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Abstract
The authors describe how teams of faculty and district leadership development directors used an appreciative organizing in education (AOE) framework using appreciative inquiry (AI) scholarship to promote a more sustainable architecture for the preparation and development of leaders. The AOE framework is introduced and a description is provided of the ways in which one university program utilizes an AOE framework and AI strategies in three programs that serve individuals in different career stages—aspiring Assistant Principals, Aspiring Principals, and experienced Principals. The article concludes with examples of AOE projects and discussion of AOE’s promise as a leadership preparation approach.
Introduction
In this article, we introduce appreciative inquiry (AI) and appreciative organizing in education (AOE), we describe ways in which teams of faculty and district leadership development directors in one Educational Leadership program came to incorporate an AOE framework across three preparation programs, and discuss implications for developing sustainable and positive leadership that emerge from our work that links preparation to changes in adult and student learning. The authors include two faculty members and one former district leadership development director and associate superintendent who now directs the university-based district partnership aspiring principal program and serves as an adjunct professor in the university program. The authors were instrumental in developing the programs discussed in the article: the Gulf Coast Partnership (GCP) Assistant Principal Internship program and Aspiring Principal Resident program, as well as the Educational Specialist district partnership program for experienced administrators.
We attempt to answer a set of questions informed by Fullan’s (2005, 2011) work on change, sustainability, and leadership in schools to stimulate new thinking about ways to strengthen the appreciative fabric of preparation programs that develop leaders for public schools. They are as follows:
How can we emphasize drivers for public school transformation that are aligned with AI scholarship and the practices it suggests?
How can we conceptualize system engagement to unleash capacity through the development of an AOE framework?
How can we nurture the appreciative capacities of aspiring, novice, and experienced school leaders and the key individuals that they work with?
How can we increase progressive interactions and render regressive resistance irrelevant?
These questions are further set in the context of research on leadership preparation. A review of current research on leadership preparation indicates that the literature can be characterized by two broad categories: program implementation studies and program outcome studies (Cobb, Weiner, & Gonzalez, 2016; Ni, Hollingworth, Rorrer, & Pounder, 2016). Implementation studies usually focus on describing programs, including the implementation of “exemplary” or “innovative” program features (Darling-Hammond, LaPointe, Meyerson, Orr, & Cohen, 2007; Salazar, Pazey, & Zembik, 2013), redesign of existing programs in response to public criticism (Robey & Bauer, 2013), curriculum and field standards and expectations (Adams & Copland, 2007) or policy mandates (Anderson & Reynolds, 2015; Sheldon, 2010). Ni et al. (2016) reviewed 52 journal articles around program implementation and program outcome. They found 38 peer reviewed journal articles which were program implementation studies and 14 journal articles, 1 nonpeer-reviewed article, and 17 dissertations that were outcome studies. They noted that there is evidence of substantial university-based leadership redesign, despite many criticisms that assert that the programs are reluctant to change (Levine, 2005).
Ni and colleagues (2016) note that implementation studies typically represent the “preconditions” or “program quality features” which can later be linked to a framework for evaluation. The main purposes of implementation studies are to identify facilitating and hindering factors of implementation and service delivery, describe patterns and trends of specific program features, and provide recommendations for improvement of program processes. Evaluating the redesign impact of the program on learning outcomes and school outcomes is not the focus of the implementation studies. On the other hand, Ni et al. (2016) point out that the outcome studies to date consider both the attributes of the programs and the various outcomes that are expected from the programs. The main purpose of outcome studies is to determine if specific preparation improvement strategies are effective in achieving the desired outcomes, which can be helpful in making recommendations for program improvement or to validate existing practices.
Our research is primarily an implementation study with a clear intent to begin to collect outcome data on the impact of program candidate selection, program design (full-year internship and principal mentoring for assistant principals and project intervention for principal candidates) on program completers on job offers and placement as well as on their contribution to building teacher capacity and increase student performance in school-based improvement plans. Our program features align with Orphanos and Orr’s (2014) framework with additional grounding in AI scholarship, which includes the following: (a) targeted recruitment and selection by joint university and district teams, (b) project-based learning, (c) a cohort community of practice structure across four then six districts, (d) full-year internship with principal mentoring, (e) with projects that incorporate teacher or student learning outcomes, and (f) monthly district University program monitoring and student oversight from May to May of each year.
Coming to a Theoretical Framework Through Program Development
Today, we know a great deal about school success as well as why schools fail; however, the dominant public narrative focuses on the latter. School failure starts with both internal and external factors. Inside the school, unstable leadership and teacher turnover adds to the instability of communities, students, and families already vulnerable to social and economic inequality, poor housing, health, and public safety (Murphy, 2008; Valencia, 2015). Nevertheless, schools and student performance have been under constant and unrelenting attack since 1982 and the Reagan Administration’s now infamous report, A Nation at Risk and a continuous slew of state-by-state indictments of public education, its school boards, superintendents, principals, and teachers (Ravitch, 2014). Many recent public education initiatives have left many local leaders feeling powerless and subjects of attack. Many of the initiatives have been shaped by a multiplicity of interest groups and actors who decry the failure of public education, have access to policy makers, and who are driven to privatize government services and/or to derive economic gains from public funds without the same concomitant accountability of public scrutiny (Debray-Pelot & Mcguinn, 2009; Ravitch, 2014; Scott & Jabbar, 2014).
