Harvard's The Art of Leadership – or the science of standardisation? – and the case for Communicative Action

Leftistish outsider Joe Holroyd finds himself on the periphery at Harvard Principal’s Center ‘Improving Schools: The Art of Leadership’, but makes the case for building progress through such outsider positioning.

Frankfurt School Critical Theorist Theodor Adorno described ideology as a socially necessary illusion, as ‘false consciousness’. In education, and particularly an education model that values inquiry and constructivist approaches to learning, a surplus of this false consciousness has always struck me as particularly contrary to the spirit of genuine learning - of really teaching students to think for themselves, to personalise their learning experiences after the model of inspirational teachers.

But a surplus of ideology is absolutely rife in education. It is central to definitions of ‘best practice’ (itself a horrible, reductive phrase) in educational leadership. The conventional focus to almost any school appraisal system begins with the questions ‘What is the school’s statement of Mission(/Vision/Values)? Does the school’s strategic plan align with this Mission?’ In short: what is your ideology, and how are you drumming it into everybody?

Adorno expresses a more pragmatic and optimistic definition of ideology elsewhere: it is what a people need to have in common to act together. And the more progressive Jurgen Habermas’s concept of communicative action develops this notion further, to create spaces for free thinking social critique within the system. Mission, Vision and Values statements are periodically interrogated and reworked by a democratic range of stakeholders – agreements and understandings of disparate interests are forged – and thus “the actions of the agents involved are coordinated not through egocentric calculations of success but through acts of reaching understanding” (Habermas,1984, 286). One line of criticism toward such ‘progressive’ concepts in Habermas's later work is that the ‘progress’ is simply towards a more neoliberal model of the public sphere: in education, this means that our schools just function more and more like corporations. Said line of criticism could, of course, also be applied perfectly well to a relative free thinking leftistish like myself going off to spend a week of the summer holiday topping-up my careerist CPD at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. 

In some senses, of course, a focus on Mission, Vision and Values is entirely reasonable and inevitable, and need not necessarily preclude diverse, differentiated spaces within which students and staff can be brilliant, sometimes eccentric, sometimes irreverent individuals. Dr Elizabeth City, in her lecture Strategy in Action, as many of the faculty, did speak briefly to the value of personalised learning and flexibility within curriculum implementation. But, in discussing the perennial issues of improving schools in the American public sector and beyond – equity and diversity – City’s core argument appeared to be this: in our central mission of supporting our diverse learners, we must ensure that our strategic plan is centrally focussed on standardisation of instruction across classrooms. We need to ensure that the same thing is happening in different classrooms to ensure that we are being equitable, and that we are including all. We need to standardise the educational package in order to be fair, and to move forward. This was met with many affirmative nods and murmurs. City, like all the lecturers at Harvard, was a highly charismatic and intelligent presenter. But the tensions between these concepts - recognitions of teaching and learning diversity - and an otherwise industrial model of pedagogical homogeneity, of production-line standardisation, seemed staggeringly obvious to me.

City’s session, on the final day of this week long intensive course, was described by course convenor Pamela Mason as being something of a consolidation of The Art of Learning, and an opportunity to frame the learning of the week in thinking about the strategic planning that we may return to our schools with. It certainly served the former purpose. Throughout the week, I had been struck by the extent to which, beneath a banner declaiming our inclusive, equitable ideology, our job - as educational leaders - is to standardise the hell out of everything. 

Jeff Howard, sharing his Efficacy Institute model, and giving a shout-out to Bush's No Child Left Behind (UK teachers: think Every Child Matters on steroids) in many ways led the charge to standardise. I admired his candour in this, along with his experience, his rigour, and his unequivocal championing of the model. He started where American public education (perhaps we need not stop at education) crudely determines value: stats and standardised measures. He then used these, via a brief dip into brain science, to debunk the notion of innate ability, and said we should be holding all to the same high standards. Such lack of equivocation can drive progress. He was passionate and advocating a kind of stats-driven realpolitik: if the teachers can’t/won’t be driven by the stats towards raising standards - and quickly - then ultimately, they should be driven out.

