Generative School Leadership

by Karl J. Klimek, Elsie Ritzenhein & Kathryn D. Sullivan

For the real question is whether the brighter future is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?
—Vaçlav Havel, open letter on “The Power of the Powerless” ¹

It is hard to describe generative school leadership in a few simple words. It is not just another clever fix-it technique or a New Age fad, and developing it can’t be reduced to a handy “how-to” recipe. It emerges as the understanding of our three foundational elements (generativity, living systems principles, and brain/mind science) deepens and expands into a fundamentally new way of seeing one’s school. Seeing with the “new eyes” of generative leadership is powerful, as this opening quote reminds us. With these new eyes, leaders can see more clearly the full capacity and creativity of their entire school and take steps to tap these more fully. With these new eyes, previously unseen pathways for action are discovered that create new futures for schools.

Expanding Possibilities

Generative school leaders are intent on actualizing the generative capacity of their school for one very simple reason: they realize that both students and staff will learn, perform, and thrive better. Generative environments are rich in stimuli, offering challenges and contrasts to existing mental models that can catalyze new ideas and new avenues for action. Generative leaders push back on the commonplace mechanistic ways of organizing and doing business to make room for generative modes of inquiry and action. The dominant machine-like mental model of our day is unrelenting and impatient in rushing from symptom to analysis to fix. It leaves no time or mental space for inquiry, creativity, and reflection—modes of cognition that are integral stages in learning and essential to breaking out of the blindness of which Havel speaks. Generative school leaders realize that we cannot shape new futures for our schools without the expansive impetus that generativity provides.

They also know that they must highlight and nurture the living systems characteristics of their school in order to grow the generative capacity of their school. They do this by fostering a clear school identity, which they model and express consistently. They ensure that the organizational patterns and processes of their school encourage the active seeking of information and its open exchange on all levels. And they steward a school culture in which authentic human relationships are the norm between and among students, teachers, and staff. They understand that respect and authority are amplified, not eroded, in authentic relationships.

Real understanding requires and leads to a shift in one’s mental model.
—Caine, Caine, McClintic, and Klimek (2004) ²

Generative leaders create cultures and work processes that support expansive, fertile phases of inquiry on questions that really matter to complement the convergent drive of the mechanistic model. They let go of some control (not authority) in order to achieve creativity, collaboration, collective intelligence, and new pathways for action. Four strong positives in exchange for a bit of give is quite a powerful trade!

Last, generative school leaders recognize that the workings of the brain/mind are pivotal in this endeavor. They are constantly mindful of the how the brain learns naturally, and they work tirelessly to ensure that student and staff activities support the entire learning cycle whenever possible. They understand that making meaning is the automatic, natural function of the brain/mind and realize the primal role that emotions have in all human cognition. The generative school leader knows that relaxed alertness is the state of mind that supports optimal learning, and he or she works tirelessly to ensure that the physical environment, the school culture, and work processes foster this state for staff and students alike.

The Look and Feel of Generativity

What does generative leadership look like in a real school setting? Let’s consider an example from a high school in the Midwest. The principal of this school, a senior administrator, schooled herself in living systems principles and brain/mind science for many years, first exploring their implications for the classroom and later for staff challenges. She avidly sought new insights about leadership from outside the realm of education and tested these in her own leadership work. When the opportunity arose to form and lead a new school, she seized it eagerly. There was one non-negotiable condition: She intended to be a generative leader and to shape the entire school environment in this fashion from the very start. This excerpt from an essay written by someone at the school provides a glimpse of what being there looks and feels like:

The culture here is different from more “traditional” schools. We pride ourselves in being a high challenge and low threat place, but this doesn’t mean just taking AP classes or knowing the right answer. It also doesn’t mean being “loosey-goosey.” We have expectations for everyone, both students AND the staff—and many of them are the same for all of us. The expectations set the stage for how we work and behave here …they’re really our rules. They’re up on the wall in several areas of the building so that we can see them every day. We care about each other. We’re all connected, and we all want to learn. We explore, take risks, make mistakes. We create—in science class and math class and the computer lab—and in staff meetings. There’s a great deal of talk in this school and a good deal of laughing. We like to try on ideas and see how they play out with the others. We ask lots of questions. We listen to each other. You don’t see someone barking out orders or commands—our common purpose and commitments are so clear that this kind of “being in charge” isn’t needed. All of the students do research here, all year and every year. On research days, we’re everywhere—in the gym, in the old cafeteria, in labs, hallways and makeshift “research rooms,” gathering data. The whole school is sort of like a professional lab—messy, sometimes noisy, sometimes smelly. Teachers watch the students do research and ask each other questions, so that they can help one another answer the ones from student research teams. Everyone here is friendly and supports each other. With the couches and the plants and kites hanging and the freedom that we have, it’s more like a college atmosphere than a typical high school. People who come to visit tell us that they don’t want to leave. It’s comfortable here. We know it’s our school, and we can make it what we wish. You have to pay attention to everything that’s happening and give a lot of energy to make schools like this work, but it’s worth it.

