7 Through a Glass Darkly Middle-Level Leadership in an Era of Online Education
Amy Burns
To see through a glass darkly is to have interruptions to sight and understanding, to see an incomplete picture. In the pages that follow, I chronicle my leadership experiences as the associate dean of a large, complex Bachelor of Education degree program as I looked through a glass darkly during those uncertain days now known as the pandemic. Although our program had included both online and in-person learning for many years, for me this was an educational crisis that resulted in online education becoming the only option.
This crisis was “an urgent situation that requires immediate and decisive action by an organization and, in particular, by the leaders of the organization” (Smith & Riley, 2012, p. 58), and it was hallmarked by perceptions of unpredictability, increased time pressures, and the feeling of a distinct threat to the well-being of the organization and those within it (Elliott et al., 2005). I faced the unpredictability, often accompanied by fear, that leaders face in times of crisis. We encountered new complexities, including the lightning-fast movement between teaching modalities required as we responded to the many changes created by COVID-19 and its impacts on public health. As of the time of writing, a return to some semblance of normality has occurred, but many lessons have been learned, and I, as a leader, have certainly changed.
One question that could be asked of me, and rightly so, is why I have chosen to focus on the moment in time hallmarked by the crisis. I was a leader of online education before it and will continue to be in the future. The reasons for this focus are the impact and the resultant unique leadership context effected by the situation, resulting in the need for immediate decision making and the lack of choices regarding online modalities for learning. Prior to March 2020, our students, for the most part, had choices in how they engaged with their learning. They chose an on-campus program with carefully selected online opportunities with which they could engage as they saw fit. Or perhaps they selected a program with increased opportunities for online learning. Whatever their choices, they had some agency in how they engaged with their education and were confident that their choices would be honoured. Additionally, as a leader in postsecondary education, I had choices too. I chose to maintain strong programs both on campus and online. I had the time to plan for course modality based on sound pedagogical practices, ensuring that students knew well in advance whether they would be learning online or in person. All of this is to say that we had choices and the time to make them, and it was the sudden lack of both precipitated by the pandemic that resulted in my engagement in crisis leadership from a distance.
Crisis Leadership from a Distance
Gigliotti (2020, p. 2) defined the word crisis from a leadership perspective as “disorienting and unwieldy events for an organization and its leaders. These often senseless and complicated moments become crucible experiences for those with leadership responsibility.” The extended period of health crisis, which could certainly be described as “disorienting and unwieldy,” provided a unique opportunity to consider how educational leaders at all levels lead students, faculty, and staff through and beyond a lengthy, life-altering event. When discussing crises that affect educational institutions, it is often violent and sudden acts that permeate the public discourse (see, e.g., Beabout, 2010; Connelly, 2013; Geis, 2019; Stanley, 2018), but COVID-19 presented us with an extended timeline. Much like a storm on the prairie, we in education at all levels watched the danger roll in before those fateful days in March 2020 when K–12 school systems and many postsecondary institutions closed their doors and made the switch to full-scale online delivery.
Smith and Riley (2012) highlighted the critical attributes that allow leaders in crisis situations to take in large amounts of information quickly and make informed, collaborative, and efficient decisions, all while ensuring the continued well-being and support of those experiencing the emergency. The three leadership lessons presented in this chapter are framed within these three overarching themes of information gathering and synthesis, leadership opacity versus transparency, and support of people with particular attention to the role of the online environment in providing this leadership. Drawing from my personal leadership journal started in 2018, as well as data collected in a funded study on women in middle-level postsecondary leadership, I will consider the following questions. How does one lead alongside others over a long period of time marked by continual upheaval, change, and threat? What have I learned about leading a large undergraduate education program through a shift to ubiquitous online learning?
