Moral Leadership in His Book

Moral Leadership

In his book entitled Moral Leadership: Getting to the Heart of School Improvement, author Thomas J. Sergiovanni outlines a blueprint for how to improve schools through the use of moral role models and basic leadership characteristics. The book demonstrates how creating a new leadership practice where a moral dimension is built around purpose, values and beliefs one can transform a school from "an organization to a community" and inspire the kinds of "commitment, devotion and service" that will make society's school "great." To do this, Sergiovanni focuses on the importance of legitimizing emotion as a method of getting in touch with the basic values and connection we have with others. In other words, true collegiality, one that is based on shared work and common goals, is what leads to a natural interdependence among teachers and demonstrates how a public declaration of values and purpose can transform a school into a "virtuous community" or a place where teachers are self-managers and professionalism is considered an ideal.

Sergiovanni begins by stating that the concept of leadership must be reinvented in order to cope with the leadership needs of the modern day school. He quotes Chelsea, Massachusetts superintendent Diana Lam's definition of leadership, stating, "leadership is an attitude which informs behavior rather than a set of discrete skills or qualities." In other words, in today's school setting, leadership has to be more than simply setting up rules and regulations that students must follow. Instead, in order to succeed in today's self-dependent, independent world, students must be taught the skills and qualities of being a leader over the ability to simply follow someone else's rules. Anything else is selling our students short.

To begin this process of building what Sergiovanni refers to as a "community of learners," one begins by understanding how both children and adults learn. In other words, the question to be asked is "What kind of leaders do we need?" It first has to be understood that one cannot change someone's heart, but instead must find the leadership style within the individual. This individual leadership potential is what we typically refer to as attitudes and values, which are used to build learning communities. A learning community is a group of learners who work together in order to lead each other to education success. Thus, everyone's individual values are of essence.

Interestingly, this idea of leadership values is relatively new. In the past the study of leadership has focused on issues of leadership style and various levels of decision making. Further, traditional leadership studies assessed the consequences and variations of the followers' satisfaction with one's leadership and the leader's overall effectiveness. The driving questions in such studies was to determine the best leadership style, such as warm or cold; autocratic or democratic; directive or participatory; or production or personal emphasis. Ultimately, according to Sergiovanni, this study of leadership failed for two reasons. First, it viewed leadership as a behavior rather than an action, "psychological rather than spiritual; personal rather than ideas." Second, it tried to understand what was driving leadership and therefore overemphasized bureaucratic, psychological and rational authority and neglecting the areas of professional and moral authority.

This failure to understand leadership is referred to as a "managerial mystique."

This term was coined by Abraham Zeleznik and refers to the misplaced focus on the leadership process instead of the people, ideas and emotions. Further, Sergiovanni argues that it is because of this managerial mystique that schools have been unable to capture, and build learning communities from, true leadership. Instead, schools have been obsessed with "doing things right at the expense of doing the right things." For example, school improvement plans became substitutes for improving outcomes. Teacher appraisal systems become substitutes for good teaching. in-service takes the place of changes in practice, congeniality substitutes for collegiality, cooperation moves in over commitment and compliance takes over for actual results. The result is that schools become trained in incapacity, or doing only ones job in isolation as opposed to working as a team and the loss of goals, which therefore leads to a standard of mediocrity.

According to Sergiovanni, the solution to achieving beyond mediocrity is leadership, but a leadership that focuses on the "head, heart and hand of leadership" opposed to the process of leadership. Thus, Sergiovanni's approach pays particular attention to a person's "interior world" through the use of "reflection, combined with personal vision and an internal system of values, or mindscapes." The epicenter of Sergiovanni's approach is one's individual values that allow an individual to arrive at knowledge. Accordingly, there are six models by which humans arrive at knowledge: 1) authority (faith in oneself); 2) deductive logic (testing oneself); 3) sense experience (gaining through the five senses); 4) emotion (feeling right); 5) intuition (unconscious rational thinking; and 6) science (or synthesis of the other five models).