Does Student-Centeredness Imply Leadership Change? Spoiler Alert, it Does.

By Ghadir Al Saghir

Conversations with school principals who host minoritized student groups at their schools can be eye-opening. A project I did in Lebanon had me going to schools that host refugee students to explore the role of principals in building healthy school environments for the kids. The conversations I had showed that the way principals perceive students and the assumptions they make about them can influence principals’ school decisions and leadership. Consequently, this piece wishes to explore the connection between principals’ perceptions and the way they lead the school, make decisions, and manage school activities. Influenced by their own behavioral and intentional direction, principals’ leadership, management style, and school visions change. This inevitably influences the school functioning and system (Hendriks & Scheerens, 2013). Even though there’s no direct connection between principals and student profiles, an indirect effect can be drawn on students’ academic and nonacademic outcomes based on principals’ decisions and actions (Lee et al., 2021). Through a long causal chain, student academic and nonacademic outcomes are ultimately affected by the instructional management offered at the principal level (Tan et al., 2020; Hendriks & Scheerens, 2013). Thus, unpacking the relationship between principals and students would be beneficial. More importantly, fleshing out leadership strategies that principals can take to center students, cater for their needs, and ameliorate the leadership influence on students would also be constructive. 

A Socially Critical Leadership Position

Having talked to principals who host refugees in their schools, there was a noticeable focus on teachers’ best practices from an instructional level rather than on fostering ways to ensure safer spaces for the students. This contrast is defined by functional leadership positions versus socially critical leadership positions. The former position primarily focuses on eliminating school dysfunctions in order to maximize the teaching and learning experience. Examples would be focusing on teacher trainings, student outcomes, and future school plans. On the other hand, critical and socially critical leadership positions look at reform in power structures that influence these dysfunctions (Gunter et al., 2013). This includes dealing with more critical issues of oppression like race, gender, or class. While functionalism is vital for school performance, socially critical positions question authority and agency from a socially just perspective.

Adopting a socially critical position will allow the school to learn more about the population they are hosting, prioritize their students, and cater for their student needs. For specific minoritized student populations, socially critical leadership positions are needed to learn about their needs, get to know their social background, and cater for them based on their social and academic backgrounds. In this case, it would include addressing issues of race and class that usually affect minoritized groups. Generally, prioritizing student needs and shifting the instruction to focus on students is known as student-centeredness. However, a socially critical position will go beyond classroom instruction, strategies, and assessments. In schools with minoritized student populations, students-centeredness entails having productive and difficult conversations about socially critical issues related to students like their race, class, and background, to help cater for them and their families successfully.

Student-Centeredness at the Leadership Level

Generally, there are apprehensions on the lack of policies that include issues of oppression to structure schools or to provide alternatives for school cultures (Gunter et al., 2013). For example, school structures, principal leadership, or even curricula may not be well-equipped to deal with students from different backgrounds. To build more resilient and student-centered systems for all students, we will discuss three pillars of student-centeredness and how we can move student-centeredness from a concept on the classroom and instructional levels to a concept that the administration level at the school must deal with. During her interview with the Innovating Together Podcast (Burns, 2021), Professor Chantal Levesque-Bristol from Purdue University discussed three broad pillars to help achieve student-centeredness: competency, autonomy, and relatedness. The three pillars could affect marginalized and minoritized communities in a variety of ways. 

A common hands-on definition of competency revolves around classroom practices that engage learners and focus on their learning processes. This term generally focuses on mastering skills and acquiring knowledge. To support students in competency development, educators resort to several practices that would aid students. Practices include improving the quality of feedback students receive by educators and give to their peers, as well as develop the skills needed to evaluate feedback given to them (Ibarra-Sáiz et al., 2020). Other practices include student participation, collaboration, taking part in the grading process (Ibarra-Sáiz et al., 2020), real-life problem-solving skills, meaning-making in different sociocultural contexts (Liu, 2021), and strategic shifting in student agency (Wilson, 2021). Eventually, the aim is to support student competency by improving students’ academic and other transferrable skills. Generally, all these practices are efforts to shift a classroom from a teacher-centered mode to a learner-centered mode, and they all fall under one umbrella: improving student competency.

