The buck stops here
21st-century school leaders face tremendous responsibilities – for staff and student development and pedagogic excellence, alongside the everyday concerns of finance, discipline and test scores. Despite it all, IB World School heads are innovating, questioning and, in some cases, revolutionizing education. Robert Jeffery spoke to six inspiring leaders to find out how they make learning work
The Coach
Leader: Walter Plotkin, Director
School: Copenhagen International School (CIS), Denmark
Number of students: 600
Programmes: PYP, MYP, DP
There are few leaders in international schools with such diverse experience as Walter Plotkin. Having begun his career in his native USA, he has worked as a Head, Counsellor or administrator in Austria, Tanzania, American Samoa, Hong Kong and Bangladesh.
Through it all, he has gained an enviable reputation for improving learning outcomes. So when he talks about why international schools require a different mindset for leaders, his words carry weight. “People are away from their home country, their social networks and sometimes their family. They require greater support, and the school becomes somewhere that support is found. International schools tend to be more self-sufficient. They use their own expertise and develop new ideas from within. They may well have a greater emphasis on developing a culture of leadership within the school, because people need to depend on one another. So it’s important to create a culture of learning and a collaborative environment.”
CIS in Denmark is the latest place in which Walter will attempt to nurture such an environment. Now 12 months into his role as Director, he has been “coalescing a vision” for education there, but is aware that the transitory nature of international school leadership means it needs to be focused on day-to-day outcomes. “I’ve worked with some dynamic leaders in very good schools, and you’d expect that their vision or leadership style would remain for a period of time,” he says. “But that isn’t really the case. Culture is very much down to the individuals in place at any one time.
“When I started with my current staff, we began talking about principles and values. I wanted to understand their values, and the values of the institution, so that every decision we make can reflect them.”
A good leader, he believes, doesn’t have one style, but can be democratic, facilitative or direct when required. Most of all, they must be a good observer. He is a supporter of cognitive coaching, which encourages teachers to work together to examine what they want to achieve: “It assumes people change their behaviours because they’ve thought about something critically… It’s like counselling in a way, where the counsellor assists the person in thinking through their feelings to determine future actions.”
“Walter’s people skills are his greatest quality,” says Judith Fabian, the IB’s
Chief Academic Officer. “His values and principles shine through in everything
he does. He inspires tremendous loyalty in his staff.”
Walter’s advice for new school leaders demonstrates why he is such an advocate
of the IB. “You should always respect the integrity of the individual learner. You need to understand how important a child is to somebody, how much somebody loves them – and always keep that at the forefront of every decision made in your school.”
The Social Pioneer
Leader: Lt Gen (Retired) Arjun Ray, CEO
School: Indus International Community School (IICS), Bangalore, India
Number of students: 300
Programmes: PYP
The sunlight verges on the oppressive, but the queues of children waiting to be served never show signs of impatience. Meal times at IICS, like almost every moment of the day, must seem a minor miracle to students more accustomed to crushing poverty.
The setting is a small group of suburban buildings where the high rises signifying Bangalore’s rapid progress as a high-tech powerhouse are barely visible across the skyline. What’s being attempted here is an educational experiment that may be without parallel anywhere. If it succeeds, it could herald a new era for international education.
Lt Gen Arjun Ray isn’t contemplating failure. After retiring from the Army to head the charitable Indus Trust, he set up the city’s Indus International School in 2001. But Lt Gen Ray was troubled by a question: was it possible to offer an international standard of education to India’s poorest children, without relying on the state?
IICS is his answer. It offers 300 students aged 6 to 11 – mostly the children of local labourers and farmers but 60 of them from the Indus Trust’s orphanage – access to the PYP curriculum and Indus’s nearby Leadership Institute at a cost of just 10 cents a day. Bags, books, uniforms, stationery, food and transport are provided, along with wi-fi and a laptop, thanks to a partnership with the One Laptop Per Child scheme. The IICS economic model borrows from the ‘lean’ approach seen in India’s manufacturing and healthcare sectors. Children are taught in shifts, receiving four hours instruction
a day. Peer mentoring is an active part of the curriculum, as is the use of technology. The resulting lower staff numbers, says Lt Gen Ray, mean IICS operates at 30% of the cost of its neighbouring international school. His aim is for it to become self-sustaining, with students and teachers spending time working with affiliated “social businesses”.