Information Gathering and Synthesis: Information Overload
I think I had better just accept that the changes and the shifts will be my new reality for a long time. The K–12 system has closed the doors, and we have 500 students who were slated to start practicum today. I met with my team today to get everyone set up for working from home. Everyone is on edge. I have had meetings today on Zoom with just about everyone who has anything at all to do with preservice teacher education from community to K–12 to postsecondary and beyond. We have to create a practicum experience that doesn’t involve any K–12 students. How does that happen?! There are so many decisions to be made, and they need to be made now but in a really informed way. Everyone has a need, everyone wants answers and reassurances, but I have the same information as everyone else. (personal leadership journal, March 2020)
This crisis leadership situation required me to become infinitely more embroiled in both the academic and the administrative aspects of the program that would normally have been delegated to others given the incredible rate of change and the volume of information accompanying the changes. As a leader, I was required to step into this work much more fully. I was faced with uncertainty regarding the most elemental of policies, such as the impacts on teacher certification of the pandemic and interrupted teacher education practicums (see Burns et al., 2020). Conflicting philosophical views emerged on whether particular courses were even able to be taught online and in particular whether it was possible to do a teaching practicum well in the online environment using peer teaching. Coupled with short course development turnaround times for successful student learning, adaptation to the online environment, fear of the future, and uncertainty in the present, all of these decisions required the gathering and synthesis of information in a significantly shortened timeline while working in isolation.
Although the timeline at the beginning was short, the virus resulted in a long-game predicament also hallmarked by increased levels of information, leading to information overload in many cases. This was evident in some of the more administrative elements of my work as a leader because of the continual change resulting from the extended timeline. Although the movement to exclusively online program delivery, save for the practicum, for the 2020–2021 academic year was additional work, it was familiar to us. We had a long history of online programming, and the courses that our students would have taken on campus were transferred to the online environment without too much distress. The exception, again, was the practicum since it had returned to an in-school format, and the levels of information that resulted were unimaginable as we began to track student and teacher absences because of illness, school shutdowns and moves to online courses, mentor teacher absences, and so on. On a daily basis, the practicum team, and by extension I as leader, navigated the shifting realities of life in K–12 schools, all from a distance as we did this work from our home offices.
Lesson Learned upon Reflection
Although one might expect the most important lesson to come from the quick changes and information overload to be flexibility, for me it was a reminder to look for the opportunities that can come from a crisis situation (see Danyluk et al., 2022). Particularly in the area of the practicum, a once untouchable aspect of teacher education, the requirement to utilize the online space resulted in ongoing innovations. Burns et al. (2020, p. 19) noted that the pandemic “ignited a historical moment in education to reimagine the possibilities for practicum,” but the reimagining must not stop there. As a leader in online education, I have had the opportunity to look where we might engage differently in a myriad of spaces from experiential learning to mentorship.
Opacity versus Transparency: The Realities of Time
I did something today that I swore I would never do. I had to make a decision without really consulting those I would normally consult, and then I had to simply ask them to trust me. It got me wondering, if I was them, would I trust me? Without knowing all of the information, would I be willing to trust me? But there is just so much information that I can’t possibly share it all. I used to consider myself a transparent leader, but right now I don’t know. I’m not hiding anything, but I’m not sharing it all either. I’m lucky to have the relationship with them that I have, or this could have been painful. (personal leadership journal, September 2020)
The example provided above, upon reflection, speaks clearly to the impact of the online environment on my work as a leader. Previously, when a difficult decision had to be made and time was of the essence, I prided myself on seeking all those affected and going from office to office to ensure understanding and consultation, even if little could be changed. Doing so created community. As a leader in an online environment, I sent out multiple emails to set up numerous Zoom calls, the time required simply not feasible for the situation, resulting in a sense of isolation and a reliance on my pre-existing relationships with my colleagues. A key factor in successfully navigating this more isolated working environment was attention to leadership integrity.
The criticality of leadership integrity was highlighted by Lucas and Katz (2011, p. 93) when they stated that those in both the educational community and the wider community “want to trust that you are doing all that you can on their behalf during a crisis.” This was especially important to my leadership practice as the pandemic continued. Although decision making needed to be instantaneous at first, many of the decisions made were outside our immediate control, and therefore there was a lessened expectation that all information would be shared. However, as the timeline extended, there remained a need to filter and synthesize the vast amounts of information in order to make decisions quickly, thereby causing me to rely on what I truly hope others saw as leadership integrity. Leadership decisions sometimes became opaque where they might otherwise have been transparent.
