well-being and sustainability in leadership requires work-life balance, and for women in particular, this creates a weblike phenomenon. Women cannot isolate their work experience from their broader experiences of self and their everyday lives. They need to sustain and take care of themselves first; giving themselves permission to do so affects their productivity, impact, and influence. We will explore this focus further in chapter 3 (page 51). Women leaders’ self-care is also crucial because it affects whether the leaders act as positive models and advocates for the role, influencing whether other women view leadership as feasible for them.
What Women Can Do
In chapter 1 (page 9), we discussed the need to address the readiness gap, support current school leaders, and make leadership roles an attractive option for future leaders. In a female-dominated workforce, identifying and developing the next generation of school leaders also requires encouraging talented women to consider and take on these roles.
Educator Jill Blackmore (2006) suggests that when choosing school leaders, systems need to promote multiple representations of and diverse approaches to leadership. This also promotes wider cultural and ethnic diversity and challenges the generally masculine representations of leadership. Such suggestions can address multiple barriers. For example, potential leaders may exit and re-enter the education workforce for a variety of reasons; multiple leadership models point out the diversity such candidates can bring to schools. Multiple models and leadership approaches include co-principalship, distributed pedagogical leadership, shared principalship, multi-campus principalship, and community-based principalship (Blackmore, 2006).
Schools and districts can support aspiring leaders to gain experience by offering work shadowing and internship opportunities or having them take leadership of specific projects or programs to flex their leadership skills and gain the experience they require. Given the feedback women have shared with us about not feeling good enough, having enough experience, or being 100 percent perfect, these are particularly attractive and flexible opportunities to build a repertoire of skills and leadership practices.
Fortunately, internationally, we’ve seen a push to get principal preparation right by firmly grounding it in the broader context of leadership development. Preparation program designers have accounted for the multitude of challenges inherent in attracting, preparing, appointing, and retaining high-performing school leaders.
In Australia, a national environmental scan of principal preparation programs highlights a desire for a more cohesive, systemic approach to school leadership development, including systematic approaches to succession planning and career development pathways (Watterston, 2015). But programs still need clarity on the necessary professional learning opportunities and the rationale for each; the support needed at each level and how to provide it; and internships or other ways to gain leadership experience. This alignment also requires a common understanding of the capacities that principals need. From a school leadership development perspective, Barbara calls pathways for leadership support the three Ps: (1) pipeline, (2) personalization, and (3) partnerships.
1. Pipeline: Identification, preparation, and ongoing development (creating a networked pipeline that enables aspiring leaders to step forward through varied, flexible, and diverse pathways underpinned by expected practices)
2. Personalization: Diagnosis and precision learning (recognizing and developing strengths, creating aspiring leaders’ leadership identities, and matching professional learning opportunities to identified needs)
3. Partnerships: The power of the profession (mentoring, role modeling, and work shadowing)
So what can you do to prepare more women for—and add the feminine archetypal values to—school leadership?
WORDS FROM A LEADER
We’ve created avenues for professional development and career growth through a coaching module and a network of support. We have academic directors and school coaches—many of whom are women—who are the support network for our teachers. Through my leadership, we have created a council of academic directors who provide support to a group of seven to fifteen schools. Stellar teachers become mentors, mentors become school academic coaches, and school academic coaches become regional or group academic directors. This career ladder provides a structure and process for women to become leaders at their school and in their region. Our coaching module contains comprehensive content to improve our coaches’ knowledge in curriculum, instruction, assessment, and team dynamics. We are proud of the quality of leaders we are generating to mentor, coach, and encourage others in our efforts to build capacity within our organization. (Karen Gayle, national director of curriculum and instruction, Imagine Schools, United States, personal communication, April 17, 2018)
Leadership development is a collective responsibility. Review the following leadership development reflections and strategies from the perspective of the individual leadership aspirant, the profession and the role it plays in supporting and informing leadership development, and the system (your sector, district, or central office) in providing the enabling conditions to articulate career pathways and ongoing capacity building. What else would you add to the list?
• Address the readiness gap: Systems need to get women into leadership positions—not by using quotas or favorable selection processes, but by getting everybody to the starting line. Like athletes in the hundred-meter sprint, each potential leader requires a different training regime to get to the starting line. That way, it’s open to the best person to win the race, but individualized training provides each person with a chance to win.
• Counter the belief that the principal role prevents women from directly impacting learning: Women who take temporary positions as acting leaders frequently change this belief; they realize they can have a significant impact on more students if they lead. These interim opportunities address preconceived ideas and demystify the role.
• Promote flexible work options for all: Career breaks are a good thing; they promote a diverse view of school leadership and provide return-to-work and family-friendly work patterns. There are numerous pathways to senior leadership positions. Systemic practices regarding family leave, education sabbaticals, part-time positions, and other options can have a significant impact on the way people perceive opportunities for progression. The point is to do whatever it takes to effectively engage your most talented, creative, and committed educators.
• Research the impact of merit and equity practices and selection processes, and increase career management support for women: Ensure appropriate training for those involved in the selection processes. Women may lack the confidence to articulate their achievements or may see this as blowing their own trumpet. Some also assume others will see their achievements without their having to explicitly articulate them for selection processes.
• Provide access to high-quality leadership programs: Many systems have tinkered at the edges but not had a holistic career view or sense of responsibility to develop their school leaders. Think about formative student assessment that, in partnership with teacher and students, identifies learning needs, strategies to address those needs, and regular checkpoints to reflect on growth and understanding; likewise, you should diagnose before prescribing professional learning so it targets and meets diverse and identified needs. One size does not fit all. Doing this requires determining what school leaders need to know, understand, and do to