Our stance is reflective of a belief that public education continues to be part of the foundation of the America experiment in democratic life. From its founding, public education has been situated squarely in the middle of the national economic, social, religious, and ideological struggles (Burrello, Beitz, & Mann, 2016; Dantley & Tillman, 2006; Karpinski, 2006; Lindle, 2014). We believe AI scholarship represents a promising stance and the AOE framework contains promising strategies to stem the tide of critique by unleashing the potential of many stakeholders to recommit to reinvigorating a venerable public institution.
Over the course of the past 5 years, a group of faculty from one university-based leadership preparation program and district leadership development directors from large school districts have developed leadership preparation initiatives that focus on lower performing schools often termed turnaround or failing schools (Duke, 2015). Initially coming together in response to a Federal Race to the Top (RTT) grant call for proposals in 2011, the group of faculty and district professional development staff quickly identified pervasive and universal concerns over: (a) the predominance of deficit thinking in and about communities and students of color and poverty (Valencia, 2015), (b) the resiliency needed for difficult leadership work in challenging school environments and communities (Christman & McClellan, 2008; Federici & Skaalvik, 2012), (c) the feeling of vulnerability of aspiring leaders (Gronn & Lacey, 2004), and (d) leadership and teacher turnover, particularly in schools most in need of effective and sustainable leadership (Beteille, Kalogrides, & Loeb, 2012; Miller, 2013). For 2 years, the group searched for a theory of action that could incorporate new theories of change and organizational development while grappling with new state leadership development standards that were complex, redundant, and taxing school leaders in both their preservice preparation and in-service evaluation processes (Rinck, Rolle, & Burrello, 2016).
Our 2-year search led to a 2-year investigation of AI and positive change scholarship developed outside of education by (Barrett & Fry, 2005; Cooperrider & Whitney, 2005; Cooperrider, Whitney, & Stavros, 2008; Stavros, Hinrichs, & Annis Hammond, 2009; Whitney, Trosten-Bloom, & Rader, 2010). Our review of scholarship on positivity was further informed through more recent work on strength-based approaches to personal and organizational change (Fredrickson, 2009; Seligman, 2011). Our purpose in engaging AI was to prepare an appreciative organizing framework for educators drawn from the corporate sector but embedded in the literature and the context of a public institution.
AI provides alternative ways of thinking about how to prepare individuals to go about improving schools by building on already present organizational assets and capacity. We found the AI approach to be consistent with our commitment to prepare school leaders who become committed to learning through networks of teams rather than individually, to catalyzing teachers to share to pedagogical knowledge rather than hoard it behind a classroom door, and to plan for systemic interventions tied to internally articulated district- and school-established purpose(s) and core values rather than desperately purchasing aggressively marketed “evidence-based” programs installed by external providers (Collins & Porras, 1996; Deal, Purington, & Waetjen, 2009; Shields, 2013; Strike, 2007). In our efforts to incorporate AI and organizing into our preparation programs, we aim to alter the too common responses to narratives of failure around public education. Leadership responses to these narratives too often focus on the individual only, overly privilege problematic accountability data underpinned by less than reliable testing, facilely accept technology as the solution, and too often come to be manifested as piecemeal reforms (Cuban, 2013; Dole, Godwin, & Moehle, 2014; Fullan, 2011; Murphy, 2008).
This review of AI scholarship, along with our university and district teams’ combined expertise garnered through their own practice, led us to begin to situate all three district-university leadership development partnership programs that we developed to inform our work also informed the development of the AOE framework. The authors initially piloted an AOE framework with the district program officers and two student cohorts in 2014 and revised it again in 2015. The AOE stance offers counternarratives: narratives of growth, not decay; narratives of opportunity, not inequity; and narratives of excellence, not mediocrity; and ultimately, narratives of progressive interactions not regressive ones. The narratives of success in high-performing districts and in turnaround low-performing districts start with searching for and discovering alternative futures. Next the search for the capacities or positive core of the district, its schools, students, families, and communities is at the core of the AOE model presented in the next section. The AOE framework seeks to extend the work in AI developed for broader corporate and government sectors by drawing on major sources of thought and scholarship in education, most particularly transformational and transformative leadership in education (Fullan, 2005; Fullan, 2011; Shields, 2004, 2013).
The theory of action underlying the AOE framework is informed by Fullan’s (2001)Leading in a culture of change which offered a framework for leadership that identified five central factors in changing an organization: moral purpose, understanding change, relationship building, knowledge creation and sharing (knowledge culture), and coherence making. He argued these five factors are the work of leaders who possess hope, energy, and enthusiasm for learning and organizational growth. The similarities between Fullan’s five central factors and the AOE framework we developed and present in the next section are evident in Table 1.
