A level of honesty and willingness to expose oneself to critique is required in situations of true  shared leadership.

When Peggy Kemp first became principal of Fenway High School, a founding Pilot School in Boston, she knew the role would be different from her past positions. She had served on the board of a Pilot School and was steeped in the language and ideas of school reform. Nevertheless, she found that the first year was a challenge: “The first year, there was quite a learning curve for me to understand how the teams worked, how people viewed their roles on the teams, how I communicated this to an outside audience, and how I defined my role.”

Prior to coming to Fenway, Kemp had served as interim principal at the John D. O’Bryant High School of Science and Mathematics, a district exam school of over 1,000 students. In that position, she supervised an extensive administrative staff to whom she could delegate many of the day-to-day responsibilities of managing the school. “My primary role at that school was thinking about the direction the school needed to go in, developing that vision, and implementing change.” Yet the possibilities for change were constrained by budget and staffing limitations. Kemp’s experience working for several school reform organizations, as well as for the Harvard Graduate School of Education, had allowed her to talk extensively with principals from all over the country. She discovered a common thread to her conversations: “I got the sense frequently from those principals that they felt there was not a lot they could do to change. They felt really constricted by mandates. They could only do so much within the confines of the district.”

Fenway represented a major change from the standard approach to education. “I found a different sort of energy. People did feel control over what they were doing, and that they could make change. You have a faculty that is very receptive to thinking about doing things differently. They don’t define their roles in terms of district mandates or union rules. That in itself was a very different experience.”

Right away she found herself immersed in the daily operations of the school. Without an extensive administrative structure, teachers took on a variety of leadership roles, but their primary role, of course, was to teach. So the principal had to be very involved. “It was an adjustment, but it changes your relationship with teachers and with students. You interact with students much more frequently and for a variety of reasons because there’s not a layer that separates you.”

Working with Teachers: Shared Leadership
Kemp found that her relationship with teachers was stretched beyond supervision. “There are so many different leadership teams, and I’m just a member. I’m responsible and accountable for how the school functions ultimately, but I’m a member of the team where everyone feels they have an equal voice.” Learning how to balance the accountability and responsibility of her role with the collaboration of shared leadership was something Kemp worked on deliberately. One example has been her work with the Teaching and Learning Committee at Fenway. The committee is a group of faculty that meets every other week to design and implement the professional development focus for the year, after having surveyed the faculty to identify priorities.  They have been engaged in this process for planning professional development for the past four to five years.  “I think that I come to the committee as a contributing member like everyone else,” Kemp said. 

At the same time, her role as headmaster required that she bring a critical eye to the process through a set of probing questions: “As a committee we do make a decision together, but then once the decision has been made, these other questions arise, because they recognize that I have to be accountable to a wider group. They ask, ‘Are you comfortable with this?’”

The questions might be financial or focused on the allocation of time. “Can we take the time to do this? Is there money for this?” She gave an example of a critical moment that grew out of the school’s focus on issues of gender and sexual orientation. “There was a really full discussion. We were going to have a play presented, Queer 101, for our opening day exercise for all students. When we actually got down to making the decision, I raised the question, ‘Is this wise timing? We’ve addressed these issues with our other students but not with the freshmen. How will parents react? How will the rest of the faculty?’ So those were issues that I had to address and I ultimately had to be accountable for if I endorsed what was happening.” 

After reviewing these questions with the Lead Team and developing a plan for the day, they did present the play as the opening activity for the school year. “It was the right decision and a very enlightening lesson for us all.”

To ensure that all faculty receive feedback regarding their teaching practice, the committee designed a peer observation structure. “All of us are assigned to groups where we’ll make at least three observations and we’ll have time to debrief. They’ve come up with a schedule, the groupings, and they’ll see that it’s implemented. Now the question back to me is, ‘Is it ok if we use planning time for observations, or some of the meeting time for debriefing?’”

The idea and practice of shared leadership is so pervasive at Fenway that it leads to the development of new leaders and new initiatives all the time. “Teachers take responsibility over running their team meetings. It’s not an administrator running them. It’s a teacher who has the same responsibilities as everyone else, but who is also the chair. In two of our departments, we have teachers who are entering their fifth year. They served as interns at Fenway and now they’re chairs of their department. They are doing workshops in other venues—one is also a humanities coach for the BPS Office of High School Renewal in the smaller high schools. Our humanities team took on the idea of mentoring humanities teachers in the new small high schools, and developed a mentoring plan for how to share resources—they felt so confident about that program and their discipline.”

Working with the Budget
            There is no doubt that the control Pilot Schools have over their time and resources makes a critical difference. As Kemp pointed out, it is all interrelated: “Teachers feel a lot of ownership over their profession in a Pilot School. It’s all connected back to autonomy. We really can change things. We can reshape the way we’re doing things to best benefit what we want to accomplish. Having control over those dollars and how they’re allocated allows you a sense of freedom to define the educational experience the way all of us think it best should be defined.”
The price of such freedom is complexity, pressure, and time. “I like having it, but it requires a lot of work, a lot more work than in a district school where there’s not much flexibility about the budget. The budget issue requires me to think about personnel, staffing assignments, how I can deliver a service in the most cost-effective way, looking at collaborations that might bring in extra resources and reduce our expenditures. Once you step into a Pilot School, you’re hit with this idea that this is an enterprise where I have to think about all the services we want to provide and how I’m going to fund them.”

