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A recent international exchange between American school leaders and French principals, researchers, and policy makers explored the meaning and application of transformational leadership across Franco-American contexts. 

 

Instructional leadership is a central component of American efforts to improve teaching and learning. In France’s education system, where principals rarely enter classrooms, how can they inspire teachers to increase their effectiveness?   

This question formed the central focus of a series of workshops and discussions during which I and 10 U.S. principals and district leaders shared our knowledge on how to employ transformational leadership for instructional improvement. The French participants included about 70 active and aspiring French principals, the heads of the French National College for School Leadership and the National Inspectorate of Schools, and leading French and European researchers. We were also joined by the American consul from Lyon. 

We blogged and tweeted about our experiences during the trip, and this article is drawn from those posts. To read the complete blog, go to http://pennfrenchamericanleadership.wordpress.com/. 

The French principal 

Napoleon’s nationalist imprint on the French school system remains in place 200 years after he instituted bureaucratic reforms. French public schools are highly centralized; all teachers and principals are employees of the national government. French elementary schools have head teachers who teach in and manage their schools; middle and high schools have full-time principals. While American principals often spend most of their waking hours in their schools, we were astonished to learn that French principals have apartments attached to their campuses and literally live with their families in their schools.  

In France, the principal’s job is largely administrative, with very little formal influence on teachers’ classroom practices. Our French colleagues said teachers generally don’t respect principals as sources of instructional knowledge for two related reasons. First, teachers in the upper grades are subject specialists, and principals aren’t considered to have a requisite level of content expertise across diverse subjects. Second, and perhaps more important, the French consider teaching to be the transfer of content knowledge rather than an approach to helping students learn. This means subject matter knowledge, or what is taught, is valued over pedagogical content knowledge or techniques to effectively transfer learning.   

The French also have a weak accountability system, particularly when compared to the amount of attention paid to accountability in the American system. France has a national system of inspectors who review teacher performance. Inspectors are supposed to review teachers about once every five years, but we spoke with some teachers who had been reviewed only once or twice in their 20-year careers. As in America, after their initial teacher training, French educators receive little follow-up instructional guidance.  Despite these differences, France and the U.S. both perform about average on international assessments. 

Although French teachers aren’t subject to the kinds of evaluations that are becoming the norm in U.S. public schools, teachers there report feeling a sense of accountability. That accountability seems to be collegial, though, rather than institutional. The school community won’t accept or tolerate poor teaching, our French hosts told us. 

But now, with membership in the European Union and associated continental policy influence and increasing pressure to improve student performance, there is a push to move school leadership into the instructional realm.  

Leadership strategies 

There is no word for leadership in French — a fact that our hosts attributed to a longstanding French suspicion of dictatorial figures — and so it’s not surprising that the French have only recently started studying and developing school leadership practices.  

Indeed, an important part of our role in the workshops was to introduce French school leaders to some of the strategies that Americans practice to engage leaders in instructional improvement. Thus, Penny Sparks Nixon, Philadelphia schools’ chief academic officer, spoke about developing learning teams of principals that would enable them to share information and experiences as a way of enhancing their leadership and instructional improvement. Errick Greene, an instructional superintendent from Washington, D.C., described his district’s work using data to inform decision making.  

In another session, school principals Caryn Cooper, Saliyah Cruz, and Tammie Smith shared practical strategies on how principals can facilitate a focus on instructional improvement in schools and described their experiences with sharing leadership, empowering staff, gaining visibility through focus walks, establishing professional learning communities, and creating structures to support learning. 

Liberty, equality, fraternity 

Every school in France has these three words carved above its entrance. During our school visits, we had the opportunity to contrast what we heard in the workshops with the lived experience of French leaders in their schools. Despite the barriers French school leaders talked about in the workshops, the reality was more complex, and we heard and saw many examples of thoughtful leadership and principal influences on teaching and learning.  

For example, at one school, the principal took us into a classroom where three students were making a presentation about their creation of an environmentally friendly building. In an adjoining technology room, students had built a physical model of the building that was roughly 6 feet by 4 feet. In the coming months, students were going to build the structure on the school campus as a place for students to study. In sum, students were addressing several rigorous standards with one very engaging project. 

In another school, we observed how some principals found ways to influence instruction informally by building rapport with teachers. One school leader stressed the importance of relational trust. Her colleagues said, “Teachers love her and will do anything for her.” Having taught for 20 years before serving two decades as a principal, teachers respected the principal as an educator as well as a manager. Her approach to leadership may help explain why student test scores on the annual 8th-grade assessment rose from 60% to 90% over the span of three years at that school. 

Other principals reported using their institutional power to gain instructional influence over teachers. One way is through principals’ ability to control the schedule requests that teachers submit to principals for the next school year. One principal said teachers sometimes cooperate with principals because they need principals to sign off on special schedules. However, a French teacher commenting on this topic on our blog said this does little to help principals gain admittance to classrooms. 

Beyond our borders 

Our visit concluded with a sometimes emotional exchange between our group and the French principals in which we had candid discussions about the challenges facing principals in both countries. Both our societies share similar challenges of growing immigrant populations and substantial numbers of low-income students who are not getting a quality education. We discussed our challenges of engaging disaffected youth and motivating recalcitrant teachers, and the spirit-lifting moments of breakthrough with children and adults alike. We found that despite our different cultures, both nations faced economic and cultural inequities that neither education system — as a reflection of the larger society — was willing to confront, even as the educational institution held out the promise for social mobility.  

Given the substantial differences between the French and American systems, the value of exchanging ideas across a very centralized and a very decentralized system may not be obvious. Yet every one of us found the experience of stepping out of our usual contexts to be of immense professional value. Being a mirror to others — helping them see their situations in a different light — helped us see our own world differently. Through their openness and willingness to share, our French counterparts helped us reflect on and revisit our own assumptions. 

If you would like to organize an exchange with a French school in Lyon, contact the U.S. Consulate at usalyon@state.gov or facebook.com/usdos.lyon. 

 

Citation: Supovitz, J.A. (2013). Global voices| France: Leadership lessons for French educators. Phi Delta Kappan, 95 (1), 74-77. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Jonathan Supovitz

JONATHAN SUPOVITZ is a professor of policy and leadership in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania and codirector of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education, Philadelphia, Pa.

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