School Leader

The Ennea-Type Four School Leader: The Individuality Seeker

Note: The post below originally appeared on the Contemplative Learning website, host of this series exploring each Enneagram personality type.

Next in our ongoing school leader Ennea-type series describes a rarity among principals, superintendents, and other district-level supervisors.  And the very fact that Type Four school leaders are rare in such roles appeals to their individuality-seeking nature.  Because of this, we naturally call the Four school leader “The Individuality-Seeker.” 
However, this sought-after quality can be the Four’s downfall when he reaches unhealthy levels and begins to see himself as a hopelessly misunderstood outsider.

Type Fours are commonly called “Epicures,” “Artists,” or “Hopeless Romantics” because of their penchant toward what they consider to be expressions of good taste and their habits of holding on to relationship-regret, and old hurts and grudges.  (Individuality-Seekers’ memories are detail-oriented and long, which can work to a school community’s favor or detriment.)  Fours can also, then, be described as sensitive, withdrawn, dramatic, and self-centered, regularly making their “enemies” walk on eggshells when they attempt to communicate or rectify a past wrong.

Healthy Fours crave authentic interactions; therefore, they can be tonics to teachers, parents, and students who want to cut through “edu-speak” and get real.  Excessive meeting without purpose is the bane of the Individuality-Seeker’s corporate existence; likewise in schools and district offices.  The Four wants to drop, and occasionally, tear down the veil that he thinks covers honest words and actions.  If he can, using open communication, the school’s mission is advanced.  And if he can’t, or won’t because of an imagined obstacle or heightened sense of self-consciousness, he will retreat inside himself, sabotaging his previous good work.

Equanimity and high standards

The Individuality-Seeker finds himself in a quandary.  He desperately wants to avoid the mundane.  However, school administrative roles demand a certain level of mundane-ness, be it in the form of “red-tape” paperwork, data analysis, or other seemingly non-creative endeavors.  The Type Four school leader’s challenge, then, is to reframe such work’s context and find its greater importance in the grand scheme of things.  For example, assessment data analysis (a common task for any school leader) might, on the surface, appear as a monotonous task to the Individuality-Seeker.  But when placed in the context of informing instruction to enhance individual student achievement, data analysis becomes exponentially more important than it was before.

Because of her high aesthetic and relational standards, the Individuality-Seeker’s school can be a haven of genuine refinement and culture.  The Type Four school leader seeks new, innovative ways of being and of school success.  Because of this, parents and supervisors are usually assured that the Individuality-Seeker is on the cusp of new research and original, if not necessarily time-tested, leadership methods as long as she remembers to clearly communicate her vision’s roadmap and its rationale.  Occasionally, the Four can assume that communication is unnecessary, thinking that surely everyone sees the obvious value in her actions (they are crystal clear to her, after all).  In these cases, the Four may potentially translate innocent requests for clarification as questioning of ideals and actions, and, if not mindful of this potential, can slip into unhealthier modes of being.  (See Ginger Lapid-Bogda’s Bringing Out the Best in Yourself at Work for examples of how each Ennea-Type potentially filters work feedback.)

The Individuality-Seeker is prone to self-judging (occasionally to the point of self-psychological abuse) because he is so emotionally honest.  Part of the heart, or feeling, center (like the Type 2 and Type 3), the Four thinks that he identifies with his feelings stronger than any other type – feeding his “misunderstood” self-image – and must therefore regularly remind himself that he is not his feelings.  Because of this stronger feeling-identification, the Four also feels set apart and socially awkward, a quality that can be cause for great school stakeholder misunderstanding.  Paradoxically, the Individuality-Seeker desires deep, meaningful connections with people but has difficulty taking the necessary risks in order to form lasting relationships.  The Four school leader must always be mindful of this tendency.  Thinking that no one else understands his feelings can ultimately be very harmful to leadership perceptions, and the meaningful relationships (with all stakeholders:  teachers, students, parents, staff, board members, and supervisors) that he so values. 

Too, when unhealthy Fours move to Type Two, they can become so emotionally demanding of their closest confidants – clingy one minute, and aloof the next – that Individuality-Seekers who find themselves in this state also risk finding themselves actually leading no one.

In healthier states, though, Individuality-Seekers move to their point of integration, Type One.  In this mode, the Four demonstrates a goal-oriented, productive, but still individually creative, condition.  It is also in this state that the self-aware Individuality-Seeker taps into his potential to accept and honor the creativity and individuality of his faculty members and school.  Practicing a calming, compassionate equanimity and demonstrating an ability to remove personal feelings from the work equation, all worthwhile ideas are honored as valuable contributions to the uniqueness and specialness of the school and organization.

