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Preface
This Book and How to Use It
In the many years that the three of us have worked in educational leadership and school improvement, we have come to believe that caring lies at the heart of schooling and promoting the learning and development of children. We have also come to believe that caring is an essential quality of school leadership. We are not alone in our thinking. Abundant evidence from research shows the importance of caring and support, along with high expectations and intellectual rigor, to the academic success of students. Educators know how essential it is for students’ learning and well-being that they are in strong, trusting, caring relationships with adults and peers in and beyond school.
In 2020, we wrote a book exploring the concept of caring and its application to school leadership. That book, Caring School Leadership (Corwin), surveys writing and research from education, related academic fields and disciplines, and the human service professions. It identifies practices that school leaders might use to be caring in their relationships with students, cultivate their schools as caring communities, and foster caring in families and communities beyond the school. This book of stories is a companion to Caring School Leadership. On the pages that follow, we present stories that illustrate concretely many of the practices of caring school leadership discussed in that book.
Purpose of This Book
The purpose of this book of stories is to illuminate, instruct, and inspire. Through these stories, we portray key elements of caring school leadership practice. We expose aspiring and practicing school leaders to possibilities of practice that might make their leadership more caring. We encourage school leaders to be reflective about their own practice and to challenge themselves to make caring a central quality of their leadership.
The stories in this book are true. They describe events, actions, and interactions that occurred among real people in real places. Many stories are recounted by practicing and retired school leaders. Teachers, parents, and others also tell about their experiences with school leaders. Some stories are autobiographical. Some describe caring leadership observed or experienced. We do not intend for the stories in this book to stand for generalizable evidence of the efficacy of caring school leadership or any particular leadership practice. Instead, we see these stories as existence proofs of the possible.
We assembled this book of stories for several audiences. One audience is aspiring and practicing school leaders. Another audience is those in higher education, professional associations, and other organizations that support the preparation and professional development of school leaders. We also believe that this book of stories can be useful to teachers and school staff, parents, and others for developing caring leadership in schools and for defining expectations for their own school leaders.
We developed this book of stories as a resource for individual principals and other school leaders to read and reflect upon. We consider it a basis for stimulating discussion about caring within school leader preparation and professional development programs. We also see it as a starting point for administrative leaders and teachers to consider together to develop strong and effective school leadership and improve schools for students. We will discuss more specifically how to use this book at the end of this introduction and at the end of the introductions to this book’s three collections of stories.
We offer no analyses and no interpretations of the stories herein. We want these stories to speak for themselves. We want you to hear the storytellers’ voices, not ours. Importantly, we want you to reflect upon these stories and discuss them with others. We want you to analyze them yourselves, give them your own meaning, and apply them to your own situations and practices.
Our Starting Point
This book proceeds from our belief in the legitimacy and power of stories for the development and promotion of leadership practice. As writers from psychiatrist Robert Coles to organization and management scholar Henry Mintzberg observe, stories have a way of calling us to consider what is right and true. Stories play an increasingly important role in programs of educational leadership preparation and professional development. Teaching cases are widely promoted as an effective means of helping aspiring and practicing school leaders understand the nature of their work, examine their own practice, and develop new ways to exercise leadership.
Stories also play an important role in informal learning of practicing school leaders. Oral storytelling is a primary means of on-the-job information sharing and knowledge development. So too are stories of programs and practices told through the pages of professional magazines. Stories are an important means of vicarious learning for school leaders. Sometimes ignored by academic scholars who favor more systematically developed quantitative evidence to guide practice, such stories can be powerful sources of new knowledge, legitimation, and motivation among practicing school leaders.
Elicitation and Selection of Stories
We began eliciting stories of caring school leadership during the early stages of work on our book Caring School Leadership. As we spoke with aspiring and practicing principals and other school leaders about caring, we often heard them express their thoughts and experiences through stories. Many of these stories were vivid and profound, capturing action and interaction and revealing both thought and emotion.
At the start, we asked for stories from practicing and aspiring school leaders in university classes we taught. We branched out to seek stories from educators with whom we worked in professional development activities. We went further to collect stories from individual educators we know from our work in schools and from our neighborhoods. We sought stories from principals, associate principals, department chairs, teachers, and others who interact with principals and other school leaders. We did not elicit stories from students, although some of the stories told by adults recall their experiences as students. Student stories hold great promise for a future project on caring in schools and school leadership. Nor did we engage in systematic sampling. Despite this, we ended up with an archive of stories that come from a wide range of schools across many settings. While they may not be considered dispositive evidence of the phenomenon of caring in school leadership, our stories are evidence of actual occurrence and of possibility.
We were fairly general in what we asked of our storytellers. From some, we asked for stories that reflected what they mean by caring in school leadership. From others, we asked for stories that reflected our developing thinking about the subject, notably key elements that make school leadership caring. As our archive of stories grew, we elicited stories of particular aspects of caring school leadership practice to ensure that we had sufficient numbers of stories to illustrate each arena of practice represented in this book.
We asked our storytellers to tell stories that related in one way or another to students. And most of our stories focus on them. The reason we sought and included several stories of caring for teachers, parents, and families is our belief that caring can beget caring. To be caring of teachers and parents is to model and inspire them to be caring of others, notably students. It is hard to imagine teachers becoming more caring of students if they do not feel cared for themselves, especially by school leaders.
Beyond such guidance,
