Values and ethics

Within a particular school context, the set of values and ethics capture the shared sense of moral purpose, with these values and ethics central to understanding the culture of that school. I reason this way in line with the definition of culture provided by Bush and Middlewood (2005:47) who assert that “culture relates to the informal aspects of organisations rather than their official elements. They focus on the values, beliefs and norms of individuals in the organisation and how they coalesce into shared meanings”.

Emerging from this definition is the view that values and ethics not only underline school culture but also provide us with deep understanding of certain attitudes, behaviours and routine practices within the school management teams. Leaders work and interact with their colleagues according to their value system.

According to Hodgkinson (1978), values are a motivating force that is a characteristic of individuals, groups, organisations and societies, and influences choices they make from available resources and means. In line with this thinking, Begley (2006) describes the influence of values within individuals as the internal psychological reflections of more distilled levels of motivation that become tangible to an observer in the form of attitudes, speech and actions. This means that values are shapers of the human behaviour, and thus are seen as conscious or unconscious influences on attitudes, speech and actions of people within the school. Therefore, values held by the school are manifesting in the way people in that school do and say things. Values are central to the activities and practices

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of any school and the SMTs should ensure that there is an explicit and owned platform for these sets of values.

According to Bezzina (2010), by the end of their involvement with the LTLL programme schools were able to identify a broader range of evidence for the existence of the set of values which included commitment, integrity, justice, excellence and the common good.

The forms of evidence for the value of justice included inclusion of special needs students, acceptance of diversity, equitable access to resources and equitable workload for staff. With regard to the value of excellence, it emerged schools experienced explicit articulation of the nature of good teaching and learning. This means that as evidence indicating the presence of excellence, the schools set high standards or expectations for student learning, achieved quality of student outcomes, and teachers, learners and their leaders jointly celebrated achievement. It also became apparent that schools set in place professional and staff learning programmes as evidence of their desire to achieve excellence in their classroom and leadership practices.

The major evidence for the value of common good was collaborated leadership practices and clarity of vision. This means that teachers and leaders were clear about the central vision of teaching and leading, and leadership was spread over multiple people.

According to Bezzina (2008), the value of integrity was evidenced in the way the leaders interacted with other leaders, teachers and learners in the school. This means that if a leader highly prizes integrity as a core value, then this value would come through in the form of the following evidence, namely, their honesty (being straightforward with others) and truthfulness (DoE, 2008b). This manual further shows that the forms of evidence for the value of commitment can include “leaders meeting goals and targets”. If achievement is a central value for a leader, then his or her behaviour will show this. He or she will want the best for himself or herself and for others.

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In addition to values, Robertson (2011) asserts that when leaders reclaim and strengthen their moral purpose they move into what Starratt (2004) called ‘ethical leadership’. While Starratt (2004:5) distinguishes between the two terms, ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’, he claims that they can be used to mean the same thing when characterising the work of leaders. He says ‘ethics’ is the ‘study of what constitutes a moral life’ and ‘morality is the living, acting out of ethical beliefs and commitments’. In line with this assertion, Bezzina (2010) argues that ethics are the way values are lived out, and are sometimes viewed as some sort of absolute values. Ethics are regarded as absolute values because Starratt (2004) understand them as maps to consult only when the terrain we are traversing becomes a tangle of underbrush. He names three significant ethics that leaders should consult when they are called upon to clear a path through the dense undergrowth conflicts within the SMT that challenges relationships between members, hence compromising teamwork.

These are authenticity, presence, and responsibility.

The ethic of authenticity points educational leaders towards a more self-responsible form of relationships and leadership and they should act with the good of others as primary reference. Bezzina (2010) simply refers to it as calling for integrity in interactions, suggesting that its existence in schools can be evident in relationships and communication. The forms of evidence for the ethic of presence include collaborated learning and teacher reflective learning, which are the two important aspects of achieving the goal of raising achievement levels of learners (Bezzina, 2008). This means that teachers sit and plan together and reflect on their teaching together. For the ethic of responsibility, teachers become more focused on their responsibility for the learning of all students, showing a sense of accountability. Although, these ethics and values cannot fully address all the questions of this study, they inform the research observations.

Therefore, it is assumed that the existence or non-existence of the values and ethics can prove to the existence or non-existence of moral purpose in the school.

