Barnett, McKowen & Bloom Reading 504 A school w/o a principal

This article is the personal reflections of teachers working at Anzar High School in California. The school uses a team leadership model, and considers its 'Communication Guidelines' to be the centre of the school culture.
These guidelines include:

• Commitment to practicing good communication.
• Collectively owning problems and collectively solving them. This means that teachers are learning to anticipate problems that would not always be apparent to teachers. They commit to the idea that the needs of the school outweigh the needs of individual teachers or of the teachers as a group. Every staff member has committed to ongoing problem solving, reflection and communication.
• Allowing conflict and being accountable for speaking up.
• Commitment to help and support others.
• Commitment to honesty.The teachers sing the praises of their school team leadership model. They concede that it is challenging, but they truly believe that it works.

I wonder how many teachers would enjoy working in this type of school? I wonder how it will go in the long term? And I wonder if there is anything in this that can be applied to my own experiences. My first impression is that this sort of teamwork is time consuming and takes quite a while to become established. Self-policing and teacher evaluation could be difficult.

While this idea seems positive, for this type of leadership to succeed requires the commitment from teachers, students and the community. Communication is essential. All must collectively own the problem and collectively solve the problem.

This type of leadership requires special types of people to make it work with the whole school community supporting it.

Barnett, D., McKowen, C. & Bloom, G. (1998). A school without a principal. Educational Leadership, 55(7), 48-49.