Judith Guy, the IB’s Director of Advancement, says IICS is an “impressive” undertaking. She praises the trust’s work with local village schools, and its emphasis on quality teacher training, as well as its leader: “The respect Lt Gen Ray commands in the school community has enabled his success in creating a positive environment for children.”
The school’s focus on self-reliance creates leaders, says Lt Gen Ray: “Our philosophy is that you should lead yourself first, then others. It’s not about influencing decisions or winning friends.” Community activities, he says, bring service leadership: “First you serve people, then you can lead them”.
“Through community service, we encourage our children to embrace life, love, empathy, discipline and respect, all of which are strongly connected to leadership,” adds Mrs Sarojini Rao, Indus International School Principal and Managing Trustee of IICS.
In the meantime, IICS is concentrating
on students’ English skills. Many could not speak a word at first, but are progressing fast. The best performers will go on to follow the IB Diploma Programme at the international school, while the others study the Indian curriculum at IICS, which is adding a new grade every year. As a result, says Lt Gen Ray, they can afford to dream: “Whatever the aspirations of ‘mainstream’ children, these children have been given the same chance.”
The Modernizer
Leader: Dr Anthony Seldon, Master
School: Wellington College, Berkshire, UK
Number of students: 950
Programmes: MYP, DP
The sense of tradition at Wellington College is inescapable, from the Duke of Wellington’s cloak mounted in the dining hall (the school was built as a monument to him) to the rugby fields where pioneers of the game first played. Yet in Dr Anthony Seldon, the school has found a leader with the profile, and the tenacity, to transform it into more than just a relic of Tom Brown’s Schooldays.
Dr Seldon is one of the UK’s most influential educationalists, an adviser to successive governments and a celebrated biographer and historical commentator. He has also been a senior teacher or Head of School for 37 years. And since taking over at Wellington in 2006, he has wielded a broad-sword to tradition, introducing mixed-sex education for the first time in almost 150 years, putting pupils into ‘wellbeing’ classes to tend to their emotional needs as well as introducing the Diploma Programme and, in 2010, the MYP.
It’s at first surprising, then, that Dr Seldon believes he has achieved successful change at Wellington by building consensus rather than being a charismatic maverick: “A bad leader is someone who comes in with lots of ideas, but actually the ideas are all about them, not the institution. They’ll come in and try changing everything, and it’s mainly about their own career and ego. The organization will reject them as a foreign body. Great leaders are people who’ve sensed the environment in which the organization operates and worked out how it can be the best that it can.”
He rejects leadership theory (“you can almost measure a leader’s true ability in inverse proportion with the amount of courses they go on”) in favour of sheer dedication. He believes teachers should remember they are already leaders: “If you can’t lead your class, you’re not teaching them properly. A teacher stimulates a class and makes students feel that he
or she is on their side and is going to take them to a better place.”
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In fact, he says, most school leadership is sub-standard. “Most heads, even if they’ve been on courses and got MBAs and management degrees, don’t know or understand the difference between management and leadership. Most are just managers. Very conscientious people, but their aim is to stop the troops from rebelling, keep the staff sweet, keep the parents happy… They can then get exhausted at the end of summer term and have a chocolate biscuit to celebrate. Leadership is about saying ‘this is where we are and this is where we’re going to go.’ If it’s a question of managing, you could have a computer or a robot do it.”
Introducing the Diploma Programme has challenged some assumptions at Wellington, says IB Coordinator Dr David James, but the result has been seen throughout the school: “If the IB Learner Profile was just a wallchart, or if CAS existed in isolation, it wouldn’t work. But we’re finding them on the rugby field and in the dining hall.” Teachers, adds
the Master, “have loved it. It’s given them a whole range of new experience that allows them to rethink their subjects, and the whole nature of teaching.”
