Dr. Andy Hargraeves

Dr. Andy Hargraeves is a former professor at OISE/UT where he was co-founder of the International Centre for Educational Change (ICEC), which was established to provide a critical, research-based perspective to educational change in Canada and around the world. He is widely involved in consultation, research, and improvement activities with teacher unions, universities, school districts, education departments, and foundations at home and abroad. A prolific author and editor, his most recent book is Teaching in the Knowledge Society: Education in the Age of Insecurity.Dr. Hargraeves was the first educator from outside the USA invited to edit the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) Yearbook in 1997: Rethinking Educational Change with Heart and Mind. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Educational Change published by Klower since January 2000. He is now with the Lynch School of Education, Boston College where he is the Thomas More Brennan Chair of Education.

A Review of Dr. Andy Hargreaves' Lecture

As part of their distinguished lecturer series, Manitoba ASCD provided educators with the privilege of an afternoon with Dr. Andy Hargreaves on May 6, 2005 at the Clarion Hotel in Winnipeg. Dr. Hargreaves is the Thomas More Brennan Chair in Education at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. Prior to his current position, he was founder and co-director of the International Centre for Educational Change at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Dr. Hargreaves' teaching and research at Boston College concentrates on sustainable leadership, professional learning communities, educational change and the emotions of teaching. He has authored or edited more than 20 books which have been translated into a dozen languages. Dr. Hargreaves' lecture focused on Sustainable Leadership: Reflections of Leadership and Educational Change.

Dr. Hargreaves used a particularly effective grounding exercise. The exercise involved each person seeking answers to twenty questions from other participants in the group. The questions and content were not as important as the process and message. Dr. Hargreaves spoke of this activity as example of a professional learning community as no one person had all of the answers but all answers were available within the group. He also stated that it doesn't take long to gain the answers to questions through the use of group dialogue.

Professor Hargreaves introduced his lecture by speaking about the concept of sustainability and the importance of applying the principles of sustainability in education leadership.

"Sustainability is the capacity of a system to engage in the complexities of continuous improvement consistent with deep values of human purpose."

He spoke of the key forces influencing change or continuity in the long term as leadership, leadership sustainability and leadership succession and cited examples of the most successful companies in the world who employ sustainability strategies.

"Sustainable leadership matters, spreads and lasts. It is a shared responsibility, that does not unduly deplete human or financial resources, and that cares for and avoids exerting negative damage on the surrounding educational and community environment. Sustainable leadership has an activist engagement with the forces that affect it, and builds an educational environment of organizational diversity that promotes cross-fertilization of good ideas and successful practices in communities of shared learning and development.

The focus of Dr. Hargreaves lecture was based upon the seven principles of sustainable leadership. Sustainable leadership is characterized by:

Depth
Endurance
Breadth
Justice
Resourcefulness
Diversity
Conservation

Depth - sustainability in leadership must focus on sustaining things that matter. Sustaining learning is therefore learning that matters, that lasts and that engages students intellectually, socially and emotionally. It is not achievement results, but the learning behind them that matters most.

Endurance - sustainable leadership is not achieved by charismatic leaders whose shoes are too big to fill. Instead, it spreads beyond individuals in chains of influence that connect the actions of leaders to their predecessors and successors. Many of successful schools have had initiatives implemented by principals with strong leadership skills, only to have these initiatives collapse soon after the principal leaves the building. Leadership succession is the challenge of letting go, moving on, and planning for one's own obsolescence. Sustainable improvements are not fleeting changes that disappear when their champions have left.

Breadth - leadership succession means more than grooming principals' successors. It means distributing leadership throughout the school's professional community. It is important to create cultures of leadership where succession can easily occur within those who are part of the organization.

Justice - sustainable leadership benefits all students and schools - not just a few at the expense of the rest. Sustainable leadership is sensitive to how lighthouse, magnet or charter schools and their leaders can leave others in the shadows, and how privileged communities can be tempted to skim the cream off the local leadership pool. Our responsibility is to share what we know with those weaker schools in order for them to become better as opposed to drawing away any strengths that they may have. Sustainable leadership is therefore not only about maintaining improvement in one's own school. It is about being responsible to the schools and students that one's own actions affect in the wider environment. It is about social justice.

Resourcefulness - sustainable leadership provides intrinsic rewards and extrinsic incentives that attract and retain the best and brightest of the leadership pool; and it provides time and opportunity for leaders to network, learn from and support each other, as well as coach and mentor their successors. Sustainable leadership systems know how to take care of their leaders and how to get leaders to take care of themselves. Teachers and school leaders who are 'burned out' by excessive demands and diminishing resources have neither the physical energy nor the emotional capacity to develop professional learning communities. The emotional health of leaders is a scarce environmental resource. Leadership that drains its leaders dry is not leadership that will last. Unless reformers and policy-makers care for leaders' personal and professional selves, they will engineer short-term gains only by mortgaging the entire future of leadership.

Dr. Hargreaves spoke of restraint as the first rule of conservation. Renewal must involve intellectual energy, emotional energy, physical energy, and spiritual energy.

Diversity - sustainable leadership recognizes and cultivates many kinds of excellence in learning, teaching and leading and provides the networks for these different kinds of excellence to be shared in cross-fertilizing processes of improvement. The strongest ecosystems are those which are the most biodiverse – the strongest human organizations are those that are diverse.

Therefore, standardization and alignment of human organizations will not allow them to adapt to new environments as they are confronted with them. Cohesion is more important than standardization. Standardization is the enemy of sustainability.

Conservation – sustainable leadership undertakes activist engagement with the environment. The most resilient of schools are resilient not just because of their innovativeness or its strength as a learning community, but because they engage assertively with their environment.

Dr. Hargreaves emphasized the importance of valuing the past as the future as we attempt to make changes in our schools. We must grasp the culture of the organization and value what has worked well before dismissing practices that have occurred in the past.

Dr. Hargreaves closed his lecture with a discussion of the importance of professional learning communities. Professional learning communities require three important components.

People are committed to a common vision, i.e. learning and caring.

People are committed to each other as people.

People protect minority interests, e.g. veteran teachers, new teachers, students, etc.

Dr. Hargreaves stressed the importance of respecting evidence and data for research. Focus on learning for kids, learning for adults and accept that learning solves problems. Leaders must create an environment for professional learning communities as a way of life or culture in their organization in order for them to be successful.

Most leaders want to do things that matter, to inspire others to do it with them and to leave a legacy once they have gone. Mainly, it is not leaders who let their schools down, but the systems in which they lead. Sustainable leadership certainly needs to become a commitment of all school leaders. If change is to matter, spread and last, sustainable leadership must also be a fundamental priority of the systems in which leaders do their work.