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Sustaining Leadership

Hargreaves, D. & Fink, D. (2003). 'Sustaining leadership. Making improvements in education.' Phi Delta Kappan, May 84(9), 693.

Hargreaves and Fink (2003) write that maintaining educational change should not be confused with 'sustaining' educational change, which has a deeper, more fundamental meaning.

Sustainability does not simply mean whether something can last. It addresses how particular initiatives can be developed without compromising the development of others in the surrounding environment, now and in the future.

The authors draw from a five-year program of school improvement involving six secondary schools in an urban and suburban school district in Ontario, as well as from 'Change Over Time' - a study funded by the Spencer Foundation that included a look at leadership over time in eight high schools in Ontario and New York State.

Many long-standing practices - among them the graded school, the compartmentalised secondary school, tracking students by ability, and teacher-centred instruction - have been institutionalised over long periods of time and have become part of the 'grammar of schooling'. The persistence of this grammar - and of everyone's ideas of how schools should really work as institutions - has made it exceptionally difficult to institutionalise innovations and reforms that challenge the grammar, that imply a different and deviant institutional appearance and way of operating for schooling.

Hargreaves and Fink argue that sustainable change demands committed relationships, not fleeting infatuations - contributing to the growth of everyone, not just fostering the fortunes of a few at the expense of the rest. Sustainable change engages with long-term commitments to resources that can be maintained (eg not purchasing large banks of equipment such as computers up-front, with no provision for ongoing maintenance and updates).

Sustainable improvement requires investment in building long-term capacity for improvement, such as the development of teachers' skills, which will stay with them forever, long after the project money has gone.

Hargreaves and Fink use the metaphor of an educational 'ecosystem', which is developed in order to enable people to adapt to and prosper in their increasingly complex environments.

In education, one important addition to our definition of sustainability is that not everything is worth keeping. In education, it matters that what is sustained is what, in terms of teaching and learning, is itself sustaining. To sustain is to keep alive; sustenance is nourishment. And in education, good teaching and learning that matter and last for life are inherently sustaining processes.

Five characteristics of sustainable change are identified.

Improvement that fosters learning, not merely change that alters schooling.
Improvement that endures over time.
Improvement that can be supported by available or obtainable resources.
Improvement that does not affect negatively the surrounding environment of other schools and systems.
Improvement that promotes ecological diversity and capacity throughout the educational and community environment.

Hargreaves and Fink provide case studies from their research to illustrate how to lead sustainable change. Effective leaders:

approach, commit to and protect deep learning in their schools
sustain others in their efforts to promote and support that learning
sustain themselves in their work, so that they can persist with their vision and avoid burning out
ensure that the improvements they bring about will last over time, especially after they themselves have gone.

Three key features of sustainable leadership include systems thinking.

The future of leadership must be embedded in the hearts and minds of the many and not rest on the shoulders of a few.
Schools must apply systems thinking to all of their initiatives (see also The School as a System). School leadership is horizontal across space (ie between schools) and vertical across time (ie different leaders within schools). No single leader acts in isolation from what is concurrently happening around him or her, nor from what has happened before and will happen in the future.
Teachers must see themselves as being - and be encouraged to be - leaders of classrooms and of colleagues from the moment they begin their careers.