This paper addresses three interconnected questions about special education leadership and research. It compares qualitative and quantitative research methodologies — including appreciative inquiry, phenomenology, and mixed-methods designs — and their suitability for studying special education supervisors' leadership styles. It then examines the roles and responsibilities of an effective special education director, drawing on inclusive school policy frameworks from the Consortium on Inclusive Schooling Practices (CISP) and leadership attributes identified in cross-national case studies. Finally, it evaluates small learning communities (SLCs) as a strategy for educating all students, with particular attention to the impact on special needs populations, professional learning communities, and distributed leadership.
Research into learning and teaching can be used for the purpose of informing teaching as well as for formal reports and published studies (Mason, 2006). In terms of mixing methods, the logic used most commonly is that researchers desire to add "some breadth or depth to their analysis. This is often done by researchers who have primarily either a quantitative or qualitative orientation, but also a sense that their methods and data are partial in some respect" (Mason, 2006). Mason reports that the "big picture" realized quantitatively — while rigorous and "based on representative or statistical forms of sampling and analysis" — may nonetheless "feel superficial or lacking in 'real life' resonance."
The use of qualitative approaches, such as an in-depth case study, "can be illustrative and evocative, and provides a more close-up view. Conversely, for a researcher with a primarily qualitative orientation, which focuses on social processes in rich and proximate detail, the inclusion of some background quantitative material, perhaps in the form of local or national demographic data, can help in making the research part of a bigger set of observations" (Mason, 2006).
Both quantitative and qualitative approaches have been widely applied to the study of K-12 leadership. The choice between them — or a combination of both — depends on the underlying assumptions a researcher brings to the question, the strengths and limitations of each approach, and the practical constraints of the research setting. The sections below examine each method in turn, with specific reference to the study of a special education supervisor's or director's leadership style.
The work of Schall, Ospina, Godsoe, and Dodge (n.d.), entitled "Appreciative Narratives as Leadership Research: Matching Method to Lens," reports that a well-known intervention strategy is that of Appreciative Inquiry — "a way of joining with others to explore the world." Schall, Ospina, Godsoe, and Dodge argue that "given the roots of appreciative inquiry in constructionism and an emerging trend to see leadership as a social construct, appreciative inquiry emerges as one of the most appropriate methodological frameworks to pursue empirical work on leadership."
Schall, Ospina, Godsoe, and Dodge further state that the majority of leadership research operates from a positivist frame resting on a set of implicit assumptions that does not explicitly address the logic of the relationship between theory and methods. The constructionist view indicates that "leadership understanding is socially constructed over time, as individuals interact with one another." The lens chosen "has clear implications for both focus (what to study) and stance (who defines what is important and does the research)." A social construction lens leads the researcher to "pay attention to the collective work of leadership in context, more than to the behaviors of people called leaders."
Schall, Ospina, Godsoe, and Dodge note that each research method "has a tradition of its own, separate from appreciative inquiry," and rather than entering into debate about the definition of leadership, they explore it "as a social construction — created through dialogue among groups of people in context, not as a fixed attribute of individuals." The idea that leadership emerges "from the constructions and actions of people in organizations" has been examined by Pfeffer (1997), Smircich and Morgan (1982), Tierney (1987, 1997), and Smircich (1983). From this perspective, "leadership becomes a reality when one or more individuals in a social system succeed in framing and defining how the demands of the group will be taken up and what roles, including the 'role of leader,' will be attributed to whom."
Drath and Palus (1994) present an influential strand of constructionist thinking about leadership "that can be used as a foundation upon which a powerful research agenda can be built. In their view, leadership is a type of meaning and sense-making that can be understood as happening over time and in community. It is a social process in which everyone in the community participates" (cited in Schall, Ospina, Godsoe, and Dodge, n.d.).
Drath refers to this process as the "knowledge principle" — the dominant, underlying, and taken-for-granted set of assumptions a community holds about how best to approach the work of leadership. The knowledge principle framing the work of a group is linked directly to the context of the group. Personal dominance is emergent in situations where individuals understand leadership as the leader's personal quality used in interactions with others or followers. The interpersonal influence principle results in a negotiation process among various actors with differing views until someone in the group becomes the most influential and takes on the leadership role.
Drath (1994) also identifies relational dialogue as a principle that occurs when various actors utilize collaborative learning and dialogue to create spaces in which a common and shared purpose is achieved and differing views are valued, so that leadership becomes vested in a social system rather than in a single person. Drath notes that relational dialogue is the knowledge principle least developed in both theory and practice in the field of leadership. Through the constructionist lens, one can grasp an understanding of mental models of leadership that tend to be "individualistic and positional — emerged out of collective processes of meaning-making developed in context, and have then taken on a life of their own" (Schall, Ospina, Godsoe, and Dodge, n.d.).
Schall, Ospina, Godsoe, and Dodge identify three critical shifts in leadership study:
(1) One that allows for attention to shared leadership and the collective meaning-making processes that shape the experience of leadership; (2) a second that encourages researchers to step back and look at the tasks that groups face as they attempt to take action, rather than look at the behavior of individuals; and (3) a third that pushes the researcher to seek leadership in new places.
Yukl (1999) holds that leadership is fluid and that the various dimensions of leadership may be distributed among several individuals in a group rather than vested solely in one individual. Kaczmarski and Cooperrider (1997) view leadership as the "art of creating contexts of appreciative interchange" in which "differences are embraced rather than being a source of dominance and conformity pressures." From this perspective, leadership is inherently collective in nature. Shared leadership is considered a critical aspect of leadership because the process is characterized by "group work" and "group authorization" of individuals acting on behalf of the group.