49 3.4.2. Authentic learning

According to Bezzina (2010), moral purpose is seen as fundamental to the educative enterprise in school. Authentic learning is therefore a “central pillar of shared purpose in schools” (Bezzina, 2007:62). This implies that moral purpose can potentially facilitate the work of teachers and learners in enhancing and enriching the learning processes in schools. To enrich the learning of learners, teachers and leaders with moral purpose learn to infuse classroom practices and leadership approaches with a dimension of personal meaning. That is, in order to transform learners, teachers and leaders ought to first take delight in both the subject matter and the process of learning before the learners can do so. This will result in authentic learning, which, according to Bezzina (2010), is the most profound manifestation of moral purpose. In the same vein, Hodgkinson (1991) argues that the facilitation of authentic learning is a fundamentally moral activity because it engages students in a deeper understanding of the nature and purpose of their lives.

Thus, Starratt (2004) argues strongly that learning that is not authentic to the needs of the students’ life or world is not only inappropriate but unethical. In other words, educators who contribute to practices which are not focused on transforming the lives of learners deeply are engaging in behaviour which is morally wrong. It is important to argue here that learning that is unauthentic cannot yield perceived improvements in the achievements levels of learners. Therefore, authentic learning is more than just imparting new knowledge and skills to learners but it means transforming learners for the long term and challenging them to engage actively with society as engaged citizens seeking to make a difference. In line with this thinking, Darren (2010:54) asserts that “authentic learning takes students and teachers within a school into a broader community, challenging them to work for the greater good of all”. It is about connecting the subject of learning to the lived experience and cultural context of the learner, where the learning connects the learner to some aspect of his or her world.

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Thus, Duignan and Bezzina (2004) state that, among other things, authentic learning would promote: development of personal meaning, awareness of the relationship between the self and the subject or object of study, respect for the integrity of the subject or object of study and transformation into a more fully human individual. From the above assertion, it can be argued that teachers and leaders engage in authentic learning when they think about what is really meaningful for learners. This means that throughout the learning process in the classroom, teachers should think critically about why they do what they do and ask what impact, short term and long term, will that have on learners.

Similarly, by designing activities that are linked to real life, teachers will make learning fun, engaging and motivating. This learner centred approach stimulates learners to question the value of their learning, and as they start to do so, they effectively engage with the subject matter resulting in improved learner achievements.

Therefore, raising the level of achievement of all learners in the school is a moral purpose of the highest order and specifically appeals to teachers and SMTs to have a sense of moral purpose in what they do, believing that “education is about success for all students” (Levin & Fullan, 2008:294). The belief that education is about success for all learners is a greater motivator and challenges teachers and leaders to engage in leadership practices that involve those who enable the creation and support of the conditions under which high quality teaching and learning take place. These leadership practices can promote the highest possible standards of learner achievement within the school. Bezzina (2010) concurs that authentic learning is only possible when there is effective leadership.

For leadership to have an impact on classroom teaching and, ultimately, learner achievement, the school principal should adopt a proactive approach and become an instructional leader who engages in the management of teaching and learning.

However, Bush and Heystek’s (2006) baseline study conducted with 500 Gauteng principals shows that South African principals do not conceptualise their role as

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instructional leaders. Bush and Heystek’s (2006:68) study revealed that of the ten leadership activities, “managing teaching and learning” was ranked only seventh, with school principals much more concerned with financial management, human resource management, and policy issues. This mindset needs to be transformed in order to achieve improvements in learner achievements. Managing teaching is a crucial leadership activity and achieves enhanced learner achievement because it involves the monitoring of teaching and learning. Monitoring teaching and learning standards of educators and learners is one of the major contributions to school improvement. This means that the SMTs need to design the monitoring and support programme which should be communicated to the teachers.

It is against the above backdrop that the study argues that the presence of moral purpose that is widely shared in the school will enable all members of the SMT to enter into a new domain of instruction. In this instructional domain, SMTs perform various activities related to the management of teaching and learning, namely, spend time analysing learners’ results, jointly develop departmental improvements plans with their educators, set improvement targets with educators, and establish direct observation of educator teaching. At this domain, each and every member of the SMT is challenged to engage effectively in his or her specified duties which are focused on managing teaching and learning in the school. This leads to the next section where I pay attention to teacher leadership or shared leadership as a primary approach that can influence enhancement in school improvement.