Writing for The 74, Beth Rabbitt reflects on the takeaways from the Learning Accelerator’s work with more than 100 leaders across eight regions nationally in the past year. Excerpts from the article appear below:
Looking at patterns across each region, our biggest finding was this: ecosystems matter. Leaders can only be as effective as the resources and communities around them. Great leaders hindered by roadblocks and a dearth of support are simply driving with the brakes on. Strong leaders operating in environments where external supports are aligned to their visions and where they have flexibility and buy-in from numerous groups have extra gas in the tank to drive change.
What does a great ecosystem look like? The factors leaders cited fell into four categories:
- Legitimacy and support: These include the organizations, people, and policies that reinforce changes or improvements, as well as the access to resources leaders need to accomplish them (time, dollars, people, political coverage). They define — intentionally or unintentionally — the rules of the game and include things like district policy and support structures, funder beliefs, strategies, grant-making, community perception and engagement, and accountability.
- Personal development supports: These are the resources leaders lean on to bolster their own learning and development in order to design, lead, and sustain change. Factors here include access to leadership coaching, personal improvement processes, learning networks, and other administrators and leaders.
- Existing school capacity: These are levers, resources, and conditions that exist within a leader’s own institution, including the people, processes, tools, and structures a leader calls on or builds to promote and sustain change. Important here isn’t just a school’s status as an already high-performing entity or infrastructure, but the flexibility a leader has to use existing capacity in new and aligned ways, such as through reallocating time in the day or how and where great teachers (and teacher leaders) work.
- External supports: These include the partners and resources outside the formal institution (the school or managing network/system) that a leader turns to for help and additional capacity. Among them: professional service and training partners, technical assistance networks, even access to new high-quality tools and curriculum.
By stepping back and mapping each leader’s access to these ecosystem factors, an informative and dynamic picture emerges. It’s the combination of supports (or lack thereof) across these four areas, in conjunction with the overall alignment to a leader’s broader vision for teaching and learning, that greatly affects the degree to which a leader can be successful. Through this systemic lens, we can also identify specific actions to bring supports into alignment, as well as accelerate beyond the current state.
For more, see https://www.the74million.org/article/opinion-great-leaders-make-great-schools-here-are-4-factors-critical-to-their-success/
