A Case Study of a School’s Application of Appreciative Inquiry, Soar, and Strengths-Based Practices as Seen in a Range of Educational Projects

Copyright © 2022 by Professor David Giles & Marie Bramley.

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Rev. date: 10/20/2022

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1: The Broader Context of Education

Chapter 2: The Case of Hillcrest Normal School: From the Inside

Chapter 3: Normalising Te Ao Māori

Chapter 4: The ‘Heart’ of Hillcrest Normal School and Life-centric Mentoring

Chapter 5: Encountering the Changing Realities of COVID: From the Frond to the Fern

Chapter 6: What’s in a Name? Rethinking the Purpose and Pedagogy of Enviro Education

Chapter 7: Digital Storytelling: Growing Communicators and Communities

Chapter 8: On Track: A Model for Commission Based, Integrated Curriculum Learning

Chapter 9: Wells of Being: How Play Contributes to This?

Chapter 10: The Power of Drama-Infused Cross-Curriculum Pedagogy to Enable Every Child’s Growth

Chapter 11: Relational Leaders Carefully Promote Authentic Cultural Connections

Chapter 12: Transformative School-Wide Professional Learning: Encounters with a Life-centric Mentor

Chapter 13: Learning Support: What’s in a Name, and How Can I Help?

Chapter 14: Engaging Students to be Lifelong Learners through Student-Led Home Learning

Chapter 15: Reflecting on the Journey from Inquiry to Publication

CHAPTER 1

The Broader Context of Education

David Giles and Marie Bramley

Introduction

I N THIS OPENING chapter, a range of characteristics associated with the broader context of education are considered. More specifically, these characteristics include the organisational paralysis behind the pace and enormity of change, the concern for well-being, experiences of change, leadership and management, and finally, the life-centric opportunity arising from phenomenological research inquiries which frame ‘relational leadership’ as a way of ‘being in’ leadership, as opposed to another style of leadership.

In Chapter 1, numerous characteristics of our contemporary educational context are presented and critiqued. In Chapter 2, we explore the enduring characteristics of the ‘heart’ of Hillcrest Normal School. In Chapter 3, we focus on the normalisation of Te Ao Māori across the school. In Chapter 4, we move inside a local school and consider demographic and organisational details of a particular school, namely, Hillcrest Normal School (HNS). The leadership, decision-making, and organisational practices of HNS show a school that is thriving, innovative, and strengths-based. These characteristics exist within the real challenges of the day. Hillcrest Normal School is the focus of this book. The chapters that follow Chapter 4 are organised around the leaders’ self-selected, innovative, and appreciative inquiries.¹ These inquiries were initiated with the leadership of the school over a twelve-month period and involved contributions from a critical friend and external mentor.

Pressures and Tensions

There has been increasing pressure and tension for those in education, whether they be leaders, principals, teachers, or managers. Over the last three decades, educational leaders have been facing new pressures, increasing complexities, and broadening uncertainties with, at times, serious consequences for both the individual responsible for providing leadership and the organisation as a whole. In these times,

leaders in education need, more than ever, to critique their practice. Relational leaders need to remain cognizant of the changing context of education and work towards shared, on-site understandings of who and what the organisation is becoming. Such understandings must take into account the characteristics of an increasingly complex context of education, namely:

• uncertainty, unpredictability

• ambiguity, uncertain meanings

• volatility, rate of change

• health and wellbeing versus performance

• short-term assessment versus long-term impact

• professional trust versus de-privatization

• standards versus standardisation

• certainty versus dynamic change.²

This broadening set of uncertainties can be observed in the practice of schooling within local contexts. This list includes the need for educational organisations to cope with an increasing number of children with challenging behaviour, alongside resourcing and staffing, to make an ongoing difference. One of the existing take-home messages that can creep into school life is that schools will ‘fix everything’.

Paralysis

The widespread uncertainties can be experienced as a form of paralysis for decision-makers in education. The paralysis can leave many organisational leaders in a type of organisational limbo with an associated mission creep. Being in limbo involves a condition of being overwhelmed by the current pressures and demands of the moment, so much so that a reaction is more likely to be forthcoming than a well-considered decision. Further, the busyness and perceived issues constrain the opportunity for strategic thinking.

Mission creep, on the other hand, is birthed during times of being in limbo. The creep involves incremental movements away from the organisation’s core mission, towards greater pragmatism, which prioritises the need to gain opportunist funding. Perceived threats are met with survivalist thinking, which have no short- or medium-term concern for the mission and vision of the organisation. More often, the creep is seen in hindsight.