Practices for wholeness: Growing equanimity by acknowledging individuality of others

To maximize their health and effectiveness, Four school leaders should find creative outlets – preferably within the school community and environment, but outside, too.  Perhaps the Individuality-Seeker has a talent to share with teachers and students in classrooms.  Students who see their leader valuing written or other artistic forms of expression receive the message that classroom practice is both important and also valued in the real world.

Additionally, since many Fours are prone to embody the true definition of a nature-loving Romantic, these school leaders could experience the regenerative effects of outdoor meditation and reflection.  This could take the form of reading or journaling, too.

Finally, Individuality-Seekers could intentionally (but also, importantly, sincerely) practice acknowledging the special and unique qualities of others.   While this might seemingly diminish Fours’ senses of “individual self,” in actuality it could lessen the more negative feelings of self-consciousness (as well as narcissism’s grip on their lives) while heightening abilities to affirm their teachers’ and students’ work (thus affirming their own work as the school leader, and ultimately their own self-acceptance).

The Type Four is an enigma as a school leader.  And make no mistake:  he likes it that way.  But when the Four practices equanimity and recognizes that all meaningful contributions to the school organization can be considered unique and special in the big picture, then his school community flourishes and so does his leadership.

Look for additional profiles of other Enneagram Types as school leaders in coming weeks. For a complete list of Enneagram resources, check the Enneagram links on the left-hand side of this page, and visit our Services page to learn about the wide range of CLS workshops available for leadership and professional development.  For previous type profiles, click here and scroll to the bottom of the post.

Kentucky's educational progress: From practice to proficiency

Classes get underway at the university this week, but for most of my educational administration students, school started several weeks ago.  The new school year was met by a Harvard report that inspired a lot of self-congratulation on the part of Kentucky educators.  The report, "Achievement Growth: International and U.S. State Trends in Student Performance," ranked Kentucky as one of the most-improved states in the U.S. through an analysis of scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, sometimes known as "the nation's report card") over the last 20 years.

From just the headlines and summary of the report, many educational leaders quickly celebrated this recognition.  Just as quickly, however, Richard Innes, gadfly and education policy analyst with the Bluegrass Insitute, noted some serious methodological problems with the Harvard study.  Innes rightly pointed out that the study did not control for differences in student demographic variables, nor for the fact that Kentucky, like many other states ranked highly in the Harvard report, excludes an unusually large number of students with disabilities from taking the NAEP.  These problems, coupled with major changes in the NAEP science test over the years, make it nearly impossible to actually compare how one state has progress against any other.

 On the other hand, there was some encouraging news when the latest round of ACT testing was recently released, showing that Kentucky's performance has steadily inched up since 2009, from an average composite score of 19.4 to 2012's 19.8.  Still, only 59% of Kentucky's ACT takers scored at the benchmark level for English - and that was our best score.  A paltry 17% proved college and career-ready in all tested areas.

So there is still tons of work to do in improving Kentucky's educational quality, and only very modest improvement to show for all our efforts since Kentucky became an leading education reform state in 1990.

My own career in education has spanned much of the last 20 years in question, and I believe we have, in fact, made some serious strides in educational practice, even if we've not yet turned those changes into measurable results.  I think educators should be encouraged by these changes, but we cannot be satisfied with our efforts until far more students are achieving at a basic level of proficiency, and taxpayers and policy makers are right to push us ever harder to get a better outcome.

As I see it, educational practice in Kentucky has greatly improved over the last 20 years in five key areas, and the Commonwealth likely leads the nation in implementation of these practices:

A serious attention to standards.  While Kentucky has emphasized the teaching of content standards since well before the implementation of KERA, a relentless focus on providing what Marzano called a "guaranteed, viable curriculum" has never been stronger.  The implementation of Common Core standards accelerated this emphasis.  But while the Common Core standards are better structured and more narrowly focused than before, there are still far too many standards to realistically teach to proficiency. 

The taken-for-granted nature of Professional Learning Communities.  From what Richard Elmore once called the "privatization of teaching practice," collaboration among teachers is now a taken-for-granted component of our professional life.  There is something that passes as a "PLC" in every school, though in the vast majority PLC's fail to operate anywhere close to the kind of framework envisioned by Rick DuFour and his colleagues.