My problem is that - quite apart from the many good teachers who may be left behind in such a crude standardisation model - if you create a culture where quantitative measures determine all, and a highly visible discourse of this at the core of education, this permeates the classroom and reaffirms to kids who are ‘failing’ that this is so - in black and white numbers. It reminded me of the need for structuring your argument very carefully, most especially within an ethos of realpolitik - especially being mindful of your current paradigm and audience. Even if the stats are invaluable as a crude leadership shorthand for what-is and what-isn’t working, if we have a leadership discourse that only sees teachers as producers of numbers, are we really modelling to our staff how they are to see their students as more than just these? If we are already operating within an excessively mechanistic, numbers-driven paradigm, is this really the lever with which to effect positive change in struggling teachers? When I asked Dr. Howard a question to this effect, he picked-up on the London accent (if that’s quite what I have these days… I think it’s rather lost somewhere between the Thames Estuary, San Diego and Kowloon Bay), inquired as to where I worked, and good-humouredly conceded that his Efficacy model was singularly focussed on turning-around the juggernaut of American Public Education. 

Deborah Helsing’s session effectively took us all through a form of CBT/coaching for Educational Leaders, looking primarily at ourselves, our professed goals, and the manner in which we may have, as per the title of her set of protocols, developed immunity to change. Taking us through a great set of activities and resources to this end, Helsing’s session gave me time to reflect on the commonality between the soft-skills of counselling, leadership and teaching. This dovetails with my own research, and more broadly in my thinking about how we can support our teachers in supporting their students to become better learners. The visual from the British Counsel, below, articulates this support spectrum nicely, and formed part of my recent presentation on a related topic at AISC. 

Helsing’s teaching and learning modality was very much at the counselling and coaching end of the spectrum. So, in providing a (non-directive) structure around which to facilitate the resolution of our own leadership issues, Helsing helped us to identify and articulate commitments to change / improvement goals, but then also - crucially - to take the time to identify competing commitments and assumptions that might be inhibiting these. It was an excellent set of systematic protocols for self-reflection, facilitating sustainable change. My criticism of Helsing’s session is, then, a largely semantic and, it may appear at first glance, a rather petty one. But, I think, it gets to the heart of what I found to be the tensions throughout the Art of Leadership course.

We concluded Helsing’s session with a protocol where we were given time to articulate and reflect on the big assumptions that were perpetuating our focus on competing commitments (those commitments that were inhibiting us from actioning our desired leadership change / improvement goal.) We were then given sets of protocols for exploring - over time, in a low risk manner - the extent to which these assumptions were valid, by testing them with (incremental) change. Again: an excellent, highly supportive set of protocols for, to frame it in CBT terms, exploring our 'maladaptive thinking’ around leadership issues.

But we were invited to test these assumptions by collecting ‘data’. And here is the problem. Yes, when pressed on the matter, the Harvard faculty, like academics everywhere, will acknowledge that ‘data’ is a broad term in education and the social sciences that comprises a range of qualitative and quantitative types of information. But, as in the natural sciences and mathematics where the term has a more longstanding centrality to methodology, ‘data’ is conventionally understood to mean numbers: facts that can be reduced to a crude quantity or measure.

If we consider the trend in the social sciences from where this proclivity for ‘data’ derives, the widespread proliferation of Evidence Based Practice from biomedical research outwards since the mid 90’s has been driven by the development of evidence hierarchies. And, although there is no single universally agreed model, they all have this in common: quantifiable data always ranks more highly than merely qualitative explorations of single case-studies, or expert opinion and observation.

Needless to say, I do not (nor am I even remotely equipped to!) doubt the validity of these hierarchies in the natural sciences. It is appropriately reassuring for parents to know that their doctor will only prescribe their child a medicine that has been tested in a large number of Randomised Controlled Trials, and the findings of these consolidated in Meta-Analyses / Systematic Reviews support its use.

But even in the natural sciences, I would also want my doctor to take the time to read case reports, or qualitative studies. I want him to have some understanding of the nuances of implementation - how the medicine’s dosage and efficacy can vary from case-to-case, for example. Moreover, I want him to develop expert opinion, through observation, of this case: my child. Where this intersects with education and developmental psychology such a need for greater attention to qualitative research is especially pressing. The great controversies and international anomalies around America’s (Evidence Based Practice) (over-) treatment of adolescent ADHD, addressed in Marily Wedge’s work A Disease Called Childhood and in my aforementioned AISC conference presentation, are highly illustrative of the problems with a purely mechanistic reliance on data, outside of qualitative accounts of psychosocial factors in development. Especially where big-pharma and direct to consumer advertising are in the mix! Moroever, the validity and reliability of the scientific method, at the core of Evidence Based Practice and quantifiable ‘data’, is prefaced on the elimination of variables.