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Table 1. Fullan’s Five Central Factors and Appreciative Organizing in Education (AOE) Framework.
Nevertheless, there are key differences. First, we posit that Fullan’s (2001) rendition of purpose is insufficiently developed. In the AOE framework, we add Collins and Porras’s (1995) notion of values anchoring an ideological core in the organization. In turn, this leads to a more robust and continuous engagement with moral purpose, what Postman (1995) refers to as a transcendent purpose and an inspired reason for schooling. In Postman’s (1995) words, with “such a purpose, schooling becomes the central institution through which the young may find reasons for continuing to educate themselves” (p. xi). A second similarity exists with Fullan’s emphasis on understanding change processes and embracing change as an expected norm. The difference in the AOE framework comes in its commitment to positive strengths-based change (Cooperrider et al., 2008).
Third, Fullan has noted the importance of relationship building, as does the AOE framework, which emphasizes relational leadership. The relational leadership in the AOE framework draws on Shields’s (2004, 2013) emphasis on a dialogic transformative change rather than reform and innovation. Furthermore, the AOE framework embraces Shields’s (2004, 2013) commitments to relational leadership characterized by authentic community dialogue built on mutual trust and respect, as well as her emphasis on inclusivity of all members with social justice as the end in mind. A fourth similarity resides in Fullan’s (2001) arguments around a knowledge culture that find parallels in the AOE framework’s generative learning and capacity building sphere. In AOE, generative learning and capacity building creates a community of practice (Wenger, 1998) that focuses on positive assets in an organization (Fredrickson, 2009) to generate organizational learning and renewal.
A fifth similarity is with Fullan’s (2001) notion of coherence making. For Fullan, coherence is constructed in the perpetual pursuit of a system-wide culture of change. For the authors of the AOE framework, the key focus is on leaders developing internal accountability as fidelity measures aligned with their transcendent purposes and core values while negotiating and managing the impact of external accountability measures on their districts, schools, staff, and students (Elmore, 2002). Coherence in the AOE framework is the outcome of the five spheres mentioned above, which are represented in interactive relationship in Figure 1 below. The AOE framework supports coherent, active, positive inquiry that seeks to bring an asset-framed future into the present.
The Appreciative Organizing in Education Framework
The AOE framework seeks to illustrate how relational leaders initially build transcendental purposes and core values within their school communities using a positive strength-based approach embedded in Appreciative Inquiry theory (Cooperrider & Whitney, 2005; Mantel & Ludema, 2004). The AOE Framework Model in Figure 1 incorporates six spheres that undergird our approach to leadership preparation and school leadership organizational development work.
In the first two spheres, relational leaders bring together the community of practice—principals, teachers, and all other staff while engaging the community of support—parents, community members, and social and economic interests. Together they work to articulate a set of purposes and core values to guide decision making with internal and external constituents. These core values center the AOE model developed below and reflect a constructive and engaged notion of the enduring promise of public education. The purpose(s) and core values become enduring aims and norms of district- and school-level work. The purpose(s) and core values require ongoing communication and review of decisions in light of the core. They set the parameters of embracing possibilities and opportunities as well as the rationale for rejecting unaligned initiatives and decisions.
Sustainable change cannot be mandated; it requires leaders who build a foundation of trust and respect as a gateway to the coconstruction of opportunities, possibilities, and actions that lead to desired end results. So, in the third sphere, relational leaders grow communal leadership through the framing of a positive set of experiences, expertise, and skills in their communities. We reference the work of Leslie Turner (2016) who speaks to the need to establish or reestablish the “relational field” in organizations where members of an organization can see the new possibilities that might emerge in a more facilitating and respectful environment. In this approach, transformation of educational practices is first a relational endeavor to connect stakeholders together in the mutual pursuit of purpose-driven goals. Grounding work in a set of common values and norms precede the move to implementing the technical aspects of rigorous and quality instruction that recognizes cultural diversity and demands early and robust instructional support (Burrello, Beitz, & Mann, 2016).
In the fourth sphere, a collective leadership team uses generative learning strategies to increase the capacity of the district’s systems, schools, and staff to meet its own internal metrics of success while managing the external pressure for results. Building individual and organizational capacity is a continuous endeavor to sustain change over time and develop responses that emerge from within and outside of the district and/or school. The fifth sphere of AOE requires what Elmore (2002) suggests an internal accountability that precedes external accountability. Together the leadership, staff, and community develop their own internal accountability standards first and foremost to guide their practices toward their purposes and core values. Hiring and developing relational leaders who are both affirming and able to set high expectations for students and staff enable the development of consistent internal narratives of success and possibility. In doing so, responsible school- and district-level leadership proactively manages the paradoxes revealed in tensions between ethically centered internal responsibility and externally imposed accountability, which is inevitably fraught with externally imposed measures that construct partial stories of school success and failure as well as constraints (perceived and real) for courses of action (Strike, 2007).
