ENGLISH SCHOOL RENEWAL

English School Renewal

English School Renewal

Introduction

This paper is based solicited information on school renewal from a purposive sample of principals initially identified using quantitative profiling techniques (Silcox, Cavanagh and Dellar, 2003). Principals were presented with a series of questions that enabled an investigation of their leadership behaviours with respect to school renewal. The principals' responses provided a reflective insight into school renewal and change processes in their schools. The paper concentrates on an aspect of the study of leadership of school renewal by exploring principal conceptions of renewal, their approaches to implementing a renewal agenda in their schools and how barriers to renewal were addressed.

School Renewal Renewal

This paper is concerned with school renewal as a particular form of educational change. According to Sirotnik (1999) school renewal is about the process of individual and organisational change and involves nurturing the spiritual, affective, and intellectual connections in the lives of educators working together to understand and improve their pedagogic practice.

The term school renewal is not only used in a wide variety of contexts but it is topical. In a religious sense, renewal is applied to the concept of being reborn and it was this spiritual dimension that was, to a degree, evident, particularly among American educational writers (Glickman, 1998). The concept of rising from the ashes, too, carried across into the research on school renewal. Joyce (1993) indicated that school renewal recreated the organisation from within, through changes that supported a process of continuous self-reflection and improvement of the educative process at every level.

In its most simple form school renewal can be viewed as a process of change or reform. However, some writers see a fundamental difference between educational reform and school renewal. The renewal paradigm involved questioning and redefining values about socia l structure, democracy and freedom. Educational reform on the other hand, assumed compliance with prevailing values. The reform approach sought to ensure that the functioning and outcomes of education would be in accord with these prevailing values and it assumed that policies, structures and programs could be modified or realigned to realise this intention. Transforming schools, whether directed towards school reform or school renewal, is inextricably linked to the exercise of school leadership (Soder, 1999).

School renewal is a model of transformative change that brings about multi- levelled structural, social, pedagogic and educational changes through human agency (Glickman, 1998; Goodlad, 1996; Sirotnik, 1999). It was acknowledged that in some circumstances principals might have experienced difficulty in initiating a school renewal process because of the requirement for schools to break out of their current worldview while continuing to operate within it. Renewal requires school leaders to work in the present with a future perspective in mind, to manage the present effectively while simultaneously creating the desired future. Adept leadership is identified as critical to the success of renewal programs within a school. As Smith (1999) indicated, leaders of simultaneous renewal need to acquire five critical skills that she identified as essential components in leading school ...