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"Leaders who see themselves as stewards will be able to create school communities that are both collegial and responsive to the needs of community members." Many scholars are in fact refining the idea of instructional leadership to reflect this finding. Instructional leadership, they argue, ought to be done in a collaborative — or facilitative — fashion. Organizations work best, writes Larry Lashway in School Leadership, "when employees at all levels are actively engaged in solving problems. The leader's role is to get that involvement." Facilitative leadership, he says, "is based on mutuality and synergy, with power flowing in multiple directions." The old model — the leader issuing edicts from the point of a pyramid — is looking as quaint and out-of-date as poodle skirts and pegged pants. The enlightened leader of today works in the background using a process Lashway calls "professional give-and-take" to move the school forward. David Conley and Paul Goldman identified the key strategies used by this new breed of leaders in Facilitative Leadership: How Principals Lead Without Dominating, published by the Oregon School Study Council in 1994. Facilitative leaders:
"A leader's competence is most clearly manifest in the ability to empower and inspire others." This last strategy, "model the school's vision," can happen only if and when that vision is clearly drawn. "If there is one broad area of agreement among researchers, consultants, those who teach prospective principals, and the principals themselves," Bess Keller writes, "it is that schools must have a clear idea of what they are about." The vision is not plucked from thin air. Nor is it imposed from above. Rather, it must take root in the school's history — the shared norms, beliefs, traditions, and myths of the school community. This deeply embedded context in which the school operates — what researchers call school culture — is the seedbed from which a guiding vision must grow. Only by knowing and understanding her school's quirks, cliques, penchants, piques, feuds, dreams, and habits (good and bad) can a principal hope to travel toward a workable vision. "School culture is the product of a succession of diverse and ever-changing social relationships among those who work and live in the school," write Stephen Stolp and Stuart Smith in School Culture and Climate: The Role of the Leader, published by the Oregon School Study Council in 1994. "Does the school's faculty have a history of conflict or collaboration? Why do teachers, who once had a habit of staying at the school until 5 p.m., now, with a new principal in the building, quickly head for the parking lot after the last bell has rung? To ask these types of questions — in pursuit of the roots of conflict or a lost work ethic — is to engage in cultural analysis." To understand a school's culture, the principal needs to first spend time observing and listening — in other words, sopping up and mulling over the countless details that together form this one-of-a-kind place. "Then and only then," Stolp and Smith counsel, "a principal can begin to approach change by empowering staff and negotiating a shared culture of meaning." The researchers offer the following practical suggestions for changing school culture:
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The New Principal Special Report:
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Date of Last Update: 9/28/01 
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