The dawn of formative assessment.  Besides "Common Core," perhaps no two buzz words have been heard more in Kentucky schools the last few years than "formative assessment."  I'm delighted that Kentucky educators have discovered the power of using routine, descriptive, non-evaluative feedback to show students their progress toward proficiency.  But most schools are using only a surface level of formative assessment, still use highly evaluative grading practices that don't really reflect what students know and are able to do, and even teachers who try to use effective formative assessment are still hampered by a set of standards that are far too big to teach (see note on Common Core above).

Response to Intervention.  For all the problems I've seen in the way various schools have implemented RtI, I still think this amounts to one of the most significant developments in educational practice of my career.  The emphasis on identifying struggling students early and pouring on the supports before they fall farther and farther behind their peers isn't just common sense, it's the right thing to do and represents a culmination of our progress in establishing a guaranteed and viable curriculum, effective formative assessments, and PLC's that focus on the learning needs of individual students.

Principals as instructional leaders.  Perhaps the second most-important change in educational practice of the last 20 years is the notion that effective school principals must also be effective instructional leaders.  The managerial aspects of school leadership are as important as ever, but no principal can now afford to sit by while sub-par teaching is happening in classrooms.  Principals must be heavily engaged in the instructional program of the school, model best practices, communicate ceaselessly with teachers about effective practice, and articulate a clear and compelling vision of instructional improvement.

In all these ways, I believe Kentucky has made enormous advancements in the last 20 years.  I believe that a key reason we haven't been able to turn these improved practices into student proficiency is because we've still never reached what Doug Reeves calls "deep implementation" with any of them.  They continue to be surface-level add-ons to the ways we've always done "school" and are not yet fundamentally altering our entire approach to the work of teaching students.

I also worry that the structure of school itself, based on a one-size-fits-all factory model of learning, provides huge obstacles for well-intentioned educational leaders to overcome.  In 20 more years, the effective school will probably look very little like it does today.  But it falls to leaders in education themselves to create these new models of learning, to pioneer these new frameworks of teaching, and to restructure educational policy in a way that unleashes greater innovation and creativity.  Rather than resist technology, school choice, and other sweeping reforms, school leaders should embrace these new structures as a means to more effectively realize our goals and capitalize on the significant progress we have, in fact, made these last 20 years.

Educators (and the public) are justifiably weary after decades of school reforms to see so little measurable progress in student learning.  But we have indeed made substantial improvements in our practices, especially here in Kentucky, and the future is bright with possibility.  It will depend on an emerging generation of school leaders to turn our long-standing vision into reality.

Free SLLA test prep session returning to WKU in September

My WKU colleague, Dr. Mike Putnam, will be reprising his hugely popular, entirely free, test prep session for the School Leaders Licensure Assessment (SLLA), required of all aspiring school principals in Kentucky and many other states.  The session will be held on September 21 from 5:00 to 9:00 p.m. Central time, continuing on September 22, from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. in Gary Ransdell Hall Room 3003 on WKU's main campus.

The next round of SLLA testing will be the week of October 8 through 13 at a cost of $375.

Dr. Putnam developed this test review with Dr. Dennis Bunch of the University of Mississippi.  Previous prep sessions at WKU have resulted in a 100 percent pass rate for participants.

The session will include a review of the six ISLLC standards upon which the SLLA is based, and feature timed test prep exercises and hands-on activities and discussions.  Participants must agree to confidentially share their SLLA test score results with Dr. Putnam, as he and Dr. Bunch use this data to continue refining the test prep process and may publish an analysis of results in the future.

Contact Dr. Putnam at mike.putnam@wku.edu by end of the day on September 12.  Space is limited and late registrations are not permitted.

Sudden interest in Schmoker's "blind spot"

Education reformer Mike Schmoker, author of Focus: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning, spoke at WKU last year.  As is usual for Schmoker's speaking and writing, ripples of discomfort washed over the education community because of some of his compelling arguments. 

One of the most controversial things Schmoker says, which he repeated at his WKU visit, was that there's no research base for the concept of differentiated learning.  As all of my students and colleagues know, I have enormous admiration for Schmoker's ideas, but this is one area where I think he's a bit off base.  I wrote about this in a post called "Schmoker's Blind Spot," and that post has received a ton of traffic in the last two days.  Not sure why, but I'm happy for the interest in Schmoker, Carol Ann Tomlinson, and the topic of differentation.  If any readers know what's motivated this sudden interest, comment below or shoot me and e-mail: gary.houchens@wku.edu

Read more about Schmoker's comments at WKU, and the ideas of Focus, here.

Read about how I think Schmoker's ideas fit into a larger context here.

