Abstract:

Societal shifts in expectations of educational institutions have led to calls for increased accountability in schools and for those who lead them. Accountability has changed the role of school principals (and teachers) in the United States and around the world, profoundly impacting their work (Wiseman, 2005). Educational administration, in particular, has shifted dramatically over the past several decades from an authoritarian figure to a visionary instructional leader responsible for engaging and involving diverse stakeholders in an effort to positively drive achievement and provide opportunities to learn for an ever-increasing diverse global student population (Odora Hoppers, 2009).

Although student achievement has become instrumentally important, the basis of student learning is not simply focusing on raising student test scores. The heart of the pedagogical and leadership challenge in schools situates squarely on the collective embrace of positive psychology – its foundational premises, organizing principles, and institutional arrangements. Much of the past work of schools (primarily public) has focused on deficit response and the accommodation of inability, disability and even pathology. Recasting the foundational premises of schooling requires a belief and corresponding practice focused on the flourishing of children (Reschly, Huebner, Appleton, & Antaramian, 2008).

As such, this conceptual paper employs a methodological approach utilizing text-based analysis to support a general philosophical argument for leading schools that support the developing possibilities of students toward thriving.

Specifically, a new vision of schooling is required for a more accurate understanding of intelligence. What organizational arrangements are possible for more enlightened view about the flourishing of children and youth? To begin, schools may be culturally structured to deliberately socialize learning goal orientations in children. This of course is no easy task when the conditions and traditions of schooling have historically operated in ways that do not support a new definition of intelligence. The possibility that effort actually creates ability, that people can become smarter by working hard at the right learning tasks with as much time as necessary has generally not been taken very seriously (Resnick, 1995).

To realize broad and lasting human potential and wellbeing in students, a change of significant magnitude and scale is required in the fundamental institutional norms, expectations, and practices of schools. Leading this alteration in professional practice includes pressing students to engage in strategic learning behaviors such as testing their own understanding, developing arguments and explanations, providing justifications, adhering to discipline-specific standards of evidence and reasoning while consistently communicating in a variety of explicit and implicit ways the belief that students possess the capacity to engage in strategic independent and social activities that make them smarter.

The results of this text-based analysis suggests a leadership vision that entails a “radical rethinking of the nature of intelligence and its relation to social beliefs and practices” of our global schooling systems (Resnick & Nelson-Le Gall, 1997, p. 156). Clearly, schools play a fundamental and important role in forming future generations capable of thriving by continually getting smarter.

Keywords:

Moral purposes of schooling, socializing intelligence, positive psychology.