Angela took at least a year on her school board to feel like she knew what was going on. She’d taken a school board seat because she wanted to see the school do better, not that it was doing poorly or doing anything wrong. Angela just wanted to make it the best school she possibly could, knowing how critical schools were to develop healthy, balanced, responsible, and wise students. That was her only agenda, just to improve the school wherever and however she could. Yet as soon as she got on the board, she realized she hardly knew how a school operated. That all the school’s functions and activities came together at all seemed like a miracle.
Development
Student development is indeed a miracle. Instructing, inspiring, coaxing, coaching, pushing, and at times even disciplining students toward their better development can be a richly complex endeavor. What works for one student doesn’t work for another. What one student needs, other students have already acquired. If students were blocks of wood, schools could just chisel and hammer at them until they took proper shape. But students are instead divine living beings who respond each in their own way to the demands, requests, and invitations of instruction. And what, even, is a proper shape, when each student has unique character and personality, and unique capacity and destiny? The teachers, administrators, staff members, board members, parents, donors, suppliers, contractors, and volunteers who make a school function do well to keep the miracle of student development in mind. Students, too, should deeply appreciate how sensitive, subtle, varied, and precious their own development is. A good school isn’t an assembly line. It’s a miracle.
Complexity
One attribute that makes schools so challenging and wondrous to lead, administer, manage, reform, and improve is that they are so complex. Some organizations and endeavors can be laser focused on a particular outcome. Mining operations can be that way: get as much as you can out of the ground as quickly as you can at the lowest cost. Manufacturing operations can be similar: produce as many widgets of the highest quality at the greatest speed for the lowest cost. Their operations are still complex, but the focus is generally crystal clear, and the means and measures are equally so. Schools? Not so much. Students are not widgets. Schools don’t produce students because students are not products. A school that sees students as products is an industrial complex, not a school. Schools instead nurture students, like a gardener gently watering, fertilizing, pruning, and shining a light on a plant, hoping it grows into the strange but beautiful flower somewhere inside it. The knowledge, skills, and ethics schools should help students acquire may be relatively standardized. But how to influence students to acquire those attributes, for what purposes, in what form, and for use in what culture and context are all wide variables. Schools are complex. Don’t think that your school is an assembly line.
Integration
Another attribute that makes schools so challenging and wondrous to lead, administer, manage, reform, and improve is that their operations and functions are so integrated. Everything a school does focuses (or should focus) on how it affects student development. Of course, instruction, instructional materials, curricula, courses, programs, and co-curricular and extracurricular activities all have the aim of promoting student development toward school goals. But facility design and maintenance, right down to the function of the boiler for the school’s heat, also affects students. If the boiler fails in winter, students go home. A problem with any school operation or function can adversely impact students. Consider the teaching staff alone. Everything from recruiting and hiring instructors to their orientation, training, professional development, support, evaluation, correction, personnel policies, payroll, benefits, finances, recognition, and retention affects students, not tangentially but pretty directly. In a school, everything must come together as in an orchestra. And when it does, it can feel and look like a miracle.
Regulation
Another attribute that makes a school so challenging and complex to administer, manage, reform, and improve is that schools are very highly regulated. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that when you walk onto a campus and into a school building, you are in one of the most highly regulated environments you will ever be. State laws may dictate academic benchmarks, academic testing, advancement and graduation requirements, content requirements, elaborate student-behavior codes, student-discipline procedures, building design, safety, and emergency testing procedures, minutes of instruction, meal nutrition requirements, square feet of classroom space per student, and a myriad of other details, on top of all the employment and occupational-safety laws regulating other workplaces. Although the Constitution reserves education to state regulation, the federal government promulgates and enforces a myriad of additional regulations through its education funding initiatives. Federal law also authorizes national and regional agencies to accredit schools, imposing vast and detailed accreditation requirements on everything from student recruiting and admissions to teacher/student ratios, curriculum mapping and alignment, formative and summative assessments, student advising, and graduate placement and support. Local authorities have their own requirements, especially around fire safety, personal security, and other law enforcement concerns. Schools now also use AI-powered video, audio, and digital surveillance to monitor every communication over school technology systems and every campus move, with automatic alerts to administrators of any suspicious or anomalous activity. Regulation can strangle a school if not managed properly.
