadership, a key role of formal leaders is to orchestrate the conditions and construct as well as highlight opportunities and affordances in order to determine leadership potential and develop future leaders (Harris, 2009; Mitchell & Sackney, 2009).
Affordance can be thought of as possibilities for action (Norman, 1988; Tella & Harjanne, 2007), and as a main strategy of distributed leadership. Learning and renewal are key processes of the affordance theory and hence enable leadership development. Moreover, learning every day, individually and collectively, is most powerful when it is integrated into action in the work setting (Fullan, 2006; Sparks, 2009). Thus, as affordances are relations between the abilities of the leaders and some features of a situation, the community of leaders has to adopt a holistic approach to their specific environment and utilize the various kinds of action this approach affords.
However, relationships do not exist a priori; leaders have to establish them, although this establishment is often accompanied by a struggle (Hallett, 2007; Mitchell & Sackney, 2009). Namely, leaders have to adopt and devise powerful strategies in order to establish mechanisms that make this culture a reality in practice. One of the most powerful sets of strategies for facilitating affordances that develop sustainable leadership, learning and change consists of capacity building in tandem with autonomy and time to act in accordance with beliefs and values (Fullan, 2005, 2009; Spillane & Diamond, 2007).
The structures have to provide opportunities, namely time and space, for collaboration. Then mechanisms such as learning through dialogue, discussion and open debate, common planning of times and norms that sustain collegial relationships are developed. Scholars have suggested that professional learning communities promote a sense of teacher professionalism through collegial interaction by creating the conditions for shared professional standards to emerge (Paredes-Scribner & Bradley-Levine, 2010).
Though empirical studies of distributed leadership have shown organizational changes and patterns of achievement outcomes (Leithwood & Jantzi, 2008), leaders still have difficulty in exploring their own particular context and linking it to leadership (Hallinger, 2011). In order to be adaptive and responsive to the changing conditions of their organization as well as to the whole system over time, leaders must identify and cope with the constraints and opportunities extant in their environment.
In the light of this literature, the aim of the study was to investigate how educational organizations develop future leaders. Namely, in contrast with many studies that are prescriptive, based on values rather than data, this study attempts to show how distributive leadership applies to their particular organizations and copes with the
unique problems, opportunities and peculiarities it contains (Hallinger, 2011).
The specifics of the research will deal with the following:
1. How are concepts and leadership theories translated by change initiators into daily practical actions in order to develop and sustain leaders?
2. What are the affordances that attract people to accomplish leadership and what are their sources?
3. Context
This study focuses on one dimension of a three-stage longitudinal research project involving a partnership between one of the largest teacher education colleges and the largest district in the Ministry of Education in Israel. The Ministry of Education is divided into five geographical districts each of which is managed by a District Head. The central district is the largest, consisting of 60 local authorities and comprising about 360,000
pupils studying in more than 3200 schools and kindergartens and supervised by about 70 superintendents.
The first stage of the project established partnerships between the college and several schools in the district during the years 2002 – 2006 within the framework of an experimental program initiated by our teacher education college. The program aimed to be integrative, coherent, and responsive to the changing needs of the educational system and to the requirements of the National Council of Higher Education. One of the program’s
main principles was preparing teachers collaboratively with the field by establishing partnerships between college and schools (Margolin, 2011).
The first stage successfully accomplished an alternative and innovative school-based teacher education program based on five interrelated principles: an inter-disciplinary orientation to curriculum emphasizing integration of and connectivity between disciplines and content in order to improve instruction; cross-specializations designed to teach candidates in elementary, special education, and early childhood together in mixed cohorts; partnerships between the college and local schools; a technologically rich learning and teaching environment where computers are used as mind-tools to expand sources beyond the current setting and a culture inquiry, observation, documentation and analysis of practice (Margolin, 2011).
In the second stage during the years 2006 – 2010 the experiment was implemented across the whole college. The core leadership of the new program was comprised of many of the teacher educators who participated in the 2002-2006 experiment. Moreover, as creating partnerships with schools and with superintendents of the Ministry of Education was at that time one of the main principles of the programs, the college continued these
relationships and deepened them. In the third stage, which overlapped the second, the District Head invited the college to assist her in her attempt to lead the district’s agenda in tandem with a national reform. She was bothered by poor academic achievements, multiple agendas and the gap between policy and implementation in the district. At that time the researcher was the head of the experimental teacher education program in the college and she accepted the challenge and took the roles of facilitator. A professional community of superintendents was initiated. Thus, the leadership of the original experiment now involved school principals, mentor-teachers in cooperating schools, superintendents and other practitioners.
From this stage till now the leadership is distributed among superintendents, teacher educators, principals and mentor teachers. All meet for group discussions about the district agenda and lead the national reform collaboratively. Together, they plan their continuous learning according to the specific needs of each group. Moreover, they visit schools in which they observe lessons, give feedback and reflect on the institutional agenda and innovations from their varying perspectives. In this routine of collaborative learning in situ, each member is a teacher and a learner simultaneously. The various expertise of superintendents, teacher educators, principals and teachers broadens the perspective of each member, develops them and enables continuous learning and
supports experimentations and innovation.
4. Participants
The participants of the present study are 48 representatives of the four populations that took part in an experimental school-based teacher education program (2002 – 2006). The first group consisted of eight graduates of the teacher education college (GR) who participated in the experimental program as students and who became teachers, each in a different school; the second group consisted of 12 teacher-educators (TE) from the college faculty; the third group consisted of eight mentor-teachers (MT) and their principal from one of the college’s partner schools; the last group consisted of 20 superintendents (SU) who comprised the leadership of the largest district in the Ministry of Education and the District Head. The superintendent group was comprised of general and professional disciplinary superintendents: mathematics, English, and Hebrew language as well as the superintendents of the counsellors and of the psychologists. The mentor teachers, the teacher educators and the superintendents continued to be partners in the new teacher education program designed and activated in the College. The participants were female except two male superintendents and one teacher educator.
The researcher was the leader of the experimental program (2002-2006) and the coordinator of the college-school partnerships until 2006; thus she was immersed in the different cultures and routines of the collaborating organizations and was able to mitigate the power struggles among them. In this position she worked with all four groups simultaneously; thus, in a sense, she was perceived as a boundary spanning leader
(Miller, 2008). Since then she has co-led the professional community of the superintendents together with the District Head with whom she has established trustful relations. Being a member of the college management, trying to inquire into her practice and publish her studies and concurrently enacting systemic reform in the district required boundary spanning as a leader as well as a researcher. She succeeded in integrating these two-fold missions owing to her primary long term agenda to reduce the gap between the college and the schools, between theory and practice (Margolin, 2011).
5. Methods