When asked for advice for the fledgling principal, Dr Seldon turns not to a great historical figure but a recent political leader: “Do what President Obama did and spend time before you take over thinking rigorously, debating, travelling around meeting people so that you can get the ideas completely clear in your head before you take over.” It seems ‘Yes we can’ is a mantra that works just as well in an English public school as it does for a world leader.
The Educational Optimist
Leader: Aureila Curtis, Principal
School: Curtis High School, Staten Island, New York, USA
Number of students: 2,700
Programmes: DP
“I walk in every morning with a smile on my face, and I don’t walk out again until I have something to smile about. When I can’t do that, I won’t come back.” Aurelia Curtis’s sunny disposition belies the sort of challenges that would break many less resilient school leaders. As Principal of the largest high school on New York’s Staten Island, the demographics of her intake are stark: half her students receive free school meals, and she estimates that 75% skirt the federal poverty line. Yet in her eighth year as leader (she first joined the school as a teacher in the early 1980s), 88% of her students graduated, 85% of graduates were accepted to college and attendance rates hit 90%.
It is tempting to assume the Principal has been so integral to the school’s success, they named it after her. In fact, the moniker is a coincidence. But so omnipresent is Aurelia at Curtis that when she’s not in her office or undertaking a “learning walk” to watch teachers in action, she can be found in the classroom, teaching mathematics to one of the school’s most challenging groups. She describes it as her “most pleasurable 48 minutes of the day… Even if I have a difficult time, it still puts me in a nice place for the rest of the day.” It also brings her closer to her staff: “The more connected I feel to students and staff, the more successful I am. My teachers rarely say that I have no understanding of what they’re going through because I attempt to walk the walk with them every day. I describe myself very often as the principal teacher.”
That hands-on attitude has impressed Dr Carrie Robinson of New Jersey City University, an expert on leadership: “Mrs Curtis sets high expectations for faculty, staff, and students. Her students know that their academic success is her first priority.”
When Aurelia took on the role, she decided on a vision for the school that could be clearly communicated – aptitude, attendance and achievement. “I spent my first year building trust,” she says. “People said to me ‘you need to look at what happens in the classroom.’ But I knew it was more important for me to have the staff’s trust. I read Good to Great by Jim Collins with my instructional team. At the end, they trusted that I had the school’s best interests at heart, so we could move on to pedagogy… moving from good to great.”
Her learning walk allows her to give “non-judgemental feedback” via Assistant Principals: “Are teachers differentiating instruction? If so, what kinds of tools are they using? I have a huge interest in technology, so I can encourage teachers to use smart boards. We’ve invested in infrastructure… is it being used? If not, what kind of professional development do I need to provide?”
Introducing the Diploma Programme was key to her vision of producing global citizens. “Initially, people said ‘this group of students can’t do that kind of work,’” she says. “The record shows that they can. In our third graduating class, we doubled the number of diplomas we gave, and we’re right at the national average of the percentage of candidates who graduate.”
Many of those graduates are likely to return to Curtis. And it’s that affirmation of school culture that is perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Aurelia’s tenure. Forty-three current members of staff are Curtis alumni, and she taught more than half of them personally. “When they come back and are part of this, I feel like a proud parent,” she says. “Sometimes, when you’re a parent, your kids act like they’re ashamed of you. But I must have done something right.”
The Motivator
Leader: María Teresa Compeán de Carrera, Director General
School: Instituo Edcativo Olinca, Mexico
Number of students: 1,800
Programmes: PYP, MYP, DP
In every classroom across Instituto Educativo Olinca’s three campuses – two in Mexico City and one in Cuernavaca – you’ll find the same slogan written across the wall: “First we love them. Then we teach them.” To some, it might sound like a homespun philosophy more akin to The Waltons than international education. But Director General María Teresa Compeán de Carrera is determined no school can be built on anything other than genuine affection.