Such crude quantitative standardisation seems, to me, to be both a long way from equity, diversity or - indeed - the art of learning. Of course, Wedge’s argument also depends on data, on comparing international models by way of quantifiable measures, and my argument here is not for some kind of a reactionary dismissal of Evidence Based Practice in the social sciences and education. Progressive academics in the social sciences and education of course speak to mixed-method investigations and the triangulation of quantitative and qualitative data being theoretically optimal: with quantitative data typically driving strategy, and nuanced understanding of qualitative case studies informing and differentiating implementation.

But the reality is this: in times of heavy-workload and/or crisis, we don’t go for what is theoretically optimal. We default to (the) efficacy (institute). And public sector teaching in the US - at least from my impressions of the wonderfully talented, dedicated, overloaded and long-suffering teachers and leaders who were my classmates at Harvard - is in a perpetual state of heavy-workload. And slipping into deeper-and-deeper crisis under the leadership of the Tweeter-in-Chief currently occupying The White House.

Tweeting of which, and to turn briefly to that otherwise largely neglected of element of art in what seemed otherwise to be largely the science of standardisation, Irvin Scott’s performance was very engaging. Despite beginning by urging everyone to follow him on Twitter and then punctuating his delivery with call-and-response imperatives to the audience, I thoroughly enjoyed his lecture. Which (if you have read this far and thus probably correctly gauged to be the circumlocutions of a somewhat malcontented Eurocentric abroad / pampered ex-pat) is to say Scott was a brilliant public speaker. His focus, in making the case for autobiographical and anecdotal story-telling in leadership had incredibly excited me in the pre-reading to his lecture, and he thoroughly demonstrated the power of this mode of persuasion and engagement.

Scott’s performance was the most powerful of the week at Harvard. He had us standing, singing, waving our hands. Simultaneously, perhaps, it was one of the least analytical. While the recommended reading had performed some very interesting discourse analysis on narrative modes in leadership, and Scott’s own research in this area is impressive, what we basically had here was spectacle, far more style than analytical substance. And, given just one lecture session in which to engage and persuade his audience towards a more personalised paradigm of leadership - one where personal vulnerabilities and failings and the artistic framing of these can take us beyond a mechanistic chain-of-command - I think he pitched it very shrewdly.

But I think this meagre space accommodated to explore a truly artful dimension in leadership, and the subsequent defaulting to spectacle as the most efficacious, if least intellectual, of art's offerings speaks to bigger problems in the US, the UK and elsewhere in education and the wider public sphere. As education budgets are squeezed and STEM et al. are prioritised, ‘art’ and ‘artists' become increasingly adjuncts: the jazz-hands persuaders, the marketing and communications departments. Granted, STEAM, and a proliferation of other letters are making concessions to the creative realm, but arts and drama departments in schools the world over are increasingly begging for scraps-at-the-table, or in less austere conditions just capitulating to a crass, unintellectual populism. 

Where, in an era that has seen the UK do irreparable damage to self and that Habermasian dream of a united Europe, along with the aforementioned US election of a man whose platform for the most powerful job in the world was singularly that he did not engage in anything but the most prosaic and reductive narratives of self or others, we have never had more pressing need to be cultivating politically relevant arts production and discourse analysis. If ever we need an authentic focus on finding space for art within both the form and content of our educational and leadership cultures, it is now. We need something beyond inflammatory Tweets driving our public discourse, and that of our future leaders.

But to turn back from that most reductive of US cynic’s, to one from the UK with a greater proclivity for the longform-narrative, (and indeed, its bedfellow the convoluted sentence structure) why did I sign-up for a week of leadership training oriented towards improving schools, with an (albeit loose) focus on the American public sector: apart from the careerist badge of a Harvard course on my resume, what else did I expect?

To risk (again) being the proverbial Hegelian ‘squid’s ink bag’, it is because I find my intellect most engaged by dialectics; by genuine diversity and difference of opinion, by doing the hard, Habermasian work of forging a collective understanding, despite the odds. From my application statement for the course at Harvard:

‘Several of my most successful leadership initiatives [in international schools], had their genesis in practices that I observed in the UK, during the early years of my career working in a large inner-city government school. My leadership vision is sparked by learning of such initiatives in one place, then researching and developing the reframing of these in another (international school) context. American pedagogical research (particularly that emanating from Harvard’s School of Education) has been an ongoing interest of mine, and immersion amongst peers from private and public sector schools from the US would be highly stimulating experience in my growth as a pedagogical leader.'

