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Diagnosis and Design: The Core Challenge
An implementation mindset dominates much of the work in school leadership and management research and development. While implementation has its place, we also need to cultivate a diagnostic and design mindset among school leaders and those who work on leadership development. Even the “best” designs by agents and agencies outside the schoolhouse will necessitate diagnostic and design work on the part of school leaders.
Diagnosis and design work in harmony. We diagnose the cause or nature of a thing, usually prompted by something unusual in our environment. Diagnostic work is not about discovering problems, but rather about constructing them. Data, after all, do not speak for themselves. Instead, by marshaling the available data and information, sometimes gathering new data, we construct evidence of a problem and advance a particular prognosis. Diagnostic framing centers on defining problems, identifying their source, and assigning blame, whereas prognostic framing centers on articulating a solution and the strategies for carrying it out (Benford & Snow 2000; Coburn 2006; Snow & Benford 1992).
At Baxter School on Chicago’s Northwest Side, school leaders re-analyzed student achievement data to look at actual growth in achievement over time. When compared with other district schools, Baxter was one of the better performing. But when school leaders crunched the numbers longitudinally, they identified some surprising grade- and cohort-level trends: compared with the twelve top-performing schools in the district, students at Baxter were at the bottom of the list when it came to actual growth. Acknowledging a problem, school staff at Baxter set out to gather data using staff surveys and classroom observations in order to define the causes of stagnant student achievement at their school (Burch 2007; Spillane 2006). Student achievement data on its own could not explain why student growth was flat at Baxter.
Diagnostic work is not an end in itself; it is, some times more than others, the basis for design and redesign work. Of course, people sometimes design without diagnosis or their designs are based on weak diagnoses. We typically think of design as a grandiose activity, confined to the world of high fashion, architecture, or engineering. But design is an everyday activity in schools as leaders attempt to shape aspects of their organizational infrastructure to meet new ends (Spillane & Coldren, in preparation). At Adams School on Chicago’s South Side, Principal Williams and her leadership team designed routines including Breakfast Club, grade-level meetings, Teacher Talk, Teacher Leaders, Five-Week Assessment, Literacy Committee, and Mathematics Committee to address various problems tied to classroom instruction (Halverson 2007; Zoltners Sherer 2007).
Coming to Adams, Principal Williams sought to establish curricular coherence within and across grades, raise teachers’ expectations for student academic ability, and get staff to talk with one another about instruction. Williams remembered, “I had to create the structures for the teachers to come together and talk” (Spillane et al. 2007). The Breakfast Club, a monthly meeting of staff, for example, was designed to tailor professional development to staff needs and build norms of collaboration among staff around instruction (Halverson 2007). It was intended to address the macro function of human development.
A diagnosis and design mindset sees school leaders as the key agents in improving school leadership and management. School leaders can still beg, borrow, and buy from the school administration bazaar, but the success and/or failure of their purchases will ultimately depend on their own diagnostic and design efforts. Outside designs can help, to the extent that they address the school’s particular problems and circumstances. But these external designs cannot substitute entirely for local diagnostic and design work. Hence, developing a diagnostic and design mindset among school leaders is critical to improvement.
A Framework: A Distributed Perspective
An analytical framework focuses and guides our diagnosis and design work, influencing which features of a social phenomenon, such as school leadership and management, we see or do not see. We often use these frames without ever clearly acknowledging them, which can be problematic. For example, much of the thinking about leadership is still, either implicitly or explicitly, framed by a “heroics of leadership paradigm” (Yukl 1999, p. 292). However, a “heroics of leadership” frame tends to equate leadership with the work of the school principal or some other formally designated leader. It focuses our attention on individual actions, rather than the interactions among staff. Further, this frame tends to focus on the formal organization, with limited attention to the informal organization – the organization as experienced by school staff and students.
Becoming aware of the frameworks we use is important, especially when working in teams on diagnostic and design work. School leaders must settle on an analytical framework and, equally important, develop a taken-asshared understanding of that framework. This ensures that school staffers are roughly on the same page when it comes to improving school leadership and management and prevents unnecessary confusion about meanings, intentions, and goals.
New frames, such as a distributed framework, can offer fresh insights into familiar phenomena such as school leadership and management. It is not a blueprint for leading and managing, a stepped program, or a how-to script for doing that work. Rather, researchers and practitioners may use a distributed framework in diagnosing leadership and management practice and designing for its improvement. This framework has two central aspects – a leader-plus aspect and a practice aspect (Spillane 2006).
The leader-plus (or principal-plus) aspect recognizes that the work of leading and managing may involve multiple leaders. Moreover, some of these leaders may have neither a formal leadership designation nor responsibilities in the formal account of the schoolhouse. Thus, the distributed frame forces us to recognize and record that the arrangement of leadership and management responsibilities emerge – through design or default – in the lived organization.
Another facet of the distributed frame is the practice aspect. Understanding leadership and management using a distributed frame means attending to the practice of leading and managing – not simply behaviors, styles, or approaches. Attention is drawn to what happens on the ground from one day to the next, as a distributed frame sees this practice as taking shape in the interactions among school leaders and followers as mediated by aspects of their situation (Gronn 2000; Spillane, Halverson & Diamond 2001, 2004; Spillane 2006).
Aspects of the situation such as organizational routines and tools of various sorts do not simply allow us to practice more or less effectively or efficiently; rather, they contribute to defining the practice of leading and managing. To understand the practice, then, we have to move beyond an exclusive focus on the actions of individual leaders and attend to the interactions among school staff. These interactions, as mediated by the situation, should be our primary concern as we engage with diagnosing leadership and management practice and designing for its improvement.