The fifth sphere of AOE leads to the sixth sphere that is whole system coherence that infuses connectedness, hope, resilience, and fulfillment in all stakeholders from students to families to staff. Organizations and systems do not get to whole system coherence until all five spheres are in place and being led and managed with what Weick’s (1976) work might lead us to envision as the simultaneous tight and loose coupling of purpose, values, and action across organizational levels and dimensions of organizational life. Whole system coherence is both a means and an end in itself. Coherence as a means is the deliberation attention to alignment of generative work with the transcendent purpose and core values. Coherence as an end is illustrated in stakeholder hopefulness, connectedness, resiliency, and fulfillment.
Many schools and districts in America are successfully preparing students for a 21st-century fraught with volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. In response, an AOE stance means leaders do not focus on the pathology in students, families, and school communities, but rather work on how to unleash the potential in those schools and communities to create the futures that they envision for students and themselves. As Fullan (2005) suggests, leaders should focus on “progressive interactions” which are requisite to develop and sustain systems thinkers who can lead continual system change by building capacity and sustain innovation rather than manage “regressive interactions” that diminish much needed organizational intelligence, and proliferate because they are easier to see and focus on.
In the following section, we discuss how this theoretical framework is being integrated across a range of leadership preparation initiatives. We describe a collaborative work still in process that university and district leaders are undertaking to apply AI processes and an AOE framework in a leadership preparation continuum for aspiring assistant principals, aspiring principals, and experienced principals.
Appreciative Organizing in Leadership Preparation
AI and AOE were introduced into project work and coursework in a University’s Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies program as a result of two robust partnership initiatives that sought to respond to local district needs: The GCP Intern (Aspiring Assistant Principal) and Resident (Aspiring Principal) and the Sunshine County Leadership Pipeline EdS in Turnaround School Leadership for experienced Principals.
Gulf Coast Partnership Master’s Program
The GCP began in August 2011 as the Educational Leadership Program partnered with large school districts in four neighboring counties1 to submit a RTT grant. The initial program lasted for 25 months and had as a primary goal the development of a collaborative job-embedded principal preparation program that would selectively recruit individuals who could increase academic achievement for all students, particularly in high-needs schools. The program included a job-embedded assistant principal master’s program for 32 individuals (leading to Level 1 Educational Leadership certification), and also supported the development of a more seamless transition into ongoing training for Assistant Principals seeking certification as Principals (Level 2 Educational Leadership Certification). After the RTT grant funds ended in June, 2014, the GCP Assistant Principal and Principal training programs continued through school district and foundation support. Two districts have continued to support the Assistant Principal job-embedded master’s program with Title II funds and to date, 47 individuals have successfully completed the GCP Assistant Principal program. The AOE framework is embedded in internship projects.
Gulf Coast Partnership Resident Program
Principal preparation and certification had been historically the province of county school districts only. With the grant the full-time tenure line faculty and one Instructor in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies became engaged in the training of principals for Level 2 certification with the four county school districts. As part of the initial RTT grant, we collaborated with district professional development directors to co-construct a residency program for practicing Assistant Principals who were in district principal pools seeking the principalship and Level 2 certification. The program has continued with the support of a local foundation and fee-based contributions from participating districts and is led by one of the coauthors through a university partnership center.
Throughout the yearlong resident program, the aspiring Principals participate in 9 days of engaging and provocative face-to-face learning that incorporates a concentrated study of AOE and its application to school improvement. We have now used the AOE framework and its accompanying practices with 204 assistant principals for the past 4 years and have 54 more in the program this year. We brought two certificated AI adjunct faculty members into the mix of seminar facilitators in addition to using the district leaders as copresenters in the programs of study.
The six spheres of AOE and the tenets of AI transformed the residency program as it transitioned from a series of lightly connected thematic sessions into nine integrated sessions that more closely focus on an AI project that the Assistant Principals can implement in 1 school year. The projects also have collective elements that span across districts. With their affirmative topics, participants from across the seven participating school districts were placed in Community of Practice groups to further incorporate the six spheres of influence in their work and use implementation science in their intervention over the course of the year (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998).
EdS in Turnaround School Leadership
In 2015, we established a new EdS cohort in turnaround school leadership for experienced and district-recommended school principals is the most recent step in our succession of programs informed by the AI process and the AOE framework. This initiative was designed in concert with Sunshine County Public Schools Leadership Development Department as a next step in the District’s Principal Pipeline, which is financially supported by a private foundation. Candidates in the first cohort began in the summer of 2015 and are all principals or district-level administrators with at least 3 years of successful leadership experience. As with the GCP, candidates are recruited and selected by district and university personnel. A new cohort is planned to begin each summer.