While different practices might be reconsidered in response to immediate challenges, the purpose of education should remain unchanged. Indeed, the signpost should point toward the possibilities of an enduring sense of alignment that underpins the life of the organisation. Take, for example, the following purpose statement:

The purpose of education relates to the fullest formation of each student in terms of their dispositions, character (resilience, adaptability), capabilities, understandings and skills that enables interdependence where,

• the purpose of education has a relational intent,

• the educational process is inherently relational and experiential,

• the participants are relational beings,

• the organisation is a relational entity,

• the relational culture is more than the sum of the relationships.³

This purpose of education and its characteristics need not be changed when there are pedagogical or organisational changes afoot. Contextual and practical changes need not affect the purpose. Rather, the purpose statement should provide stability for the organisation’s short- and long-term future. Regarding the purpose statement above, what might have we taken for granted about our relational practices as educational leaders?

Paralysis and Well-Being

The paralysis within an educational context extends to the well-being of those ‘in’ leadership and those who are ‘with’ leadership.

Principal well-being is on the decline in Australia and overseas. Attempts to understand well-being in School Principals . . . in the United Kingdom found that vocational stress was higher in education than across all other industries, with job-related mental ill-health almost double the rate of other industries. ⁴

Similarly, Nitta, Deguchi, Iwasaki, Kanchika, and Inoue’s (2019)⁵ research concluded with recommendations around clarifying job roles and reducing quantitative workload for principals, thus lessening depression. In New Zealand, the New Zealand (NZ) Council for Education Research (2007) conducted a research inquiry which showed high stress levels in NZ principals due to identified Ministry of Education initiatives, paperwork, and other systemic demands. ⁶

Equally important is the well-being of the organisation as a whole. The organisation is a living entity in its own right. The point here is that when an organisation is understood as a living system,⁷ as opposed to the organisation being likened to a machine, then each person’s well-being is inherently interconnected and influenced by others in the context.

The Pace and Enormity of Change

It is not only the breadth and complexity of change in education that poses significant challenges for those in educational leadership; adding increasing pressure in the educational environment is the rapid pace, enormity of scale, and seeming inability to resist unprecedented change. As Lao Tzu says,

Resisting change is like trying to hold your breath, even if you’re successful, it won’t end well.

As a consequence, leaders in education need to manage their ‘own’ feelings of burnout and change fatigue while lessening the characteristics and realities of burnout and fatigue for staff under their leadership. During these times, individualism can take precedence over community, and survival can take over from sustainability. One wonders whether the scope and pace of change have been advantageous to the educational organisations and their communities. In short, the impact on collegial and organisational relationships appears to be unrelenting. The enormity of change has been seen and felt in education. This is also true for many areas of our society.

A Metaphorical Take on ‘Experiencing Change’

A useful and alternative metaphor for our activity as leaders during times of change follows. Consider the spawning season of Canadian salmon as an analogy for the different ways leaders grapple experientially with their immediate context.

From the outset, salmon have a goal to return to their origins during the seasonal spawning. During this time, one of the most obvious characteristics of salmon’s behaviour involves the absolute necessity and commitment to swim upstream, against the flow, and to their final destination for reasons of procreation. Simply going with the flow does not bode well for the continuity and community of life within the many interdependent relationships.⁸

Manoeuvring upstream is a matter of swimming ‘against the flow.’ The salmon must instinctively move towards life and hope. In the effort to swim upstream, against the flow, salmon are constantly under pressure to turn back from engaging with the issues of the day and just go with the flow.

Similarly, salmon don’t have the option of remaining ‘in’ the status quo, given the flow they are immersed in. In fact, for salmon, the status quo is not an option! Indeed, it is only dead salmon that go with the flow. Could it be that the outcomes of schooling and education for our students are just as serious with a long-term impact? Educational leaders too need to have a way of being that points to, embodies, and charts a path ahead for the organisation as a whole.⁹ In this regard, the leaders’ ways of being act as signposts for opportunities and aspirations that act as shared understandings to be considered in the short and longer term.

Understandings of Leadership and Management

The seriousness of the contextual paralysis described above also highlights critical differences between the roles, functions, and responsibilities of leaders and managers. A critical role for managers in these times of significant change is the creation of strategic options and the associated risk management. These options should be made available to those in organisational leadership. In this way, management serves the intentional engagement of leadership.

