J Educ Change (2009) 10:129140

DOI 10.1007/s10833-009-9111-4

Leadership and change in schools: personal reflections

over the last 30 years

Karen R. Seashore

Published online: 5 April 2009

Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract The two fields of leadership studies and school change have
increasingly converged over the last 30 years. This paper reviews the origins of
the intersection, and the development of research themes in three areas: The role
of leaders in shaping and using organizational culture, the agency of teachers in
the change process, and the importance of leadership in knowledge use. The
conclusion suggests some arenas for further research, and areas of policy
application.

Keywords School leadership
Organizational culture
Change processes

Knowledge use

I have taken at face value the editors invitation to reflect on how my interest in
leadership and school change has evolved over my career. While self-indulgent, it
has also been a challenge because I usually defined myself as an organizational
sociologist rather than a leadership researcher. But, here goes.

Professor, appointed 1987 Rodney Wallace Professorship for the advancement of teaching and learning.

K. R. Seashore (&)
Department of Educational Policy and Administration,
University of Minnesota, 330 Wulling Hall, Minneapolis,
MN 55455-0221, USA
e-mail: klouis@umn.edu

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School change in the early years.But where was leadership?1

During the 1960s, newspapers and practitioner journals called for leadership for
change, pointing to problems ranging from the quality of previously segregated
schools to exposures of the costs and rigidities of urban school systems. The first
(somewhat discouraging) response from scholars came, on the other hand, rather
late, with Gross et als. (1971) investigation that pointed to the disintegration of a
local change effort as a consequence of leadership failures. More than 35 years
later, I am still struck by the then novel insight that administrative errors left capable
teachers to flounder as they made serious efforts to implement a district-mandated
innovation. Resistance occurred because teachers became frustrated with district
bumbling, and not because they were stuck in old patterns of teaching (the usual
explanation at the time). A research revolution was about to explode.
The most prominent contribution to this shifting terrain was the stream of
publications emerging from the Rand Change Agent Study. Berman and
McLaughlins (1974) initial model for the study ignored district and school
administrator roles, but later they affirmed Gross, et al.s conclusions about the
importance of leadershipand its failures (Berman and Pauley 1975; Berman and
McLaughlin 1978). During the same period, preliminary versions of a research
synthesis about organizational development in schools also began to circulate, and
caused many to look harder at the role of groups and patterns of influence within
schools as a feature of an important focus for change leadership (Fullan et al. 1980).

Schools as settings for leadership and change: emerging views2

Another key shift began in the 1980s with recognition of the importance of context to
school change. The first federally funded comprehensive reform initiative, the Urban
Experimental Schools program, failed in part because it ignored the decentralized
nature of larger districts (Cowden and Cohen 1981), while the rural version of the
program proved more successful due to the powerful influence of superintendents in
smaller districts (Rosenblum and Louis 1981). By the early 1980s, additional
research suggested that successful schools serving less affluent students had different
leadership than more advantaged schools (Hallinger and Murphy 1983).
The re-framing of debates away from change as a dependant variable and toward
harder measures of student success in different settings began long before the
current accountability movement and has had consequential impacts on the way
in which we think about leadership and change. The focus on positional leadership
has been evident in the effective schools research, ranging from early case studies
documenting the role of leaders in maintaining high standards in low-income

1
Other scholars have reviewed the evolution of research on educational change this period (Fullan
2007), and we owe a particular debt to Matt Miles description of his personal scholarly journey (Miles
1993).
2
Although there have been many contributions to the social psychology of school change (Hall and Hord
2001). I focus on research that emphasizes the importance of organizational and cultural contexts.

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schools (Edmonds 1979) to the increasing string of quantitative investigations

(Hallinger and Heck 2002; Leithwood et al. 2002; Teddlie and Reynolds 2000).3
Altogether, the 1970s and early 1980s did not provide a significant corpus of
research that linked leadership and change, but it opened up significant avenues of
inquiry that expanded rapidly, culminating in a more robust field that could support
new or expanded journals as well as an increasing number of articles in general
education journals. Because the field is now larger, I will spend the rest of this
article examining three of the streams that have been of particular interest to me.
These include the role of leaders in shaping and using organizational culture, the
agency of teachers in the change process, and he importance of leadership in
knowledge use.