An AI and action research capstone project is being designed to enable candidates to work in teams to design and develop for implementation an intervention plan based on analysis of school data, climate and culture inventories, site-specific interviews and observations, identification of applicable research-based perspectives and strategies, and effective program evaluation practices. The entire degree is underpinned by an AI stance with a particular emphasis on engagement of assets in communities, community leadership exchange protocols, knowledge of self, and knowledge of the community. The collectively produced capstone project will take a “problem of practice” and engage it with a positive strengths-based philosophy of AI as well as develop action steps based on the framework of AOE. In this program, a new advanced graduate-level course was approved titled Appreciative Inquiry and Organizing in Public Education. While work is urgent and challenges were recognized, during the course and in the ongoing development of the capstone project, specific effort is being made to frame leadership in turnaround schools as that of opportunity to identify assets and build on them so that the most challenging schools become attractive places to commit efforts.
Appreciative Organizing Across Programs
Across all programs, projects and some courses came to be infused with an AI orientation. In addition, the research on implementation science (Fixsen, Naoom, Blase, Friedman, & Wallace, 2005) and the work of the National Implementation Research Network (n.d.) on scaling-up system interventions (see implementation.fpg.unc.edu/) have shaped the design of projects. In each of the programs, every student completes a yearlong project (practicum for the Intern program, Inquiry project for Resident program, and group capstone for the EdS) based on AOE theory of action. By focusing on assets in their schools rather than gaps or deficits, participating individuals create an opportunity for greater success on the projects by focusing and building on what a school does well rather than focusing on addressing problems or deficits in the school, such as eliminating gaps in achievement and attainment.
In incorporating an Appreciative Organizing perspective, all three programs focus on developing the relational leader. We first seek to guide individuals to discover themselves and the root causes of their successful steps in their leadership journey. Then the students learn to question others in a positive and engaging manner to learn about other stakeholders’ reasons for being and why they are doing the work that there are doing. Then the students develop projects that utilize strategic processes to unleash potential in teacher leaders who take responsibility for the success of the whole school, not just their classroom or department. Final project reports are presented and critiqued by a cross-district audience of school and district administrators.
When initiating the yearlong projects in the Principal Residency and EdS programs, each participant is placed in groups with other individuals who share similar interests and are working within the same or similar affirmative topics. The groups study each sphere of AOE and generated purposes, core values, and affirmative topics. They are then tasked with engaging a local team of teachers or staff in an ongoing collaborative work group to work through the cycle of the four dimensions of AI: Discovery, Dream, Design, and Destiny. Interventions were screened and selected using the National Implementation Research Network’s (n.d.) Active Implementation Hub Resources for implementation science (http://implementation.fpg.unc.edu/). As resident students worked through their project phases from Discover to Design, they had monthly opportunities to query one another and receive feedback on each stage and how well they were incorporating the six active implementation frameworks from the national center on sustainable interventions (Fixsen et al., 2005). Each participant also has midyear presentations and solicits feedback from professors, district leaders, and another selected resident group leading to minor and sometimes major turns in their 4-D cycle.
In the following section, we provide five brief examples of the application of the AOE from two of the three programs that demonstrate ways in which groups engage a local team through the four dimensions of AI. The projects include Conducting an Appreciative Interview, Reframing through the Four Dimensions of Appreciative Inquiry, Improving Attitudes and Seeing Possibilities, Utilizing AOE to Build a Culture of Care, and AOE and Professional Development.
Conducting an Appreciative Interview
The programs require an AI process known as an Appreciative Interview as the initial starting point of an AI process. The goal of an Appreciative interview starts with personal storytelling related to a positive experience of the interviewee, their role in making the experience successful, and the role of others in the process. It also often includes an identification of strengths of the participants and links the successes to what would make an affirmative topic successful in their opinion. An effort is made to never skip this process, as we found that this step was pivotal to gaining more and better ideas, and greater overall participation of stakeholders. This process reinforces the development of a relational field first—trust, respect, freedom of expression, and the invitation of commitment to the proposed work scope entailed in fleshing out the affirmative topics of our students’ project goals.
Reframing Through the Four Dimensions of Appreciative Inquiry
The 4-Ds of AI is the device used to structure appreciative projects designed to realign the relationships between leadership, teachers, and students in order to positively affect student accomplishments. The projects’ focus is on honoring what already exists and using a positive strengths-based change orientation to make the changes that needed to occur. In developing their projects, students eschew phrases like “take over” with honoring what came before and finding the positive core of the school to build to collective future. Below is an example of how one participant used the 4-D cycle to engage in her project:
In one particular project, an assistant principal sought to move the academic and social behavior of 18 students in a 94-student fourth grade. Using the 4-D model of AI (Discover, Dream, Design, Destiny) the assistant principal began by highlighting assets in fourth grade:
94 Loving, hardworking students who thrive on attention and affection
5 Dedicated, passionate, and skilled teachers
An elementary school in which every stakeholder believes in endless possibilities
She sought to Discover first what the students and teachers thought of one another and their strengths and what engaged them about each other and their teachers—sample statements from student about teachers included the following: “Kind, nice, smart, goofy, fun, helper” and teachers said of their students: “Hard worker, independent, bright, driven, good listener, high potential, creative thinker, organized, risk-taker, insightful.”