If they were pithy and not merely awkward, reductive and cynical, a Trumpism for this sentiment might be to know thy enemy. The most comprehensively researched models, the publications in the journals with the biggest ‘impact factors’ still emanate from the powerhouses of the Evidence Based Practice Anglo-American education departments of Harvard et al. IB International Schools such as mine do not face remotely the same pressures that see so many impressive Anglo-American public sector oriented educational researchers and leaders operate within this paradigm of standardization. But standardization-at-all-costs is still very much the leadership path-of-least resistance, driven by such leadership courses as this – without even the excuse, in our pampered ex-pat gated communities, of a realpolitik in the face of a public sector in crisis.

Nuancedly differentiated pedagogy, curriculum, and the dynamic leadership models that support these take much longer to even describe, let alone to develop and proliferate, than do a set of ‘off-the-shelf’ protocols with Ivy League branding.

But said brandings have power.

References to prestigious universities operate as a shorthand for ‘credible’ in our leadership discourses. Like our ideological Mission Statements, this ‘false consciousness’ reassures us with objective sounding phrases like Research Based, Data Driven, Best Practice.

The week at Harvard concluded, in distinctly American evangelical style, with an invitation for public declarations of our experiences of, and our feelings about the week. The skepticism, that may be creeping back into my attempt at an otherwise progressive narrative mode here, was also riding high by this point in the week for your author. Yet I had also spent a week immersed in far less equivocal narratives of a better world in education, a week of singing, hand-clapping and generally engaging in school spirit – that ‘socially necessary illusion’ with which I began these musings. So when the microphone made its way around the auditorium to me, what came out was as mixed in register as it was a blessing of my time at Harvard:

‘As a relatively pampered outsider here, I have been awed by the depth of commitment, passion and talent I see around me… but I can’t help but be struck by how much of this great work is happening within a system that is so wrong.’

Needless to say, the response from the room was also, at best, mixed. This wasn’t the conclusion they were looking for: the pithy, upbeat affirmation, the sentimental gushing of mutual appreciation. And neither will this be.

But nor, I hope, is the concluding tone one of an outright ill-spirited contrarian. The message, it is to be hoped, remains mixed. My sharing at the conclusion of The Art of Learning was (however clumsily) emanating ‘not through egocentric calculations of success but through acts of reaching understanding’. And while I appreciated the warmth behind course convenor Mason’s comment to me afterwards that I was ‘never an outsider’ – I begged to differ. Artists have always valued difference and distance from the herd, to effect greater critical distance and space in which to develop and test ideas, to craft their forms. Artful leadership, as both a creative and a communicative endeavor, depends perhaps equally upon such peripheral positioning – sometimes standing alone on tough issues, sometimes intentionally taking a birds-eye view as the outsider looking in – or how else are we to create communities where diversity is truly understood, where equity is truly valued? It is not easy, but if we are to be progressive leaders we must embrace the challenge of such tentative footing, since ‘Communicative reason is of course a rocking hull—but it does not go under in the sea of contingencies, even if shuddering in high seas is the only mode in which it ‘copes’ with these contingencies’ (Habermas, 1992b, p.144)

Which should, really, be my conclusion. The narrative has come full circle, we’re back to Habermas’s progressive framing of Frankfurt School criticism in educational leadership. Anything else risks, as I may have at Harvard, outstaying the welcome. So be it. I'll stay on the outside.

Australian Vietnamese entrepreneur Tan Le articulates the value of the outsider position with far greater poetry than I can – and is perhaps more immune to the charges of Eurocentrism than both my-longwinded-self and the sometimes poetic Mr Habermas. And if the narrative circle is broken, then good, because the thoughts should keep spiraling-on in communicative action and ‘It is okay to be an outsider, a recent arrival, new on the scene - and not just okay, but something to be thankful for... Because being an insider can so easily mean collapsing the horizons, can so easily mean accepting the presumptions of your province.’

Work Cited

Habermas, J. (1984). The theory of communicative action. Volume 1: Reason and the rationalization of society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

TED: ‘Tan Le: My Immigration Story’. Retrieved August 7th from https://www.dlgvisablog.com/blog/2014/5/13/ted-tan-le-my-immigration-story