Those in positions of leadership have different priorities to managers and focus instead on the interrelationships across the organisation and their role as guardian of the organisation’s culture and mood. Bradberry summarises this difference as follows:

Managers light a fire under people. Leaders light a fire in people.¹⁰

Leadership, Management, and Organisational Development (OD)

A similar difference can be found between leaders and managers in terms of their approach to organisational development. Typically, the approach to organisational development taken by managers is that of problem-solving, where the end goal is to lessen or remove problems within the organisation. The dominant methodology underpinning this form of analysis is action research. The action research approach has been described as a deficit model.

A major criticism of deficit approaches comes from an alternative and competing ideological approach, variously labelled as solution-focused, appreciative, life-centric, and strengths-based.¹¹ Problem-solving approaches start with questions such as What’s wrong with the organisation? What needs to be fixed? and What are the gaps to be filled? The alternative approach to organisational development starts with questions such as What’s working in the organisation? and What characteristics of the organization’s positive core can be identified within the member’s experiential narratives of high-performance events?

The process of an alternative, strengths-based, qualitative approach to organisational development involves the gathering of life-centric narratives from those inside the organisation. These narratives, or stories, become the basis of a thematic analysis. This analysis identifies strengths, opportunities, aspirations and concludes with negotiated results.

Alongside the uncertainties within education, there is mounting pressure on leaders to raise standards and engage in the co-construction of a local and authentic curriculum. These prescribed changes are said to be a matter of innovation towards creative and entrepreneurial outcomes.

Relational Leadership: A ‘Life-Centric’ Way of ‘Being in’ Leadership¹²

The contents of this chapter have so far considered the paralysis behind the pace and enormity of change, paralysis and well-being, a metaphorical take on experiencing change, leadership and management, and leadership and management with respect to approaches for organisational development. Of paramount importance, and a common theme throughout this chapter, is the phenomena of relationships, leadership, and relational leadership. The experiential nature of these phenomena has been theorised using phenomenological and ontological research approaches resulting in the phenomenological expression relational leadership.

The prevailing discourse in education around differences in leadership practices is framed around styles of leadership, namely, transformational, distributive, shared, instructional, servant, and the like. In contrast to styles of leadership, relational leadership is not another style but rather a way of being in leadership. Every leader, manager, and colleague has a way of being that is enacted between those relating.

The term relational leadership is also a reminder of what is critical to our practice as leaders. Indeed, it might be said that leadership is always relational and that relationships are the essence of leadership. The styles of leadership accentuate the need for greater knowledge and skills as the basis of growth and development as a leader. This form of professional development is largely a technicist approach with a skills-based emphasis on the what and how of leading. A deficit and problem-based model of professional development also emphasises an individual focus and negates concern for the why and purpose of education.

A phenomenological concern and interest in relational leadership is always holistic and unpacked as taken-for-granted meanings and shared understandings that lie beneath our everyday existence and are revealed as the essence of a leader’s humanity.

Four phenomenological themes which shape the nature of relational leadership¹³ have been articulated as follows:

1. Relational leaders live ‘towards’ a deep moral and ethical commitment to critical, humane, and connected interrelationships.

2. Relational leaders live ‘out’ a way that authentically models and embodies careful relationships (individually and organisationally).

3. Relational leaders ‘attune’ to the subtleties of the immediate, dynamic, and relational context through refined relational sensibilities.

4. Relational leaders ‘enact’ a phronesis (practical wisdom, tacit knowing) which was context-specific and involved relational sensibilities (such as attunement, tact, nous, resoluteness, improvisation, and moral judgement amongst other sensibilities).

Leadership narratives and experiential accounts of being in leadership show the presence and absence of a leader’s relational sensibilities that are embedded and integral to experiencing unprecedented change.

Relational Approaches to Professional Development¹⁴

The framing of leadership as a relational way of being in leadership opens exciting professional development opportunities, which serve life-centric priorities rather than endorsing deficit practices. The new priorities and initiatives are yet to be fully realised in education. They would include the exploration and application of solution-focused approaches, along with appreciative inquiry and other strengths-based approaches and strategies.

Summary and Intention

There is no doubt that we live in a world experiencing unprecedented changes. It is not surprising that our conversation can have a sense of hopelessness. Easy solutions appear to be few and far between. What is needed is a new and alternative discourse in education, and schooling, that is hopeful, appreciative, strengths-based, and relational. A new and critical discourse would have positive implications for professional development.

The chapters that follow describe Hillcrest Normal School’s application of an appreciative inquiry approach in a range of curriculum, pedagogical, leadership, and relational settings. Examples of strategies and areas of interest will be outlined in Chapters 5 to 12.