Then she took the group through the Dream step and in a series of conversations, asked what could be.
Could these 94 students become truly invested in their own accomplishments?
Could their 5 dedicated, passionate, and skilled teachers recognize their opportunities for impact on students’ lives?
Could an elementary school in which every stakeholder live out endless possibilities?
In the Design step, she and the group sought to determine and identify more specific actions:
How should the 94 students become truly invested and take ownership in their own accomplishments?
How should the 5 dedicated, passionate, and skilled teachers take advantage of their opportunities for impact on students’ lives?
How should an elementary school in which EVERY stakeholder recognize his or her endless possibilities?
With these data, the leader and the group laid out an action plan that connected the whole staff. They added an AVID program of support, created new incentives, conducted student Data Chats/Teacher Data Chats, created preferred lunch seating, made efforts to have positive phone calls with parents, and sought more frequent formative feedback to teachers. Monthly data charts showed improvement beyond expectations in reading and math as well as increasing appropriate social behavior. In planning for the next year, the team planned to vary incentives through the next school year by month and determined that their Destiny would be the following:
That 94 loving, hard working students will become truly invested in their own accomplishments.
That 5 dedicated, passionate, and skilled teachers will cherish their opportunities for impact on students’ lives.
That an elementary school will be created in which stakeholders will live out possibilities.
Improving Attitudes and Seeing Possibilities
The emphasis on using identified strengths as a springboard for action in projects, even in areas where much improvement was needed, increased the intensity of work and improved attitudes about the process. An example of this improvement in process, intensity, and attitudes comes from an assistant principal resident in one school with over 90% of students qualifying for free and reduced lunch in a large urban school district. The entire third-grade team of teachers approached the project leader at the first of October. The teachers were intent on resigning or transferring in mass as soon as possible. They were done and saw no way out of this “hopeless situation.” They were tired of the “fix it, fix us” mentality that came from a problem-solving approach designed by district personnel because they saw no way for it to be successful and were experiencing what they considered to be extreme classroom behavior issues. The assistant principal resident halted the plan for improvement that had been designed by the district and school leaders over the summer and replaced it with an Appreciative Project process.
She started by reframing the task from a problem-solving approach to an appreciative planning process and had the teachers focus on “when it was good, what did it look like and how did you feel about your work.” The assistant principal instituted the 4-D cycle process and first sought to Discover common interests of teachers and students when they were both highly engaged in reading. Then she got them to Dream about what learning at its highest in reading class might look like. They then surveyed their students. After going through these steps, they began to Design a set of alternative ways students might be more highly engaged in reading content that was more personalized and reading instruction better attuned to instructional and independent reading levels. Their collective Destiny was not only revealed when the third-grade students made significant academic improvement in reading during the rest of the year, but the teachers found new enthusiasm for teaching and an appreciation of their students’ talents. By the end of the spring semester, not only did the teachers complete the year but they requested to loop as an entire team with the students to fourth grade.
Utilizing AOE to Build a Culture of Care
A veteran principal who was enrolled in the EdS program found tremendous success through adopting an AI and AOE approach to organizational improvement. He stated as follows:
Appreciative Inquiry is changing the way we lead on our campus. Traditional problem-solving methods were uninspiring and often digressed into problem identification and blame, yielding few results.
He was able to affect his school through his capstone project work, which was a requirement of his EdS degree. While working with his capstone group on developing a culture of care to turnaround student achievement, he started focusing with his school leadership team on the following questions:
How do our change processes focus on our strengths?
How do we involve stakeholders in creating an ideal vision of our organization?
In what ways do our action steps leverage our strengths to make the ideal a reality?
How can a focus on strengths and positive aspirations over deficits and limitations foster care and increase achievement among students and teachers in schools?
He worked with the leadership team on different positive ways to start meetings and the best ways to pose appreciative questions in every meeting. He also led his leadership team in a minisummit by going through the steps of the 4-D cycle from AI during the summer around the areas of greatest need in his school. He worked through the Discovery and Dream stages by acknowledging the reality of school but determining to look at it through a different lens as they worked on the new goals for the upcoming school year. He interviewed each member of his leadership staff and demonstrated how to use the appreciative interview process. The leadership team then interviewed most of the staff members and several students. The information gathered and shared created a different level of understanding in the school and engendered trust. They completed the Design and Destiny stages of the 4-D cycle by developing a model of what success would look like for them at years end and creating an action plan to accomplish the vision.
As a result of engaging in the process, the veteran principal and his leadership team realized they never would have come up with the goals and strategies they proposed using a deficit-based model and the excitement of the new goals propelled the school to greater success throughout the new year. The year-end culture and climate surveys showed growth in all areas associated with staff perception to the openness of the administration to listen to ideas and be responsive to areas of need within the school.