Linking leadership, culture and change

When I began graduate school in the late 1960s, organizational research focused on
the importance of structures. Alternative views quickly developed, ranging from
Sarasons (1971) classic work on the Culture of Schools and the Problem of Change
to Clarks (1970) study of organizational sagas. This new focus on culture fueled
research that looked at variables such as values, power relationships, and social
integrationthemes that continue to have significant resonance today.
My interest in school culture and leadership emerged when I collaborated with
Matt Miles, Elinor Farrar, and Sheila Rosenblum on case studies of schools that
were struggling to implement the new effective schools programs. Our initial
intent was to investigate the characteristics of innovative schools, but the data led us
to focus on administrators roles in shaping the will and skill to change (Louis
and Miles 1990a, b).4 Several themes emerging from this work found their way into
the larger tapestry of research on change.
First, the role of leaders as planners, goads, and problem finders became a major
sub-theme for both me and others (Louis 1994; Leithwood and Steinbach 1995;
Short et al. 1994). Second, I became convinced that leaders were powerful actors
when they were able to read their context and reinforce early supporters of
improvement (see Leithwood and Riehl 2005). Third, principals became change
agents not because they were authoritative or charismatic, but because they could
weave and bob around all of the opportunities and impediments they encountered.
As Jim Toole, Andy Hargreaves and I wrote in the late 1990s:
If organizations are seen as gardens, then leaders cannot command them to
grow. They must contend with the unpredictability, environmental influences,
teamwork and risk factors that characterize trying to help anything develop.
Leaders can only promote growth by rearranging the conditions and

3
For the sake of making this a journal-length article, I focus on school change and improvement, and
limit discussions of the equally large school effectiveness research arena (see Muijs et al. 2004).
4
Elinor Farrar passed away before we began writing the book, and Sheila Rosenblum chose to limit her
contributions to developing her case studies. Our team was not alone in focusing on the wide adoption of
effective schools programssee for example, Cuban 1998.

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structures For gardens, those conditions are sun, moisture, soil, nutrients,
and temperature; for schools, they are time, space, materials, money, training,
collegiality, respect, trust, and personnel (Louis et al. 1999).
An issue implied in this quote is a shift that looks beyond the consequences of
change to incorporate the experience of changewhether among principals,
teachers or others. Change is not just about implementing top-down mandates: It
can also be about empowerment (Hargreaves 1994), professional development
(Youngs and King 2002), and even play (Wheatley 1992)or all of the above.
My reenergized interest in leadership and change in the late 1980s was also
stimulated by a chance to revisit the topic of innovation adoptionbut with a new
focus on leadership, politics and power (Wahlstrom and Louis 1993). Case studies
of district decision making led us to conclude that both organizational culture/
structure and the politicized roles of idea champions and gatekeepers were
critical. Again, I was not alone: Studies that emphasized power and proved
significant in looking at many of the school reform initiatives of the 1990s, such as
site-based management (Malen 1994), professional development (Hargreaves
1998), and comprehensive school reforms (Datnow 2000).
Like others, I struggled with issues related to top down and bottom up
change. During the 1990s, an emphasis on building local capacity for improvement
was challenged by a new wave of systemic and comprehensive reforms (Fuhrman
et al. 1993). Echoing the systemic change proposals of the 1970s, whole-school
models often failed to address the effectiveness of context-free solutions. As an
antidote, people again began looking for alternatives. Almost by accident I
discovered continuous improvement and quality management when a business
school colleague, Roger Schroeder, invited me to kibitz with a team that was
studying CI in districts and high schools. Out of this informal relationship we
developed a common interest in thinking about what quality-focused cultures would
look like in schools (Detert et al. 2001)a conceptual model that could be adapted
to many different contexts.
Studies of improvement cultures in education cannot, however, be easily
distanced from the increasing drum roll of accountability, and the issue of how
school leaders (and teachers) interpret and work to maintain autonomy, democratic
responsiveness, and a room for local agenda-setting continues to be an important
and unsettling question for many scholars (Louis et al. 2005; Schmoker 1999;
Pounder et al. 2002).

Teachers as change leaders

During the 1980s and early 1990s scholars began to revisit the theme of teachers
role in change suggested by Gross, Guiaquinta and Bernstein (op cit). Studies that
looked specifically at teachers work (Little 1985, 1990; Rosenholtz 1991)
suggested that there was important research to be done, particularly around how
teachers work with colleagues. Most teachers in urban U.S. schools had experienced
dramatic shifts in cultural values and populations, which often left them burned out

