A Whole-School Approach to Urban Educational Renewal: Community, Collaboration, and Leadership

Many attempts at educational reform focus either on developing the knowledge and skills of individual teachers through courses, workshops, publications, and so on, or on mandating curriculum and pedagogy — with related professional development — across a whole-school system. The first approach is problematic because individual teachers need workplace support and encouragement in order to go in new directions, and furthermore the innovations of individual teachers must be reinforced by other teachers in their school if they are to have a substantial impact on students. The second approach also presents challenges. System-wide directives tend to be either so general that teachers have difficulty interpreting what they mean, or so specific that no room is left for essential adaptation at the school and classroom level. And even if appropriate “medium grain” standards (Darling-Hammond, 1997, p. 229) can be found, implementing them across a whole system requires more resources, ingenuity, and coordination than are often available.

In this paper, we report on an educational reform effort that pursued a third alternative, what we call a “whole-school approach.” The staff of a downtown Toronto elementary school worked together as a community to develop and implement a shared vision of teaching and learning. One of their central goals was to ensure that all students achieved success in this strongly urban setting. While aspects of the vision — and substantial support — came from government and school district sources, the staff showed a great deal of local initiative. This third approach to educational renewal also has its challenges. Just as individual teachers need support, so do schools: it is difficult for a school to rise above the general culture of a system. And even where one school is highly successful, there is no easy way to “spread” the success to other schools (Sarason, 1990). Fullan (1991) maintains that school renewal requires system-wide top-down initiatives as well as bottom-up ones. However, we believe the approach taken in our case study school is instructive and elements of it could be utilized in other school settings. Of particular interest for this book, of course, was the school's emphasis on building professional community among the staff as a means of promoting school renewal.