Theory of practice coaching study to be published

I'm pleased to report that a year-long research study I recently completed with several colleagues will be published in an upcoming edition of Qualitative Research in Education, an international, online, peer-reviewed journal.

Based on my on-going research using the concept of "theories of practice" to understand the instructional leadership, my co-authors and I designed a coaching protocol to help school principals enhance their professional effectiveness.  My fellow researchers included Dr. Janet Hurt, associate superintendent of the Logan County Schools; Dr. Beckie Stobaugh, assistant professor in WKU's School of Teacher Education, and Dr. John L. Keedy of the University of Louisville (and my dissertation advisor and research mentor).

Theories of practice are intentionally-crafted "game plans" used to solve professional problems.  What distinguishes theories of practice from generic action plans, however, is that the individual articulates her underlying values, beliefs, and assumptions that shape her approach to the problem.  This gives the practitioner the chance to make revisions to the game plan based on feedback, not just in terms of action strategies but also in the way he thinks about problem. 

My dissertation research found that most people can't adequately identify their own tacit assumptions, or work to quesiton them, without the assistance of a coach.  Thus, we devised a coaching protocol to help principals think through their approaches to a particularly vexing and common instructional leadership problem: how to help a struggling teacher improve his or her practice.  We found that the theory of practice framework was particularly helpful in helping principals shift their thinking about their instructional leadership, or in shedding new light on principals' thought process about how to support high-quality teaching.

Results of this study were shared at the 2011 Kentucky Association of School Administrator's Summer Institute, which you can read about here.  For more on theories of practice, including a full list of previous blog posts, click here.  I'll post a link to the full study as soon as revisions are complete the the article is published.

Opportunities for aspiring Kentucky minority school leaders

To regular readers, I apologize for the infrequency of my posts of late.  As many know, I have a new baby at home and an ailing father, but everyone is doing exceptionally well (including Dad) and as I gear back up for a new semester at WKU, I'll also be posting more frequently on the blog.

Today I want to share news of two exciting opportunities for aspiring minority school leaders in the state of Kentucky.  The Kentucky Department of Education recently announced it is extending the deadline for application to the Minority Superintendent Internship Program.  The MSIP identifies exception minority school leaders (currently employed in a Kentucky district and with at least four years' administrative experience and holding superintendent certification), partners those candidates with a sitting superintendent mentor for one year, and then in the second year places them full-time as assistant superintendent interns.  MSIP is an outstanding opportunity and an excellent vehicle for enhancing the diversity of Kentucky's superindent ranks.

The Minority Emerging Educational Leader Program is a one-year internship for current minority school administrators who are working toward superintendent certification.  Completion of the program makes MEEP interns eligible for the MSIP the subsequent year.

Click here for more information about both programs, and encourage outstanding minority administrators to apply.

Back to School with the Enneagram

Note: This post originally appeared on the Contemplative Learning website.

If the Facebook posts and their cute accompanying pictures didn’t alert you, it is back-to-school week in our area of Kentucky.  While Gary prepares for his fall semester, and Tom closes out his summer teaching, in solidarity we still eagerly anticipate the public school year's beginning with our many friends and former colleagues and students who are teachers and school and district administrators (both first-year and veteran).

Earlier this week we facilitated an introductory Enneagram professional development workshop for the faculty and administration of Warren Central High School in Warren County, Kentucky as part of their “opening days” professional development series. As always, it was very gratifying (and exciting) to witness sparks of self-recognition and awareness. "This is SO me!" was a typical response. Deeper still were the possible implications discussed for classroom and leadership use: from opportunities for more authentic collegial communication to building a healthier classroom climate, workshop participants affirmed the Enneagram's school-level value.

Sincerely, we are humbled to be able to facilitate Enneagram workshops in area school districts, and are always encouraged when fellow educators recognize its worth and importance.  When we embarked upon this work together a few of years ago we did so with a specific purpose and outcome in mind. It was not our initial intent to provide training for other schools, but we are certainly grateful for the opportunities to do so and eagerly anticipate each one.

So happy first days of school from CLS. May this one be your best, and most presently and mindfully aware, yet!  

KASA to offer PD workshop series for assistant principals

I was pleased to learn that the Kentucky Association of School Administrators will host a four-part series of professional development workshops geared specifically toward assistant principals.  See details here.  A Bowling Green-based cohort will be offered.

I can't attest to the quality of this program and I don't know the presenter, but KASA typically offers top-notch learning experiences.  I'm delighted that this important but often overlooked segment of our educational leadership force is getting needed attention.

Also see my upcoming article on the "ritual hazing" of assistant principals in School Administrator magazine.