easily applied approaches are founded on the emerging body of research in brain science and adult learning theory. Reason has worked with leaders throughout the United States, Switzerland, India, and New Zealand. He earned a prestigious 2010 Blackboard International Exemplary Course Program Award for a doctorate-level leadership course he designed.
He earned a PhD from Bowling Green State University. To learn more about Casey’s work, visit www.caseyreason.com or follow @caseyreason on Twitter.
To book Casey Reason for professional development, contact [email protected].
INTRODUCTION
Today Is Not Yesterday—Get Ready!
This book is devoted to helping you, the principal, challenge the absurd assumption that you can lead today as if it was yesterday. Simply put, you can’t. Even if you were a good leader yesterday, the game has changed significantly, and you have to change with it. I have been directly involved in designing award-winning principal and teacher leadership training since 2001, and I can safely say that much of what we designed just a few years ago either no longer applies or the application has changed dramatically. This book will help you recognize how leadership is changing in response to a very different set of challenges in schools; it will arm you with specific key concepts and requisite implementation strategies that will provide the tools you need to successfully lead—today and tomorrow.
In the pages that follow, I’ll be sharing a new leadership model that’s called Leading for Excellence and Fulfillment (LEAF). This model is designed for school leaders with the unique challenges of today in mind. Furthermore, the model takes advantage of the latest research on human performance, learning theory, and psychology. The ideas presented in this book aren’t just well-intended, homespun pieces of advice. They represent the synthesis of a generous amount of research on learning and human performance that will help you shape your leadership behaviors in the most productive way possible.
What’s rather surprising about this collection of key concepts and strategies is that, in many cases, it represents a distinct departure from much of the common wisdom about leadership from the past. You’ll learn in the following pages that much of what you were taught about leadership was designed for a world of work that doesn’t exist anymore. To illustrate this chasm between yesterday and today, I want to begin by taking a brief look back.
The Industrial Revolution
Our traditional notions of leadership and organizational development in schools emerged due to significant historic and economic forces. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, when the United States was going through the Industrial Revolution, cities were growing, and work environments were defined very differently than they are today (Eisner, 2002; Gray, 1993). Frederick Taylor, a mechanical engineer, developed the managerial style of the Industrial Revolution; it was known as scientific management or Taylorism (Taylor, 1911). As you read the following list of scientific management’s work expectations and conditions, think about how different the world of work is now from the systems envisioned when these models were developed.
Employers valued compliance and consistency over high performance and differentiation.
The work being done was mostly boring.
The workers were poorly educated and had very low skill levels.
Meeting expectations meant following very specific work parameters.
There was a great need for workers to respect authority and comply explicitly with everything they were told to do.
Workers had to endure high levels of boredom.
Everything was measured by time. Quality was assumed within the confines of the routine, and time was used to maximize efficiency (Eisner, 2002).
These rules and standards led the way for mass production, which required large numbers of people working in strict unison and close quarters to produce a consistent product with high quality, in great quantity, and at a lower cost than ever before (Jones, 2000). This method drove people from rural areas into the city for these new factory jobs. It also drove the need for larger schools, which likewise structured themselves in a way that both mirrored the common thinking of the time and served as a mechanism for delivering future workers for these emerging institutions (Gray, 1993). In order to prepare workers for the Industrial Revolution, schools constructed during that time were organized to do the following.
Schools were set up to reward compliance over high performance. Students were much better off going along with the crowd than standing out (Eisner, 2002).
Students were taught that putting up with boredom was part of their work expectations. Complaining about boredom was not an option, and learning to live and comply with it was the expectation (Eisner, 2002).
Fear, threats, and intimidation were utilized to keep control. This has proven to be historically effective in managing workers doing low-intellect, high-muscle jobs (Reason, 2010).
Even though schools were technically designed as learning institutions, the real measure or metric was time. Students were taught to move en masse by taking breaks, eating lunch, and going back to work with a large group. All activities were controlled by a bell system very similar to the factories that students would be joining in just a few years (Jones, 2000).
Sadly, many of the conventions in place during the Industrial Revolution still carry a significant level of importance in our schools today. Having trained thousands of teachers and administrators at this point, I can say with confidence that there are still greater rewards in most schools for conformity than there are for creativity. These schools also admit to being more focused on the metric of time than the progress of learning. Similarly, they value the illusion of control over the opportunity to be creative.
Still not convinced that your school is carrying around elements of this old managerial framework? Ask math teachers why algebra is taught before geometry. During the Industrial Revolution, to stay organized and streamlined, policy makers and school leaders decided to choose algebra over geometry because A comes before G alphabetically (Thompson, 2005). Learning theorists tell us that the levels of abstraction necessary to learn algebra may be difficult for students in the latter years of middle school and early years of high school (Thompson, 2005). Not surprisingly, algebra continues to be one of those courses with an extraordinarily high failure rate in every state (Pappano, 2012). Here we are over one hundred years later, and we continue to follow an unsuccessful tradition based on alphabetical order.
The Carrot and the Stick
As the Industrial Revolution unfolded, the United States developed management techniques that revolved around carrots and sticks. It was generally assumed that people performed more admirably if leaders clarified their expectations by offering explicit rewards and punishments (Skinner, 1938). Those in charge would put a metaphorical carrot in front of an individual or group of workers and encourage them to move forward. Leaders would likewise wave a threatening stick as an ominous reminder of what would happen if the workers didn’t follow the prescribed direction.
So does the carrot-and-stick routine work? Does it work for students? Does it work for teachers and staff? The answer is yes and no. Rather than relying on stories or homespun wisdom, I’m going to share some science with you. In studying human performance, we’ve come to realize that if you are providing human beings with a simple task with relatively few decision points and the need to execute maximum effort, the system of
