0.4 Davis, s., & Leon, r. the big 20: critical principles and  (Page 2/9)

Without question, our perspective is subject to debate. Nevertheless, the two of us have been “educationists” in one form or another since the early 1970s. Between us we have over 75 years of cumulative experiences in K-12 schools, school districts, and in higher education. During that time, we have formulated many impressions, insights, and intuitions about what it takes to lead effectively. We make no claim of exclusivity or authorship over these ideas (although we aspire to present them in both a meaningful and interesting fashion). Each of our ideas is anchored in the literature on organizational leadership in schools and generally. In fact, we hesitate to define them as anything other than good ideas. We also acknowledge that the ability to lead effectively does not depend on one’s ability to satisfy each idea in some contrived chronologic order, nor does it depend on the ability to satisfy each of the ideas comprehensively. However, we are confident that in the aggregate the following 20 big ideas outlined in Figure 1 provide fertile ground upon which great leadership often grows, while individually, each idea can serve to guide, inspire, or promote the types of behavior associated with great leadership in America’s public schools.

Outline of the big 20 ideas for great leadership in schools

Organizational perspectives

• Contextually Adept
• Systems Thinkers
• Crafters of Culture and Climate
• Cultivators of Leadership
• Lead Cheerleaders
• Leaders of Learners

Cognitive perspectives

• Amorphous Scientists
• Sophisticated Diagnosticians
• Champions of Data
• Judicious Decision-Makers
• Storytellers and Sense-makers
• Inquiring and Inquisitive
• Imaginers and Creators

Affective perspectives

• Seekers of Truth
• Courageous Seekers of Social Justice
• Poets and Plumbers
• Role Models and Symbols
• Moral Stewards
• Emotionally Intelligent
• Meta-cognitively Aware

Our primary purposes in presenting these ideas are twofold. First, we want to encourage both aspiring and current school leaders to reflect deeply about their own skills, talents, and perspectives by providing them with a set of rich descriptors that we believe fairly represent the conceptual and practical grist of great leadership. Second, we want to contribute to the capital stock of knowledge in the field of school leadership with humble acknowledgement of the many important perspectives that have come before us.

Finally, our set of 20 big ideas contains a great deal of information and in the aggregate may seem little more than a disparate and perhaps random collection. In the interests of clarity and economy we organized them into three general thematic perspectives common to the field of leadership, 1) organizational, 2) cognitive, and 3) affective. In doing so, we placed each idea within an empirically based conceptual framework. This, of course, enables one to make better sense of these ideas (e.g., what they mean in terms of important leadership characteristics and their comparative distribution).

Ideas that fell within the organizational perspective were those that related to a leader’s ability to think systemically; manage and organize resources, tasks, and people; plan and support crucial organizational functions, and seek out intra-organizational synergies and extra-organizational opportunities (Yukl, 2009). Those that fell within a cognitive perspective related to a leader’s thinking and problem solving, intellectual attributes, skills and expertise, and knowledge processing (Gardner, 1999). Finally, ideas that fell within an affective perspective related to a leader’s emotions, social relationships, self-reflections and awareness, ethics and morals, and aesthetic qualities (Newman, Guy,&Mastracci, 2009; Zhen, 2008).