AOE and Professional Development
Another capstone project being undertaken by two district leaders and two principals on building teacher leadership focused on the general topics of developing peer coaches, personalizing professional development, and changing the district professional development delivery model. Group members gathered information from an appreciative interview strategy as well as traditional data sources. They focused on developing peer coaches that used an appreciative coaching model. The two main focus areas were connecting with the ways coaching had assisted individuals in the past and exploring their vision of what highly effective coaching was for them. They explored personalized professional development and district delivery models of professional development in similar ways. Staff members were interviewed exploring what was best in their past experiences in these areas and what their visions were of the best possible scenarios in these areas. Professional Development Surveys and Staff Culture Surveys were used to judge the impact of delivery of the groups appreciative approach to working with identified professional development leaders in four schools. Survey items in the area of professional development were scored between 6% and 9% higher than comparable schools in the district. In the area of teacher leadership, they raised the scores between 11% and 15% over the district average for similar schools. In the area of instructional practice and support, the average was just over 8% higher than other schools in the district.
Conclusion
Effects Across Programs
While we focused on the dynamics of implementation and provide examples of capstones in the previous section, it is noteworthy that some of our initial program outcomes align with the markers of exemplary programs reported by Davis and Darling-Hammond (2012) and some elements of the Evaluation Pathway for Preparation Programs Framework (Orr, Rorrer, & Young, 2010 cited in Ni et al., 2016). Our selection process with district partners emphasizes prior instructional leadership experiences (program participant prior experiences). Students are offered a quality program infused with AI and organizing (program quality features). We use capstone projects to evaluate outcomes and our graduates report high levels of program satisfaction and high levels of confidence and efficacy-related leading and managing administrative tasks and their roles as instructional leaders (formative and summative learning outcomes). Our Level 1 or master’s level candidates have maintain their initial positions after graduation and 92% of intern program attained administrative positions with 6 months of program completion as compared with 4 to 5 years of our typical self-selected Level 1 candidates, only 40% of whom attained administrative positions (career outcomes). The study of the remaining elements of the Evaluation Pathway for Preparation Framework (leader practices: leadership impact on staff, school practices, and school community; and leadership impact on school and student performance) remains a work in progress. The past year, we began to utilize an annual survey of program graduates based on the framework that begins to systematically gather data over time on program quality features, formative and summative learning outcomes, and leadership practices and allows us to compare our programs with other programs across the country. However, we agree with Ni et al.’s (2016) assertion that “the indirect link between leader preparation and student achievement presents a challenge” (p. 300).
While universities have just begun to assess preparation program learning outcomes, districts (who are ultimately responsible for reporting the principal preparation/Level 2 program results), have not built measurement systems to capture the results of implementation of the training over time, much less the impact of appreciative projects in the schools. Nor have we ever explicitly asked the district to assume that responsibility in the partnership to collect and report that data to the partnership or the state. While we have significant descriptive and formative data and have used it along summative assessment of capstone projects to recommend or not recommend member for Level 2 principalship. But the partnership has not evolved its summative assessments regarding sustained improvements in student learning. This is an emerging area for the partnership. With the passage of new state-level preparation standards and program review protocols, our state is beginning to provide pathways for this examination, as the state is beginning to track program graduates, their career pathways, and indirect effects principals and indirect effects on schools and students. The state is providing new data to universities and districts on graduate’s job placement and value-added contributions to student learning. Even with possibilities for new outcome evaluation measures to be developed, program impact is still tricky as McCarthy (2015) notes “too many events take place between preparation, career advancement to a principalship position, and school improvement, making it difficult to isolate the impact of particular preparation program features on graduates’ school improvement influence and ultimately student learning” (as cited in Ni et al., p. 300). Yet Ni et al. (2016) suggest that the field is ready to move beyond program description or implementation studies or even studies that document immediate or proximate program outcomes. Rather, they predict the “next generation of educational leadership program evaluation research should focus on the relationship among program features, teaching and learning approaches, leadership effectiveness, and organizational outcomes” (Ni et al., pp. 286-287).
Sustainability of the Partnership
What we can claim is that the 4 years of district postgrant support to the university-district partnership does serve as an approximate measure of our joint success as the partnering leadership development directors must justify our partnership annually to district leadership back home. In addition, the partnership is valuable to many districts, as only two of the partnering districts have the resources to carry out the program by themselves. The partnership has withstood the fluid participation of nine superintendents and nine district leadership directors over its 6-year history. The university has been the only constant in the partnership as only three district directors remain from the partnerships discussion in August of 2011. The university has served as the linchpin since the district leadership is fluid. A group of four leadership development directors recently argued that the partnership enables the partners to produce a rich dialogue that they could not do alone within our individual districts. In addition, as one noted, “the partnership brings credibility to our practice given its research basis and a level of rigor that we cannot replicate on our own.” In some ways, the impact of the AOE framework is intertwined with the effects of the partnership and both the partnership and implementation of AOE can now be imagined to be in a mutually beneficial relationship.
Implications
The questions we posed at the beginning of the article guide our discussion of implications for leadership preparation.