References

Cooperrider, D. L., Sorenson, P. F. J., Whitney, D., and Yaegar, T. F. (eds.), Appreciative Inquiry: Rethinking Human Organisations towards a Positive Theory of Change (Stipes, 2000).

Cooperrider, D. L., and Srivastva, S, ‘Appreciative Inquiry in Organisational Life’. Research in Organisational Change and Development, 1, (1987), 129–169.

Cooperrider, D. L., and Whitney, D, Collaborating for Change: Appreciative Inquiry. (Berrett-Koehler Communications, 1999).

Giles, D. L., Relational Leadership in Education: A Phenomenon of Inquiry and Practice. (Routledge, 2019).

Giles, D. L., Bell, M., Halsey, J., Palmer, C., Bills, A., and Rogers, B., Teaching within a Relational Approach to Educational Leadership (2nd ed.) (Cengage, 2016).

Nitta, T., Deguchi, Y., Iwasaki, S., Kanchika, M., and Inoue, K., ‘Depression and Occupational Stress in Japanese School Principals and Vice Principals’. Occupational Medicine 69(1). (2019). DOI 10.1093/occmed/kgy149.

Phillips, S., and Sen, D. Stress in head teachers. In J. Langan-Fox and C. L. Cooper (eds.), Handbook of Stress in the Occupations (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011), pp. 177–201.

Wheatley, M. J., Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time (Berrett-Koehler, 2005).

Wylie, C., ‘Principal Wellbeing and Stress in 2007—Are We Seeing Any Changes Yet? Notes for presentation to NZPF Principal Wellbeing/Hauora hui (2008), 16 June 2008.

CHAPTER 2

The Case of Hillcrest Normal School: From the Inside

David Giles

Introduction

T HIS BOOK IS based on the enduring strengths of an appreciative inquiry approach that was adopted for the development of leaders within Hillcrest Normal School (HNS), Hamilton, New Zealand. Critical to the outcomes of this initiative was an initial meeting between the principal, Marie Bramley, and Professor David Giles, former dean of education and emeritus professor of educational leadership, Flinders University, South Australia. For the purpose of this chapter, Professor David Giles, director of Life-Centric Educational Consultancy Ltd, New Zealand, will be referred to as the ‘principal’s external consultant [PEC] .’

The inaugural meeting of the principal and the PEC took place during a ‘Normal and Model Schools’ conference in New Zealand in 2016. A shared agenda was established for the school that focused on the development of senior and middle school leaders, the school’s vision statement, and other shared endeavours designed to enhance the life-centric nature of the school and its relationships. This chapter reports on the school-wide influence of the many shared endeavours led by the principal and the PEC.

The purpose of this chapter is to:

• provide background details on the case study: Hillcrest Normal School

• describe the formation of a life-centric school

• note the high priority given to professional learning and development at HNS

• deprivatise the school’s professional learning.

Background Details on the Case Study: Hillcrest Normal School

Hillcrest Normal School is a year 1–6 contributing school distributed across twenty-five classrooms. The school has a roll of 600+ students which includes a large number of ESOL (English as a second language) alongside many highly gifted children. The school is increasingly multicultural and enjoys very strong relationships with the different cultures within the school. As a consequence, the school has built a strong school community.

The Exemplary Professional Practice Required of a ‘Normal’ School¹⁵

A simplified description of a ‘normal’ school, and its role, is that a normal school is contracted by the Ministry of Education to deliver at least two outcomes on an annual basis. The first is that the school provides an example of exemplary and innovative educational professional practice. The second outcome is that the school proactively supports the development of pre-service teachers (ITE) within their professional experiences and other classroom endeavours.

Normal schools have been characterised as:

• innovative sites for new conversations in education

• educational sites where staff development remains a high priority

• pedagogical site where staff proactively engage in mentoring pre-service adults

• an organisational site where the leadership is relational and releasing, growing emergent, aspiring, and positional leaders

• schools which contribute to a life-centric, networked association

• schools described as model schools where change and growth go hand in hand.

Hillcrest Normal School exemplifies the characteristics of a ‘normal’ school in both aspiration and practice.

A New Principal for Hillcrest Normal School

Being in her new position as principal of HNS, the principal went about observing and ontologically listening to stakeholders associated with the school. The term ontological listener has been coined to describe the principal’s aspiration and ability to read between the lines where taken-for-granted understandings lie. During this time, the principal reflected on the readiness of various possibilities and opportunities for the school. The