Technicality
Another attribute that makes a school so challenging and complex to lead, administer, manage, reform, and improve is that teaching and learning is a deceptively peculiar and technical field. Most of us think we know how to teach and learn because we grew up in classrooms, spending countless hours in school. Instructional methods seem fairly routine and obvious. Yet teaching and learning has a vast body of technical knowledge, empirical study, and scholarly literature. See a few of the abstracts in the appendix to this guide. The field of instruction has several schools or approaches including cognitivism or cognitive psychology, behaviorism or behavioral psychology, experiential learning, social learning, constructivism, connectivism, humanism, self-directed learning, and brain science or neuroscience, among others. The field of instruction has its own vocabulary including terms like pedagogy, androgogy, adaptive learning, blended learning, learning objectives, assessment, fluency, shaping, association, prototyping, mnemonics, heuristics, metacognition, mapping, and anchoring. Instruction also has its own technology involving complex learning-management systems.
Expertise
Another attribute that can make leading, administering, managing, reforming, and improving a school challenging is the subtle expertise that the best instructors exhibit. School boards, leaders, and administrators can’t just change things without potentially undoing the conditions that the best instructors need to do as well as they do. Don’t underestimate the peculiarly sophisticated expertise that fine instruction can take. Strong and sound instructors are not only generally organized, clear, on time, responsive, understanding, wise, and compassionate. They are also keen observers of students and student dynamics. The best instructors are aware of the capacities, challenges, yearnings, and other mental, psychological, and spiritual states of their students. And the best instructors arrange their classrooms, activities, resources, technologies, schedules, and other variable stimuli to inspire those students in their capacities and to help them meet and overcome their challenges. Schools must respect the sensitivity of the teacher/student dynamic for a successful program.
Goal
So, you can see the unusual challenges of school leadership, management, and enhancement. This guide is to help you both see and meet those challenges. Given this guide’s brevity, the details are up to you. Any solutions or enhancements you discern from reading this guide will take abundant additional thought, research, and design. But having an overall view of your school is your first challenge to effective enhancement. And that’s the goal of this guide, to give you a thorough overview with key insights into opportunities and challenges.
Experience
To meet that challenge of school enhancement, you need and deserve an informed and seasoned view. My primary expertise is as a lawyer. But I was a full-time professor and administrator, the associate dean over two law school campuses, for more than fifteen years. I also served on the provost council of a major public university, hearing the challenges that other deans and directors faced within their programs, while sharing my own. I also served as my school’s dean of instructional enhancement, meaning that I researched teaching and learning to share resources, insights, and designs with over a hundred other instructors. Indeed, for years I collaborated with a team of behavioral psychologists and graduate students to observe and reform classroom instruction. I also presented papers at national teaching, learning, and assessment conferences, along the way earning recognition among a couple dozen other instructors in a Harvard University press publication on what the best law professors do. I also appeared repeatedly before a national accrediting agency to advocate for new school campuses, the programs of which I helped design, and to defend sabbatical self-studies that I wrote for then the nation’s largest law school. I have also led two school boards, as a lawyer advised and represented schools at all levels, for years written educational web content about schools, and published several books and more scholarly articles on teaching and learning. This guide draws on that experience. May the guide serve you and your school well.
Reflection
What is your goal for your involvement in your school? On a scale from one to ten, how do you rate your school’s effectiveness in pursuing its mission of student development? Do you regard schools as simple or complex organizations? Does your school integrate its functions smoothly and efficiently, to good effect? Where are government regulations impacting your school’s mission and operations? How are accreditation requirements affecting your school’s program, both positively and negatively? Is your school’s faculty well trained and informed in the art and science of instruction? What is your experience with school administration? Have you benefited in the past from having had a school mentor? What study, if any, have you made of schools, curricula, and teaching and learning, to inform your view about schools? What study should you undertake to improve your school knowledge and skills?
Key Points
Schools operate to pursue the miracle of student development.
Schools must be richly complex in their operation to achieve their goal.
Schools effectively integrate wide functions all affecting students.
Schools operate in a highly regulated environment affecting all they do.
Teaching is a technical profession with its own language and forms.
Schools must respect the rich and subtle expertise of fine teachers.
This guide is to provide a seasoned and sound overall school view.
This guide’s author has substantial relevant school expertise.