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and with low sense of efficacy. While my research initially examined teachers
quality of work life, my eye was always on what principals and districts could do to
stimulate the conditions for change (Louis 1990; Louis and Smith 1991). The need
for this kind of research (and accompanying interventions) has not abated, as
Hargreaves and his colleagues recent study of change over time suggests
(Hargreaves 2006).
One fruitful arena for inquiry was how teachers used their peers as resources to
maintain and improve their work environment and benefit the lives of students in
their classrooms. Over many tough meetings my colleagues and I hammered out the
idea of professional community, which focused on the social values and behavioral
underpinnings of teacher engagement, and its connection to real reform (Louis et al.
1995). The ideas underlying professional community put emancipated and powerful
teachers at the core of the reform process, and shifted the focus away from
administrative leaders and toward all professionals as leaders. A number of
publications emerged from this original partnership, including explorations of the
professional community concept in several different samples, and investigations of
the role of teacher empowerment in reformed practice (Bryk et al. 1999; Louis and
Marks 1998; Marks and Louis 1997).5 While these and other investigations
validated the importance of collective teacher leadership in school change (Murphy
2005), our analysis consistently revealed that principal support and facilitation was
required to encourage teachers ownership of instructional improvement. A decade
later, with a larger database and under very different policy conditions, we are
finding the same result: Principal leadership matters because it provides a firm
foundation for teacher leadership (Wahlstrom and Louis 2008).
Interest in expanded teacher leadership has merged into a larger question: How
do schools develop more influence and more leadership for reform (Spillane et al.
2001; Harris 2009)? This question obviously has a lot in common with an interest
in the organization and redesign of work in schools (Mayrowetz et al. 2007), and
also intersects with a focus on leadership and the development of a solid and
purposeful school culture (Smylie et al. 2007). Even more challenging is the
question of how to distribute leadership beyond the professionals who work within
the schoola step that is increasingly becoming critical if we are to think about
closing the gap between the more and less affluent students in our schools
(Kruse and Louis 2009).
This remains the a core issue for research on teacher leadership, shared
leadership or distributed leadership: while we know that involving teachers (and
even with student learning and development), we know much less about how to
make it happenand much of what we see in schools looks increasingly like
managerially initiative contrived collegiality rather than the normative cultural
shifts that are likely to be required (Hargreaves 1991).

5
The idea of professional community was simultaneously proposed by Talbert and McLaughlin (1994).
A recent Google Scholar search using the terms change/leadership/professional community resulted in
over 9,000 hits.

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Leadership, knowledge and school change

A number of the above statements foreshadow a theme that is becoming

increasingly important: Leadership for knowledge use. While in graduate school,
my first research project examined the dissemination and use of research knowledge
by educators (Louis 1977). The stream of research on knowledge use in the 1980s
paid limited attention to leadership, but that lacuna is filling rapidly. Much of our
continued fascination with the problem of knowledge use stems from the
(re)discovery of the tendency for reforms, to disappear shortly after they are
implemented (Datnow 2002, 2005). Like many, when I looked to social science for
theoretical explanations, I was influenced by James March and Karl Weick, whose
work is mirrored in the many school case studies that suggest sub-optimal
knowledge use and decision processes.
As part of a several large-scale studies at Abt Associates in the 1970s and early
80s, my colleagues and I became convinced that we needed to modify rational
change models to reflect good practice rather than constraining practice to make
it consistent with rational models (Louis and Dentler 1988; Louis et al. 1981) (See
also (Huberman 1994). This initial insight became more compelling as we examined
how principals approached change in urban high schools (Louis and Miles 1991).6
Articulating the merits of a non-linear approach to change management is
compatible with the continuous improvement and distributed leadership perspec-
tives that I have described above, but runs headlong into policy makers calls for
more systematic data use. In other words, wildly disparate images of what
constitutes effective knowledge use for school improvement have emerged, ranging
from naturalistic (letting a thousand flowers bloom) through improved exposure
to new ideas through networks of teachers (Lieberman 2000) to focused teacher
action research that is driven by problems of practice in that school (Huffman and
Kalnin 2003) to centrally designed and integrated systems for data use that are
focused on improving test scores (Halverson et al. 2005).
At the heart of many of these competing perspectives is the idea of organizational
learning. As the distributed leadership perspective suggests, networks of influence
within schools encourage the transmission of knowledge and new practices, some of
which are research-based, and others of which are locally grown adaptations to a
context. Beyond networks, however, we also need to consider what is usually
thought of as organizational learning.
Argyris and Schon (1974) definition of OLs central concepts emphasize
behaviors: A learning organization is one that regularly (and often informally)
incorporates new knowledge, works efficiently, readily adapts to change, detects
and corrects error, and continually improves. Building capacity for these behaviors
in schools demands new forms of leadership. Productive organizational
learningthe kind that pays off for studentsoccurs when school members
consistently take collective responsibility for student learning. This, in turn, depends
on the school having stable, community-like relationships among adults (Spillane

6
Fullan (1993), drawing on our work, has given this perspective pungency by calling it the ready, fire,
aim change force.