The issues stemming from the time that it took to connect and remain transparent from a distance were also discussed by several participants in a study that I conducted on women in middle-level postsecondary leadership. When asked how COVID-19 and working remotely affected their leadership, participants spoke of increased meetings and the time that it took to arrange them by email, resulting in an inability to be as collaborative or consultative as normally would have been the case. “It’s easier to turn around and ask a question than actually do an email.… [I]t takes forever” (Elizabeth, March 2022). Others described it as a feeling of disconnection and isolation exacerbated when important decisions had to be made, making them feel like they either had no choice other than to make them alone or had no choice in making them at all since decisions were made at other levels, and their job was to implement them. But others also saw the mandated move to online communication as an opportunity to “just see how we might do things differently, efficiently, but let’s not lose the human touch” (Sam, March 2022). Given the ubiquitous nature of online communication now with platforms such as FaceTime, Teams, and Zoom, one does wonder not if but how the pandemic has altered the opacity or transparency of leadership and the time that it takes to consult with others.
Lesson Learned upon Reflection
Strangely, the lesson that I took from reflecting on my experiences with opacity versus transparency in a time of crisis had less to do with the time that it took to aim for transparency and more to do with my own confidence in instances of leadership opacity. Not only in challenging times, but perhaps especially in times of crisis, leaders must trust themselves as well as others. Cairns and Stephenson (2009, p. 9), speaking of professionalism, referred to the ability to take “appropriate and effective action” in unfamiliar contexts, but that could easily apply to leadership. I had to trust that what I was doing was appropriate for the circumstances, even when I was unsure.
The Support of Others: Heart-Led Leadership
It’s been a week with a lot of uncertainty about what the future looks like. I have been meeting almost non-stop with various people who just want to talk through what they think it will all be like. And they want to know what I think. I’m not even sure I know what I think, but I believe it helps just to listen. Not only for them but for me too. It brings me back to my work on heart-led leadership, and I am surprised at how important this has been over the past few weeks. People are wondering if we will ever get back to normal. I wonder that, too, but as a heart-led leader I know my role here is to be reassuring and to listen. (personal leadership journal, February 2021)
Perhaps at no other time in my leadership history was heart-led leadership more important than during the COVID-19 crisis. Several prominent authors, both directly and indirectly, argue for meaningful, robust models of leadership that honour collective wellness, mindfulness, vision, and sustainability (e.g., Brown & Olson, 2015; Burns, 2020; Hargreaves, 2009; Hawkins, 2017; Kouzes & Posner, 2017; Novak, 2009; Starratt, 2009). For example, Hawkins (2017, p. 154) noted that “we are very much in need of positive, wise and sympathetic models of leadership—people who can demonstrate a balance of cleverness with wisdom, analytical skills with compassion, head with heart.” This, I believe, is one of the greatest capacities that we can hold as leaders, perhaps particularly when those with whom we work are at a distance and we do not have the benefit of facial cues or subtle gestures that show care.
Lesson Learned upon Reflection
The lesson learned as I reflect on my leadership during that time is that perhaps it was not so much everyone else who needed me to be heart-led. I needed that for myself. Not only during times of crisis but perhaps more so during those times, we need to learn to support ourselves in the same way that we support others or risk an unsustainable leadership life. And, when coupled with the potential isolation that comes as a risk in the online world, yet again this is more important for leaders of online educational communities. Hargreaves (2009) describes sustainable leadership as a path to enduring educational change, and it requires leaders also able to endure. The airline instructions for mothers to don their own masks first comes to mind. If we as online leaders in a time of crisis are to endure, then we need to look after ourselves as ardently as we do others.
Conclusion
The act of reflecting on our leadership is what helps us to grow. For me, this meant an examination of my experiences in a time of crisis that saw me go from leader of both in-person and online education characterized by relative stability and calm to a leader housed entirely in the online world in a time of upheaval and fear. In this reflection, I grappled with information overload, the realities of information sharing and time, and the need to engage both my heart and my head in my work as a leader. That I have been changed by my experiences as the leader of a wholly online program during a time of great uncertainty is undeniable, and I can only hope that I never forget the lessons that I learned in spending that time as a leader looking through a glass darkly.
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