From Blind Passion to Professional Inquiry

“Action without reflection is meaningless activity. Reflection without action is mere academia“

(Peter Reason, 1998)

The seeds of this research effort began to sprout in the fertile grounds, the dirt, if you will, of my personal experience as a school leader. I served as an assistant principal for three years and then as a middle school principal for nine years.  In reflecting on my own growth and development as I struggled to learn the craft of educational leadership, I was left with a very simple conclusion:  it was nothing less than a wild, erratic growth pattern, characterized by fits, sputters, stops and periodic spurts of learning and development. 

I did not have a professional learning community to provide the necessary support or structured opportunities that might have prompted me to reflect on and integrate my new experiences. I did not have the language or conceptual frameworks that would have allowed me to formulate a theoretical construct to inform my work as an instructional leader.  I had no idea how other school administrators talked about their work, how they made decisions, how they chose which roles to play, or how they navigated the intense emotion that seemed to erupt whenever they attempted to make any kind of change in school practice.

As a practitioner, rarely was I interested in, nor did I have the time to read academic journals.  Most scholarly books and articles seemed abstract, wordy and not overly useful in refining or reforming my everyday practice. Yet, I recognized that thoughtful researchers had gone into the field to study and learn and share their findings. I knew there was much to learn from researchers. While I understood the importance of using data to drive my decision-making, I wondered, why the disconnect?  Why the great divide between theory and practice for so many principals? Schon[i] aptly encapsulated my concern about positioning myself too closely to the world of academia.

I have become convinced that universities are not devoted to the production and distribution of fundamental knowledge in general.  They are institutions committed, for the most part, to a particular epistemology, a view of knowledge that fosters a selective inattention to practical competence and professional artistry.

As a new principal, I was in desperate need for more information about the art and science of school leadership.  I needed a means of framing the challenges I was confronting.  I needed guidance on how to develop an effective decision-making process, and most of all, I longed for a professional learning community that would prompt me to reflect on my practice in a supportive and structured manner.

As I entered graduate school at U.C. Berkeley, I had the privilege and opportunity to help shape the structure of a new administrative induction program: the Leadership Support Program (an outgrowth of the Principals’ Leadership Institute[ii]) designed for new leaders working on their professional clear administrative credential. From the program’s inception, my colleagues and I were committed to ensuring relevance in the learning activities we facilitated. With this perspective in mind, we adopted problem-based learning[iii] as a foundation to explore the personal experiences shared by the participants.

The monthly session of the Leadership Support Program begins casually as participants toss down briefcases, exchange pleasantries, and work through an evening meal.  Before long, shoulders begin to relax, brows unfurl.  What happens next seems born of necessity:  stories literally pour out of these novice administrators, evoking tears and laughter, as they replay their most recent foibles and follies, their successes. By allowing new administrators to share a story with colleagues, site leaders forego the persona of the superhero, take off their capes and reveal the more authentic hand-wringing that takes place beneath the costume of the professional. Reflective storytelling was chosen as a primary tool in the LSP because the activity provides new leaders the opportunity for reflection, sense-making and theory-building based on actual dilemmas confronted in the field.  By looking at the aggregate of the narratives, by diving deep into the data set and unpacking the stories, unexpected patterns and findings have emerged that provide a detailed picture of the internal landscape, the inner workings of novice school leaders.

The initial intent of this book was to explore how novice administrators make sense of, conceptualize and talk about the many roles they play in a challenging, politically-charged environment. But as new leaders analyzed their own transcribed narratives over time, they offered rich reflections of the transformations taking place in their thinking, decision-making and action-taking. They presented new ways that they were conceptualizing their practice, and they even described positive feelings of efficacy as they reflected on the ways they were navigating the intense emotion they confronted in the field.  Based on these collective observations and learnings, this text will explore how reflective storytelling and narrative analysis can prompt school leaders to:

• better frame the dilemmas they confront;
• clarify their underlying values;
• determine an effective decision-making process;
• develop new theories and conceptions about their problem-solving;
• and increase their metacognitive thinking about their practice.

The prompts used to elicit the stories in this book were not topically prescriptive; participants were always given the opportunity to speak on any subject that they felt was important.  Therefore, the transcribed narratives effectively capture the most salient and poignant issues upon which professional training and development should be based. 

One of the greatest challenges that I faced in writing this book was remembering which hat I was wearing.  At one moment I was capturing data to learn how new administrators make decisions, embody different roles and navigate the intense emotion.  In the next moment, I was designing protocols and analytical tools or facilitating groups to promote deep reflection and metacognitive processes.  And then, of course, there was the endless writing, the search for the most eloquent turn-of-phrase to capture the essence of school leadership. Fortunately, I had 246 leadership narratives to draw upon that I had collected from new school leaders over a period of three years.