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Teaching leaders to lead committees.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Using three qualitative case studies, this article applies findings regarding the importance of committee composition and superintendents' roles on committees to the preparation of education leaders. The superintendents in each case placed individuals on committees in deliberate ways and chose specific roles for themselves in relationship to the committees they created. Prospective leaders can learn from these examples to select committee members for enhanced productivity and to choose which role to play on a committee within a specific context.

Introduction

Teaching collaborative leadership to prospective superintendents and principals is guided by an abundance of published advice and a scarcity of helpful theory and field-based research. The empirical results from three case studies briefly described in this article clarify two important teaching areas for education leadership programs-selecting committee members and choosing a leadership role within a given committee. The complexity of these two kinds of choices and their significance with regard to how committees function merit specific instruction in education leadership coursework.

When given opportunities to form committees in hypothetical or school and district settings, education leadership students in licensure programs often choose one of two strategies: take any volunteers willing to participate in committee work; or adopt a "one of each flavor" approach and recruit a variety of people, each of whom ostensibly represents a particular interest group. Either one is probably an intuitive approach that many education leadership students probably take with them into their school and district administrative positions.

How practicing leaders engage with committees is brought to light by examining instructionally-focused strategic decision making in three school districts. The decisions studied in these cases are strategic in the sense that they impact a large portion of the district and they help determine long term practices and procedures. This type of case study research, with its emphasis on tracking the evolution of specific decisions, is rare in education leadership literature. Its application to leadership preparation is vital because making decisions is what leaders are expected to do (Bolman & Deal, 2003) and they are increasingly expected to do it in the context of substantial accountability pressure in a manner that is satisfactory to multiple constituencies (Donaldson, 2006; Elmore, 2004).

Theoretical Framework

This study of committee work in strategic decision making focuses on superintendents because in each case the superintendent convened a committee to assist with a major district decision. The findings of this article also apply to principals because they engage in similar collaborative decision making efforts. The committees superintendents work with tend to be collections of individuals with varying qualities and they tend to develop a collective character. Individual combinations of expertise, motivation (Hoy & Miskel, 2001; Vroom & Yetton, 1973), and habits of mind (Simon, 1993) are...