The stories in this book are true. They describe events, actions, and interactions that occurred among real people in real places. Many stories are recounted by practicing and retired school leaders. Teachers, parents, and others also tell about their experiences with school leaders. Some stories are autobiographical. Some describe caring leadership observed or experienced. We do not intend for the stories in this book to stand for generalizable evidence of the efficacy of caring school leadership or any particular leadership practice. Instead, we see these stories as existence proofs of the possible.
We assembled this book of stories for several audiences. One audience is aspiring and practicing school leaders. Another audience is those in higher education, professional associations, and other organizations that support the preparation and professional development of school leaders. We also believe that this book of stories can be useful to teachers and school staff, parents, and others for developing caring leadership in schools and for defining expectations for their own school leaders.
We developed this book of stories as a resource for individual principals and other school leaders to read and reflect upon. We consider it a basis for stimulating discussion about caring within school leader preparation and professional development programs. We also see it as a starting point for administrative leaders and teachers to consider together to develop strong and effective school leadership and improve schools for students. We will discuss more specifically how to use this book at the end of this introduction and at the end of the introductions to this book’s three collections of stories.
We offer no analyses and no interpretations of the stories herein. We want these stories to speak for themselves. We want you to hear the storytellers’ voices, not ours. Importantly, we want you to reflect upon these stories and discuss them with others. We want you to analyze them yourselves, give them your own meaning, and apply them to your own situations and practices.
Our Starting Point
This book proceeds from our belief in the legitimacy and power of stories for the development and promotion of leadership practice. As writers from psychiatrist Robert Coles to organization and management scholar Henry Mintzberg observe, stories have a way of calling us to consider what is right and true. Stories play an increasingly important role in programs of educational leadership preparation and professional development. Teaching cases are widely promoted as an effective means of helping aspiring and practicing school leaders understand the nature of their work, examine their own practice, and develop new ways to exercise leadership.
Stories also play an important role in informal learning of practicing school leaders. Oral storytelling is a primary means of on-the-job information sharing and knowledge development. So too are stories of programs and practices told through the pages of professional magazines. Stories are an important means of vicarious learning for school leaders. Sometimes ignored by academic scholars who favor more systematically developed quantitative evidence to guide practice, such stories can be powerful sources of new knowledge, legitimation, and motivation among practicing school leaders.
Elicitation and Selection of Stories
We began eliciting stories of caring school leadership during the early stages of work on our book Caring School Leadership. As we spoke with aspiring and practicing principals and other school leaders about caring, we often heard them express their thoughts and experiences through stories. Many of these stories were vivid and profound, capturing action and interaction and revealing both thought and emotion.
At the start, we asked for stories from practicing and aspiring school leaders in university classes we taught. We branched out to seek stories from educators with whom we worked in professional development activities. We went further to collect stories from individual educators we know from our work in schools and from our neighborhoods. We sought stories from principals, associate principals, department chairs, teachers, and others who interact with principals and other school leaders. We did not elicit stories from students, although some of the stories told by adults recall their experiences as students. Student stories hold great promise for a future project on caring in schools and school leadership. Nor did we engage in systematic sampling. Despite this, we ended up with an archive of stories that come from a wide range of schools across many settings. While they may not be considered dispositive evidence of the phenomenon of caring in school leadership, our stories are evidence of actual occurrence and of possibility.
We were fairly general in what we asked of our storytellers. From some, we asked for stories that reflected what they mean by caring in school leadership. From others, we asked for stories that reflected our developing thinking about the subject, notably key elements that make school leadership caring. As our archive of stories grew, we elicited stories of particular aspects of caring school leadership practice to ensure that we had sufficient numbers of stories to illustrate each arena of practice represented in this book.
We asked our storytellers to tell stories that related in one way or another to students. And most of our stories focus on them. The reason we sought and included several stories of caring for teachers, parents, and families is our belief that caring can beget caring. To be caring of teachers and parents is to model and inspire them to be caring of others, notably students. It is hard to imagine teachers becoming more caring of students if they do not feel cared for themselves, especially by school leaders.
Beyond such guidance, we gave our storytellers liberty to tell the stories they wished to tell. They could share autobiographical stories about their own work and experiences as school leaders. They could share stories of other school leaders. We told them that they could write in first or third person, and we told them that they could use dialogue they remembered. Our only stipulation was that the events in the stories had to have actually happened. We told our storytellers that they did not have to tell of only positive instances of caring. We encouraged them to tell stories of problematic caring or caring gone wrong. Caring is often complex and not always straightforward. However well intended, it can create problems—even harm. We did not want this book to be a collection of only feel-good or happy stories. Of course, there are many positive stories of caring in this book, but there are also negative ones. There are stories of crises and exceptional circumstances. There are also stories of everyday events. Some stories are quite dramatic, while others feel routine. All of the stories—positive and negative, ordinary and extraordinary—speak to the importance of caring in school leadership.
The vast majority of our stories were written by educators. Several were told to us in a class or conversation, and we put them into writing. Several stories are of interactions or incidents that we witnessed and wrote ourselves. In addition, we found and adapted several stories from news sources, magazines, and books.
By the time we began to prepare this book, we had amassed nearly two hundred stories. From this archive, we selected one hundred stories for this book. These stories illustrate important ways in which caring school leadership is practiced. The stories in this book are not a comprehensive representation of the untold number of ways that school leaders can be caring in their work. They are but a sampling and what our storytellers chose to share with us. We strongly suggest that when you read and reflect upon these stories, you also think beyond them to other ways that caring can manifest itself in school leadership.
We selected stories from different types of schools and settings. You will read stories from preschools, elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools. You will read stories from urban, suburban, small-town, and rural schools and communities. And you will read stories from public and independent schools, well-resourced and underresourced schools, and economically and racially diverse as well as homogeneous schools. The stories in this book come from across the country. Not surprisingly, most come from regions in which we live and work. About 40 percent of the stories are from the Midwest; 35 percent are from the South and Southeast; and nearly