Malcolm Nicolson, Head of Middle Years Programme Development, said Olinca’s duty of care was visible throughout the school when he visited: “The warmth in relationships between teachers and students was mirrored in the relationship between staff and leadership. Students were happy and engaged and teachers appeared motivated and enthused.”
That motivation, says María Teresa, comes through a sense of empowerment: “I believe in collective leadership. We share a clear, focused goal: to have the best for our pupils in every aspect of their lives. That includes academically, socially, morally, even spiritually. We don’t teach religion, but emotion and belief are part of our students, teachers and parents.”
Olinca first opened its doors in 1973. It was the first school in Mexico to teach the Diploma Programme – and María Teresa
has dedicated her professional life to being its principal, with 38 years in the hot seat. She describes her style as “leadership by example… I don’t believe there is any other kind. But the basis of being a good leader is also being humble enough to say ‘I made a mistake’ or ‘your idea is so much better than mine’. There are no egos here: I will never
be hurt if someone tells me I am wrong and they can show me a better way to give my children the best possible opportunity.”
Collaboration is also in evidence in Olinca’s professional development. The school uses cameras to record classes which teachers watch with senior members of staff. All teachers, including María Teresa, undertake self-evaluation exercises and are also rated by their manager and their students. She insists the exercises are about “congratulating” strengths and identifying “areas of opportunity” rather than finding fault. Teachers certainly seem enthused by the Olinca way. Eight other Mexican schools owe their roots to former Olinca staff, and all maintain strong relationships with the school.
The Reverse Engineer
Leader: Dr Bill Gerritz, Head of School
School: International School Bangkok (ISB), Thailand
Number of students: 1,800
Programmes: DP
Management consultants have earned millions rethinking traditional manufacturing processes – taking the desired end result and working backwards to focus every part of assembly on achieving that aim. Dr Bill Gerritz isn’t building cars or consumer goods, but so-called ‘reverse engineering’ has become second nature in his decade producing educational excellence at ISB.
Too many schools, he believes, focus on implementing changes, then expect better academic outcomes to magically appear. “Instead, we measure learning targets and work backwards to achieve them. I’d call it evidence-guided school improvement. It’s about asking how every decision we make – whether related to staffing, curriculum or evaluation – will improve learning.”
Dr Gerritz worked as a park ranger, nuclear chemist and systems analyst before entering teaching. He has led schools in The Netherlands and the Caribbean, and was on the faculty of the Graduate School of Education at the University of California. His dedication to immersing himself in the latest educational thinking sees ISB teachers contributing to journals and giving workshops around the world. In 2007, he was chosen as Superintendent of the Year by the Association for the Advancement of International Education (AAIE), beating 600 rivals.
But despite such plaudits, his is a collaborative leadership style. “It’s about making people excited about the challenge,” he says. “I empower those around me to get things done, and I constantly sing the song about quality.” His openness is embodied by a “Third Thursdays” monthly get-together with staff where they can air concerns, and a regular open session with parents: “They see it as an opportunity to complain, but I see it as a chance to get ideas and find out what’s going on out there.”
Harlan Lyso, former Head of Seoul Foreign School, says: “Were one to envision what a student-focused head of school might look like, one need look no further than Bill Gerritz… while many successful heads of school delegate much of the curricular/educational side of the school to curricular specialists, Bill is the educational leader of
his school. Personally involved in the school’s curricular innovation, he has not lost sight of the fact that it is the teachers who are responsible for ensuring the delivery of the curriculum.”
There are still challenges ahead, says Dr Gerritz: “I’m dissatisfied with the proportion of kids who do the Diploma Programme here. Given the students’ calibre, it’s too low. That’s in part an historical artefact, part of
a misunderstanding among parents that it’s only suitable for a certain type of student as opposed to being the best possible preparation for college available in the world, as I believe it to be.” He’ll address that challenge as he has every other – hands-on. “Often, when people become school leaders, they start focusing on things like HR, finance or facilities,” he says. “But those are just things that support what you do. Never stop focusing on learning.”
