Spotlight on leadership: An interview with Professor Viviane Robinson

Abstract

It was her own three-year stint as head of University of Auckland's School of Education that really sparked Viviane Robinson's interest in leadership. That sort of experiential, gut-level feeling for it gave me a much stronger sense that there was more to be said about what leadership involved. Professor Robinson is an organisational psychologist, so she had long been interested in how organisations tick, how they learn and how they deal with mistakes, as well as in the communication processes that make them work better. As an organisational psychologist, I came to questions of educational leadership and administration quite late. Now I'm more and more convinced that there is something distinctive about educational leadership--it needs to be very strongly grounded in the core business of teaching and learning. In other words, educational leadership draws heavily on domain-specific expertise. We cannot assume that school leaders have enough knowledge of assessment, curriculum and pedagogy and that they only need generic leadership preparation. Her conviction comes from the enormous body of work involved in the Best Evidence Synthesis (BES) project on educational leadership that she and colleagues won the contract to write in 2006. Although the Ministry of Education has yet to publish the full report, the findings have been well signalled and published in a number of places, including in a resource kit for teachers. (The publications available are listed at the end of this article.) Professor Robinson and her colleagues Dr Margie Hohepa and Dr Claire Lloyd began by reviewing all the literature on educational leadership. Of the hundreds of thousands of papers on the subject, only a handful looked at the relationship between leadership and student achievement, which was the focus of the BES. After a careful review of the material it became clear that the question, Does school leadership make a difference to student outcomes? was the wrong question. Leadership itself does not make a difference to student achievement, but certain leadership practices do. The impact of school leaders depends on what they do. We have good evidence about what they need to be doing to make a difference. All the evidence the BES writers drew on to identify the impact of particular leadership practices on student outcomes was international, as there were no relevant New Zealand studies. However, the recently published BES on teacher learning and professional development (Timperley, Wilson, Barrar, & Fung, 2007) provided some indirect evidence about New Zealand school leadership, as it identifies interventions in New Zealand schools that had made a positive difference to student achievement. writers of the leadership BES honed in on the role of leadership in those initiatives, seeking to single out a leadership dimension and compare it with what had been identified internationally. The New Zealand evidence is much more indirect, Viviane says. it is important and it gives a couple of strands to the story that did not emerge from the international research. In Maori-medium education, for example, leadership that can effectively engage the community with an educational agenda is particularly important. big message from the international and the New Zealand work is that the more leaders focus on the core business of improving teaching and learning, the bigger the impact will be on student outcomes. It's one of the first lessons she picks out as important for practitioners. But of course there's an obvious follow-up: To what extent does the New Zealand school environment allow leaders to gain and maintain that kind of focus? On the whole, the environment in which school leaders are working is very challenging in terms of that focus, she says. She reels off the tasks that can steer principals away from the core business: health and safety requirements; endless requests for information; working with the board of trustees on finance, property and marketing. …