As Drath (1994) notes, leadership occurs when "people in a community create a shared understanding of their mutual and moral obligations so that their common cause is realized." Any group attempting to accomplish goals collectively faces three crucial tasks: (1) setting direction; (2) creating and maintaining commitment; and (3) adapting to the challenges that appear along the way. Heifetz refers to these as "adaptive challenges." When the group fails to respond to such challenges, it has failed in serving its purpose.
This shift in perspective — drawing focus away from the single leader and onto the "collective work of leadership in social change efforts" — does not demean the importance of the leader's role, but "calls for a shift in the role they play in research and a shift in the scholar's stance as well. Given our focus on the experience of leadership in context, we believe that we can best understand how leadership happens by entering into the community and inquiring into the shared meaning-making languages and processes of the community" (Drath, 2001, as cited in Schall, Ospina, Godsoe, and Dodge, n.d.).
Schall, Ospina, Godsoe, and Dodge reflect that after working collaboratively with researchers across disciplines, they realized: "If we had used only a participatory approach, we would have been missing a powerful dynamic. Our appreciative approach has helped us overcome some of the challenges associated with participatory research by making the task of research less threatening to participants (we do not aim to uncover what is going 'wrong' in their work) and thereby helping us to build trust. More importantly, our appreciative and participatory stance with our co-researchers has allowed us to witness and learn about the cutting edge of leadership work in such a way that is and feels qualitatively different from other research traditions we have used in the past, because it is built on valuing."
Qualitative research methods include the following primary approaches:
(1) Phenomenology — a form of qualitative research in which the researcher focuses on gaining understanding of how an individual or individuals experience a phenomenon. (2) Ethnography — qualitative research that focuses on the culture of a group and describing that culture. (3) Case Study Research — a form of qualitative research that provides a detailed account of a case or cases. (4) Grounded Theory — a qualitative research method that generates and develops a theory from data collected by the researcher. (5) Historical Research — the collection and analysis of events that happened in the past.
Flick et al. (2004), in A Companion to Qualitative Research, state that the practice of qualitative research "is generally characterized by the fact that there is no single method, but a spectrum of methods belonging to different approaches that may be selected according to the research questions and the research tradition." A central feature of qualitative research is "the appropriateness of methods: for almost every procedure it is possible to ascertain for which particular research object it was developed." The narrative interview, for example, was originally developed for the analysis of communal power processes, and objective hermeneutics for studies of socializing interaction.
Flick et al. (2004) note that qualitative research is strongly oriented to everyday events and the everyday knowledge under investigation. Because of this, qualitative data collection and analytical and interpretive procedures are tied to the idea of contextuality: data are collected "in their natural context" and statements are analyzed "in the context of an extended answer or narrative, or the total course of an interview, or even in the biography of the interview partner." The researcher's ability to reflect on his or her own actions and observations is considered an integral component of qualitative research — a critical factor in discovery rather than "a source of disturbance that needs to be monitored or eliminated."
Qualitative research's epistemological principle is "the understanding of complex relationships rather than explanation by isolation of a single relationship such as 'cause-and-effect'" (Flick et al., 2004). Questions are formulated as open, and observations are not aligned to a rigid grid. Research generally begins with the analysis or reconstruction of individual cases and only proceeds, as a second step, to summarizing or contrasting cases from a comparative or generalizing viewpoint. Flick et al. (2004) list the key characteristics of qualitative research practice as follows: (1) spectrum of methods rather than a single method; (2) appropriateness of methods; (3) orientation to everyday events and/or knowledge; (4) contextuality as a guiding principle; (5) perspectives of participants; (6) reflective capability of the investigator; (7) understanding as a discovery principle; (8) principle of openness; (9) case analysis as a starting point; (10) construction of reality as a basis; (11) qualitative research as a textual discipline; and (12) discovery and theory formation as a goal.
Condelli and Wrigley (2004) state that "the value of, and need for, objective, methodologically sound research is undeniable." While acknowledging the value of traditional research, they also hold that "a more interactive reciprocal research and development model that combines evidence from previous research studies with the professional wisdom" of educators plays a critical role. In their view, the optimal research design is a mixed-methods design characterized by the integration of both qualitative and quantitative research, starting "with a sound research methodology and quantitative methods enhanced with qualitative measures of key processes and outcomes."
Quantitative methods alone may identify what is effective but offer limited explanatory power — "there is little information about how students learned and how instruction worked." Qualitative research designs provide "rich information about learners and teaching" but this information "is more subjective and cannot be generalized." Combining both enables a richer understanding: quantitative design informs the researcher as to what works, and qualitative design informs the researcher as to how it works.
The two primary types of mixed research methods are: (1) mixed method research — in which the researcher uses qualitative research in one phase of the study and quantitative research in another, essentially conducting two smaller studies within one larger study; and (2) mixed model research — in which qualitative and quantitative research are mixed within a single phase and also across both study phases.
Frick (2005) notes that research methods in education throughout much of the twentieth century were largely quantitative, employing experimental and quasi-experimental designs with analytical techniques including ANOVA, regression analysis, and their extensions. "The basic problem is that this general linear models approach seldom yielded findings that could be directly linked to educational practice. Within-group and within-person variance was often large, typically obfuscating differences between groups that could be attributed to so-called treatments, practices or programs." Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, researchers including Egon Guba at Indiana University began exploring qualitative and case study methodologies. One clear advantage of qualitative methods is "thick description," which allows for "rich details of individual cases" that provide researchers "insight into and understanding of the educational phenomena investigated." However, the "unavoidable" dilemma is the "lack of justification for generalizability of findings."
"Mentoring, equity, and administrator support in special education"
"CISP policy framework for curriculum, accountability, and governance"
"SLC benchmarks, philosophy, and community engagement strategies"
"PLCs, IEPs, and SLC effects on special needs achievement"
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