How can we emphasize drivers for public school transformation that are aligned with AI scholarship and the practices it suggests?
We found that one of the keys to a successful intervention undertaken by members across all three levels of preparation was discovering how to reframe project topics from emphasizing gap reduction into affirmative topics about a desired future state that would allow them to describe the school’s pathway to that goal. For example, rather than reducing the dropout rate at the high school, the affirmative topic becomes how do we infuse meaning and purpose into the high school experience. Most “problems” of practice orientation and needs analysis approaches carry within them a centering of need and deficit. A challenge for us is that students at all levels come with an orientation to view practice as being concerned primarily with need and problems, so we attempt to look at the possibility of reframing in an appreciative manner. Once reframed, the systemic issues surrounding the intervention became more manifest, discussable, and workable. For another example, rather than labeling more students as being disabled or chronic failures, the affirmative topic might become how do we identify and affirm student’s strengths and develop personalized learning for each student while determining the best set of supports they need to learn. Throughout the projects, we found that a systemic approach to reframing ways to build pedagogical capacity and teacher decision making based on already existing assets were key to most successful projects.
2. How can we conceptualize system engagement to unleash capacity through the development of an AOE framework?
In doing the work in partnership with districts and schools over a multiyear period, we were able to engage in a highly collaborative AI process with our district partners in order to develop a seamless preparation program that links principal preparation with adult and student learning. The inquiry with our district partners opened with a course-by-course review of the entire masters’ and certification program offerings. In every case, the partners focused on what was critical in each course and added suggestions for affirmative applications and experiences. When we envisioned what a contemporary principal needed, we easily came to consensus on determining what we needed to add to our collective capacity—conflict resolution strategies, cultural competency, and linking preparation to instructional improvement and student learning. The faculty’s trust and respect for our district partners required to a full year of inquiry and study of our program content and competencies and how they could be integrated into internships, practicum, and mentoring relationships. The partners and the faculty took turns, critiquing and offer their perspective in a climate of mutual respect and trust of the program and its application of student learning in their four unique sets of district schools.
3. How can we nurture the appreciative capacities of aspiring, novice, and experienced school leaders and the key individuals that they work with?
We found that the focus on the individual leaders root cause of personal success was the place to start. A peer inquiry into past successes and reflection on what those past successes led to opened up the school leaders to go find the root cause of others success. It acts like a turnkey that unlocks the potential of others and allows the collaborative team to garner the capacity of the whole group to move forward together. Fullan (2011) wrote as follows:
that an investment in capacity building and group quality and a systemic mind-set are superior drivers for change than a sole focus on individual quality, a data system that tracks student achievement and technology. The latter are useful and not to be ignored, however, they should not be the engines running the train. (p. 58)
His explanation is essentially rooted in a belief that the reality we face in public schools is one where more people are wired to notice what’s wrong—what’s not working (regressive interactions) versus what’s needed (progressive interactions).
4. How can we increase progressive interactions and render regressive resistance irrelevant?
In all three programs and with our district partners, we eschew the piecemeal drivers. We have insisted in multiyear projects and see the first year as building the foundation for sustainable impact over time. We require performance markers for the first year only but encourage the recycle of the process as schools add more staff to the interventions that they often design for a grade level or a subject area. We have built on Fullan’s theme of “progressive interactions” using AOE theory as a means of linking what Mantel and Ludema (2004) believe occurs by shaping the organizational “conversational streams and extending appreciative inquiry from a one-time or periodic intervention technique into a continuous philosophical approach facilitated by leadership development and organization design” (p. 4). Leaders have the unique opportunity to initiate a new conversation while building on the historical conversations of the school or school district that reveal their positive core. Each unique school or district possesses a matrix of strengths that provide the foundation of any new beginning.
School people have been historically optimistic about their ability to make a difference in the lives of children and youth both in school and after school; however, after years of external reforms, many educational leaders are seeking survival strategies for the leading organizations in “permanent white water” (Vaill, 1996). By centering the enduringly important work of school leadership in meaningful, relational, and appreciative frameworks, we have developed partnerships with an eye toward the preparation of sustainable leadership in appreciative organizations.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
1.
In the state of the study, School Districts are county wide and the partnering school districts are all large (ranging in enrollment from 30,000 to 100,000 for the GCP and 200,000 for the EdS program partnership) and diverse (with students of color comprising approximately 53% of enrollment across all districts).
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Author Biographies
William R. Black is associate professor and area program coordinator in the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies program at the University of South Florida. His research interests include leadership preparation, critical policy implementation, and inclusive leadership.
Leonard C. Burrello is co-project director of a Federal Personnel Preparation Grant at the University of South Florida and professor emeritus at Indiana University. His professional interests include district leadership development and organizational policy and change.
John L. Mann is the senior anchin project director for Leadership Development and affiliate professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies program at the Universtity of South Florida. He has served as principal, Leadership Development director, and assistant superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction for the District School Board of Pasco County.