Part 3 - Te Rito Toi and the crisis of leadership

My very good friend and colleague Gary Roberts (Principal of Hornby Primary School) often says that we have the best job in the world, and I struggle to disagree. He expresses the view that we have such freedom in our positions as leaders of kura in Aotearoa, and I think he's right. While there are clearly some limits on our actions as Principals, we have a huge amount of freedom as leaders of self managing schools.

Within the limits of the direction set by our governance bodies (Boards of Trustees) we have the capacity to determine so much about the direction of our individual kura. Even then, we have the capacity to work with our Boards as education leaders to set the direction of our kura.  New Zealand education leadership researcher/writer Vivianne Robinson created an outstanding model for student centred leadership, one that is still my 'go to', my gold standard, in this regard:

Why then do we see so little attention given to the types of future focussed thinking and leadership that our society and our economy need? Why do we not see the focus on creativity that evidence suggests we need?

I guess you could say that as leaders we all bring our own individual flavour and values to our roles as educational leaders, and rightly so. And I guess it would be silly to think that we could and would all see things the same way. However in the face of a massive body of evidence and thinking I struggle to see how some key trends are not now forming the basis for our educational leadership in Aotearoa. 

Whether it be the thinking of thought leaders like Jane Gilbert and Yong Zhao, the work of the thinkers from Deloittes about what society and the economy needs from learners in the future, or practitioners and academics like Peter O'Connor, there are compelling arguments for embedding creativity more firmly in our kura. Creativity appears to support literacy and numeracy, and improved science and engineering achievement, rather than the other way around (although I suspect the jury is still out on that one?). Yet we are not seeing this across our system, and within our kura., Of course there are pockets of exception, and I'd like to think that our Manaiakalani schools form one of those pockets with our underlying pedagogy 'Learn Create Share'. But even there, it takes leadership that exhibits a relentless focus on this work for change to happen.

So why not? My suspicion is that this is a crisis, a failure in fact, of leadership. My fear is that all too often school leadership is confused with school management. Both are essential, but they are fundamentally different. I also fear that what I am seeing more and more often is leadership that is ego focussed rather than learner focussed, informed by myth rather than evidence.  I worry that I am seeing leadership that is driven by the 'what's in it for me' drive rather than the 'how can I improve the lives of the earners that I serve'. If you like, I think that we have lost sight of the concept of servant leadership.

A belief in and commitment to big ideas is absolutely essential in these times of exponential change. In my opinion we are not seeing the emergence of leaders who are willing or capable of committing to the big ideas. We are not seeing leaders prepared to commit to a big vision for our future. We are seeing leaders who buy into the comfortable, who buy into the idea that what worked 30 years ago is what we need to return to now. Except that it didn't work 30 years ago.

At Hornby High School Te Huruhuru Ao o Horomaka we have adopted a bold vision, one that is future focussed:

"He puna auaha a centre of creative excellence" (yes we have corrected the typo). We believe that creativity is essential to our future.  That may mean the creative arts, but it most definitely does mean creativity in any and every curriculum area.  

That doesn't mean that we have forsworn the idea of knowledge and skills. Quite the contrary. However we understand that education now demands much much more. 

As leaders we actually DO have the freedom to lead our kura in the direction required to create the exponential change that we need. We have the capacity to deliver on the promise that is offered by the work of the Auckland University Centre for Arts and Social Transformation, to embed creativity into our kura at every turn, in every thing that we do. We need to listen to Professor Peter O'Connor and his team. We need to be bold, we need to be visionary. 

I am just not sure that we have the individual nor the collective b***s to do so.