The second pillar, autonomy takes deeper measures to attain. Students are not only encouraged to acquire mastery of skills, they’re also encouraged to take responsibility of their own learning (Calkins et al., 2018). This does not mean that students will get to choose topics, objectives, or outcomes they want to pursue, but rather be able to choose and have options about their own learning experience from a context previously set by the educator (Burns, 2021, 5:46). By increasing student autonomy, students’ intrinsic motivation for learning will also increase, ultimately influencing their learning experience positively (Evans & Boucher, 2015; Garcia & Pintrich, 1996). Choice empowers students and raises their sense of responsibility towards their own learning path. There are no simple answers on ways to give students autonomy but sets of practices that the curriculum can incorporate to help in that. Systems of assessment that students value, find useful, and have contributed in co-creating will have remarkable influence on their autonomy. However, to contribute to student autonomy for students from all backgrounds, educators may face additional layers of challenges. In that aspect, there’s a need for educators to know their students well, offer the needed opportunities on an equal basis, and foster students’ identities on the academic, social, and cultural aspect. Efforts to achieve this include setting equally high expectations for students, removing biases that predict performance based on social and cultural factors, and promoting multicultural environments within the school system (Calkins et al., 2018). For these efforts to be sustained, they need to be considered beyond the educator level and be addressed on the school system level.

By maintaining social and cultural factors as individual efforts that teachers decide to address or not address, they will always be personal and unsustainable efforts. However, by informing the behavioral and intentional directions on the leadership level at the school in light of social and cultural diversity, school systems will seek alternatives beside functionalism. For example, there’s a difference between a school that leaves it for teachers to act on their innate characteristics to care or not care about students and a school whose principal takes the responsibility to think about biases and assumptions out loud and address them. Conversations will alter functionalism in favor of social criticism as an effort to address student autonomy. This does not mean that addressing school functionality is unimportant. However, it adds more points that school leaders need to address in the light of constant increase in students’ heterogeneity. School leaders will need to address school’s functionality by finding solutions to everyday problems, as well as engage in conversations around socially critical issues to cater for all students and foster student-centeredness.

“For student centeredness to be achieved, principals need to critically assess school systems beyond functional problem-solving. As student populations continue to become more heterogeneous in their cultural nature, school leaders need to have difficult conversations that address heterogeneity and assess power structures.“

As for the third pillar for student-centeredness, relatedness dives deep into each student’s culture, history, and society, which makes it among the more challenging pillars to attain. Generally, relatedness stems from the need to be surrounded by a group of people while having secure and meaningful connections with them (Poulou & Norwich, 2019). In an educational setting, the group of people constitutes anyone who is considered significant (Kurdi & Archambault, 2020), including classmates, other students, and teachers for more frequent interaction, or school leaders, counsellors, and supervisors for less frequent interaction. While it’s clear in principle, developing a school system that fosters relatedness on its organizational and instructional levels is challenging, particularly when speaking about specific student communities. Specially for groups of students from minorized communities, feeling of relatedness might be most difficult to achieve because not many people they encounter at the school share their background (Hilts et al., 2018). Scarcity in the amount of people that share their background or those who share similar traits as them may influence relatedness in the negative sense because they will feel like they are different, inferior, or as if they don’t belong. Consequently, the sense of relatedness is most needed for those students specifically because it is most at risk of not being achievable. This doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to achieve. However, it needs to be addressed on the institutional level to maintain its sustainability and influence. A study that targeted immigrant students found out that students persevered at schools because of networks of emotional and psychological support programs that were present to them at the school (Kurdi & Archambault, 2020). When targeting student populations from the organizational and instructional level in order to cater for their emotional needs based on their background, their sense of school connectedness and relatedness will increase. Ultimately, a sense of relatedness not only influences students’ academic motivation, but also their engagement and wellbeing (Poulou & Norwich, 2019).

The three pillars of student-centeredness: competency, autonomy, and relatedness can be achieved on the classroom and institutional levels. However, only the latter can be sustained over years and can help foster centeredness on the school level. Therefore, works of teachers, while appreciated, might not be enough. On the other hand, principal’s interaction, vision, and presence has indirect positive effects on students’ academic outcomes and a direct positive effect on students’ nonacademic outcomes, including students’ sense of safety (Lee et al., 2021). Thus, schools leaders need to dedicate portions of their leadership strategies and practices to think of socially critical issues and address them.

For student centeredness to be achieved, principals need to critically assess school systems beyond functional problem-solving. As student populations continue to become more heterogeneous in their cultural nature, school leaders need to have difficult conversations that address heterogeneity and assess power structures ethically. Principals have a significant influence by the way they manage the organizational and instructional capacity at the school. Their management is stemmed from their intentional and behavioral directions, which ultimately steer the school system. The causal chain of the indirect effect of principals on student profiles continues, and only principals can launch new routes to address it.

About the Scholar

 

References

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