Imagine being a guest who has just walked into this school for the first time. What do you think you would see and hear? What parts of the description do you find familiar? Are some puzzling, some appalling? Do some questions come immediately to your mind? Who in the school would you approach about your perceptions and questions?

Questions like these can lead to valuable insights about the assumptions embedded in your current mental models—the simplified concepts of “student” and “teacher,” “principal” or “leader”—that operate continuously in your unconscious, filtering and evaluating new information, such as this vignette of a high school.

We all know that the kind of vibrant, creative work environment sketched in this school vignette can and does exist. Many of today’s most creative and successful companies are famous for being like this—high-challenge, low-threat environments that are rich in conversation and have creative, playful atmospheres. Their leaders don’t just allow such a generative environment to exist; they work very intentionally to create and sustain it. Designing an appealing physical work environment is the smallest piece of this challenge. By far the most important task of the leader in highly successful innovative companies is to foster and sustain a culture that is wide open to information, welcoming to new ideas, and safe for individual creativity. These leaders put a high premium on culture and environment for one very simple and utterly practical reason: The survival and success of their organization depends on their team’s continual learning, creativity, and innovation.

Few schools today fit this picture of a workplace culture. Most are locked firmly into mechanistic structures and centered on practices designed to maintain rigid control. Walking into a school like this, one often senses the dampened energy of an audit compliance culture. Sadder still, it seems that many educators and administrators believe it’s impossible for schools to change in this more generative direction. A long list of reasons is given for why this is so, including the uniqueness of education as an enterprise, the intense public scrutiny and demands for accountability that schools face, budgetary pressures, or the behavioral challenges arising from the short-term focus and consumerism of today’s techno-media saturated society.

Education in schools could hardly be more unrealistic. Students, when they are given a problem, can usually assume they have been taught everything needed to solve the problem. How many of you in your own affairs find that challenges come pre-equipped with everything for a solution?
—Jay Forrester (1996, p. 5) ³

These and many other factors certainly make school leadership today a very complex challenge. Yet some schools—public and private, large and small—do work in a generative fashion. And within any single school, one can almost always find one or two teachers whose classrooms are shining examples of generative learning environments, no matter how dauntingly different the overall school or administrative culture might be. The difference is always leadership: the generative leadership capacity and drive of an individual within the school.

© 2008 Klimek, Ritzenhein & Sullivan. Reprinted with permission from Generative Leadership. Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks, California.

Karl Klimek is the Executive Orchestrator of the Convergence Education Foundation, a nonprofit organization that incorporates brain/ mind learning theory and practices in schools, with special focus on science, engineering, and mathematics projects (www.cef-trek.org). He is coauthor of 12 Brain-Mind Learning Principles in Action: The Fieldbook for Making
Connections, Teaching, and the Human Brain (2004, Corwin Press) and has taught in Washington, Wyoming, and Michigan at both the public school and university levels.

Elsie Ritzenhein is the Director of the Macomb Academy of Arts and Sciences in Armada, Michigan, a magnet school for mathematics, science, and technology designed around a foundation of generativity, living systems, and brain/mind learning research. She is also President and CEO of Creative Sources, serves on the faculty of the Natural Learning Research Institute, and is a Senior Associate with Caine Learning.

Dr. Kathryn D. Sullivan is a scientist, astronaut, and award-winning educator. She currently serves as the founding director of the Battelle Center for Mathematics & Science Education Policy in the John Glenn School of Public Affairs at the Ohio State University. During her 15 years with NASA, she flew on three space shuttle missions and earned the distinction of being the first American woman to walk in space.

Endnotes
1. Havel, V. (1985). The power of the powerless: Citizens against
the state in Central-Eastern Europe (J. Kean, Ed.). Armonk, NY:
M. E. Sharpe.
2. Caine, R. N., Caine, G., McClintic, C., & Klimek, K. (2004). 12 brain/
mind learning principles in action: The fieldbook for making con-
nections, teaching, and the human brain. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Corwin.
3. Forrester, J. W. (1996). System dynamics and K–12 teachers. Sloan
School Monograph, D-4665–5.