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and Louis 2002) and the development of supportive cultures (Kruse and Louis
2009). Effective school leaders not only manage the organization, they also
stimulate serious intellectual interaction around issues of school reform; in learning
organizations, the leader crosses boundaries to challenge the organizations culture,
detect its dysfunctional features, and promote its transformation (Leithwood and
Jantzi 2005; Schein 1992).
When we began serious studies of organizational learning in schools, we again
confronted the issue of culture. Leaders who support learning also foster a culture
based on the assumption that people want to contribute and can be trusted to do so
and that the role of the leader is to model a process of learning (Leithwood et al.
1998; Marks et al. 2002). Paradoxically, effective organizational leadership must
sometimes be directive in order to promote such transformations. Both supportive
and authoritative methods, used alternately or together, determine effective
organizational leadership in developing professional community (Huberman and
Miles 1984).
The issue of knowledge use and leadership is now moving beyond an
examination of the role of principals as transformational leaders.: Future studies
will increasingly look at districts as the place where key resource decisions are
made, and the emphasis on how knowledge is used in these contexts is, therefore,
paramount (Anderson 2003; Louis et al. 2005). Increasingly, we will need to return
to the problem that I identified early in my career when I studied comprehensive
change in rural school districtsnamely, how the district office influences resource
allocation in schools, what happens in classrooms and, ultimately, the trajectory of
student development.

Some thoughts on leadership and policy steering in school change

Until recently, school leaders have been regarded as the recipients of policy,
which is made at the federal or state level. In the 1970s and 80s, we were concerned
with the problem of non-compliance to policy initiatives, or to the reasons for
slippage between policy intent and policy implementation at the school. Today
our emphasis is on the accountability movement that has swept through all
developed countries, but it is worthwhile starting off with the recognition that the
policy issues facing schools havent changed as much as we often think. Consider
the following quote from an article published at the beginning of my career:
The newly arrives climate of accountability in education has made it possible
to challenge many of the existing organizational forms and processes that have
long guided the educational institution. Whether or not the schools will accept
the challenge and adopt the behavior of systematic change over crisis
change is yet to be seen. (Hanson 1971).
What has shifted since the 1970s is the way in which we formulate the problem of
leadership and change. First, we have stopped looking at policy making from the
perspective of the policy maker, who typically considers one policy at a time.
Rather, we examine how multiple policies and pressure are delivered to schools and

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districts, requiring them to make sense of overlapping and sometimes incom-

patible demands (Louis 1998; Spillane et al. 2002). One recent approach that may
bear fruit is to look less at policies and specific decisions, and more at how leaders
frame new goals and policies that are stimulated by the increasingly public
knowledge generated as part of the accountability movement (Anderson and
Rodway, under review). We also tend to see district and school leaders as effective
when they can help to tell stories that allow others to make sense of the turbulent
context and changes that they face (Hargreaves 1996).
At this point I am convinced that until educational researchers and policy makers
find the levers for change that already exist within schools and district as
organizations, school improvement will continue to be a haphazard affair. It will
take grounded and evolving theories pointing the way to these levers to move
beyond only tinkering about the edges of classroom practice to reverse Sarasons
(1971) classic contention that the essential impediment to change lies in the culture
of the school. The fact that control over change is elusive does not imply that
leadership is unimportant. Wheatley and Kellner-Rogers give a sense of the flavor
of a how progress realistically occurs (1996): Life uses messes to get to well-
ordered solutions. Life doesnt seem to share our desires for efficiency or neatness.
It uses redundancy, fuzziness, dense webs of relationships, and unending trials and
errors to find what works (p. 13). If this is the case, we need leaders more than
ever. We also need leadersthose who make policy at all levelswho have the
capacity to highlight central questions that need more attention:
What is purpose of school improvement?
How does the school organize to change?
How does the school create the internal and external support required to change
and improve?
What is the source and role of different leaders in initiating and sustaining both
transformational and continuous change?
Who is it that carries out and is involved centrally in change?
How do differing school cultures impact a schools ability to create change and
to make use of autonomous and anomalous changes in positive ways?
These questions appear to be familiar and straightforwardnot very different from
those posed by earlier scholars. However, in no case do we believe that there is a
compelling accumulation of empirical findings that take into account the contextual
quandaries that are central to the study of change in contemporary settings.
The dichotomy between a desire for all students to be competent by 2010, and the
relatively weak knowledge base that we have about how to do that represents a split
between Americas historically millennial thinking, applied to education, and the
realities of making ideas work in a world that is increasingly identified as
postmodern (Hargreaves 1994), chaotic (Wheatley 1992), multicultural (Delpit
1995), and inhabited by wicked problems (Mason and Mitroff 1981). Caught in
the middle are educational professionals, who find themselves alternately energized
and exhausted by trying to make the world a better place. The themes that I have
outlined abovethe role of formal leadership in shaping change efforts, the central
place of teachers and other professionals, the importance of knowledge and

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knowledge useall need to be framed within a practical context (providing

assistance for leaders of all kinds whose feet are grounded in local school work),
and also a policy context (for those who provide the data and research, laws and
regulations, and assistance).

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