For Kemp the benefits of budget autonomy are clear. “You really can shift teaching assignments around. You really can think about what people should be doing rather than being just told by the district, ‘You’re a high school, so you need two chemistry teachers.’ We can even consider, ‘Are we going to teach chemistry? Who do we need?’ You see the organization more as something that can really be shaped if you identify the right resources and think creatively about how you’re aligning those resources.”

Working with the Board
Governing boards are another unique feature of Pilot Schools. Because of the school’s autonomy, the governing board has a much greater scope of responsibility than does a regular school council. Pilot School boards are made up of families, staff, community members, and students (for high schools and some middle schools).

“Because the board of trustees [Fenway’s governing board] selects and evaluates the headmaster, I think they take their responsibilities more seriously. The trustees at a Pilot School feel that they are accountable for the success of the school. They are very much invested in how the school is doing long range. My annual evaluation is fairly comprehensive. Parent, faculty, and student input is sought. The trustees are there at our meetings—we don’t have a lot of absentees. They ask good questions. I’m held accountable in a way that’s different. I really have to be prepared. I have to give my report and be prepared to address the issues that come up.”

Fenway’s strength in shared leadership and governance has most recently led to a comprehensive strategic planning process. “We used a ‘big tent approach’ that involved around 100 people—students, teachers, alumni, our board, community members—and identified key areas that we want to focus on going forward. Now our faculty has divided up into committees, and they are making recommendations on how we implement this process. For example, we have a curriculum review team, an electives team, and a team that’s dealing with college awareness. They approach it with a sense of responsibility and they’ll make it happen.”

Student Voice at Fenway
Students are involved in leadership activities in Fenway through formal structures like the student government and representation on the board, but student voice and leadership really begin in the classroom and are tied closely with the learning process at Fenway. “There’s a heavy emphasis on reflection in the classroom, what you’re learning for the portfolio process and for the exhibition.” Students are required to think critically and must be able to articulate their own opinions. This kind of intellectual leadership shapes the culture at Fenway, and students are frequently asked to use their leadership skills with outside visitors. “We have so many exhibitions that bring in outside judges, and we have many visitors to the school.” As part of any school visit, visitors meet with a group of students and ask them a range of questions. “Students reflect on their experience at the school and they develop clear opinions. Sometimes the visitors think that we must have our highest achieving students there, but many times they’re not. We use a wide variety of students. But they are all so reflective.”

 “It’s only for people who really want to be immersed in the learning experience and in the community.  It’s not for somebody who wants to manage. What’s most rewarding is that there really is a community here. There’s an opportunity for me to know teachers and students on a very personal level, for me to observe their growth, to know their personal issues.  I like the idea of change. I don’t want things to be too static. There’s an opportunity to be continually evolving and reassessing. What’s the best direction that we should be moving in? What are we doing well? What can we do better? And yes, we can find a way to make it better if we all work together.”

The following vignette describes the role of a coach in developing shared leadership and provides one example from TechBoston Academy (TBA). Amy Bayer, CCE coach, worked with faculty members at TBA to create an effective process for creating staff development with teachers’ input and investment.

The term “shared leadership” can sound like a contradiction in terms. Our traditional images of leadership most often reflect strong individuals acting alone to motivate followers. Shared leadership is harder to capture in a story or an image, but ultimately, it can produce more sustainable results. What gets in the way of shared leadership in schools is the perception that it is cumbersome or inefficient—that it will slow down the pace of change to get input and foster involvement across a school’s community. The perspective offered by an outside coach can often help a school establish shared leadership practices.

CCE coaches assist Pilot School leaders to establish structures and routines for faculty and governing board meetings and professional development sessions that encourage shared leadership. Rotating facilitation of meetings, soliciting input on agendas, and communicating through shared minutes are all concrete ways to make shared leadership efficient and productive.

Amy Bayer, CCE coach, worked with the leadership team and faculty senate representatives at TBA to construct the agendas for a series of faculty retreats. Coming in the spring of the school year, the retreat days provide a significant opportunity for professional development and planning. As Principal Mary Skipper put it, “The goal of the retreat is that everyone has a chance to co-create the vision of the school.” Teacher Stephen Ensdorf reflected that for the most part the retreats work well. “It takes a lot of planning—if it’s not planned properly, it falls flat.” He especially likes the opportunity to choose working groups that are of particular interest, such as new technology or student discipline. “It allows people’s interests and expertise to be valued.”

Making sure that everyone’s voice is heard is a critical part of shared leadership, according to Keith Love, TBA’s director of student leadership and operations. “It’s so important to get input from people with different styles—and reach the more quiet person in the back as well as the person who always speaks up.” He believes that the role of the coach has been helpful in the planning process: “It’s important to include someone who knows the community but isn’t in it day to day.”