The Moral Role and Characteristics of Finnish Urban School Principals: Free

Character education has reemerged in the 1990s as a critical issue in North America (Althof & Berkowitz, 2006; Lapsley & Power, 2005). Many of today’s educators recognize the role schools play in the personal and character development of youth (Ryan & Bohlin, 1999). The role of a principal is essential to the ethos of the school and to its success in instilling character in its members. Principals serve as moral educators and role models for their school even when they do not consider themselves as such. In this article, we focus on the moral role and characteristics of principals who successfully lead challenging urban schools.

This study is part of the Socrates Comenius project (funded for the years 2005-2008) in which urban schools are studied as challenging learning environments and principals as successful leaders of their schools. The European project includes nine countries: the United Kingdom, Poland, Greece, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, and Finland. The Finnish data were gathered from four urban schools in Helsinki and Jyväskylä. Two of the schools are elementary schools (Meri-Rastila and Keltinmäki) and two are secondary schools (Normaalilyseo and Huhtaharju). The schools were selected based on their high national results in educating diverse populations with multiple challenges. The selection criteria for principals in this project were, for example, having led their school for at least 5 years, being a mix of male and female principals, and having students in their schools who had improved their attainment and achievement results against students from schools in similar contexts. In addition, the majority of students were drawn from economically and socially deprived backgrounds, and the schools had to be located in challenging urban contexts and be typical of similar schools in each country in terms of size, pupil composition and community mix. Furthermore, all the principals in this study were nominated by their colleagues as effective and moral leaders of their schools.

We interviewed the principals of the schools (two males and two females) as well as some key informants from their schools. These informants included two teachers, two parents, and two students from each school. In addition to qualitative data, we gathered quantitative data from the teachers (N = 124). Even if the success of the school is the sum of many factors, the principal’s role is crucial for the ethos of the school (Nokelainen & Tirri, 2007). According to Day (2005), a multiperspective study of successful principals in schools located in challenging socioeconomic contexts showed that vision and distributed leadership were accompanied by strong core values and beliefs, an abiding sense of agency, identity, moral purpose, resilience, and trust. A particular aim of our study was to identify those emotional and ethical skills and qualities of the principals that made them successful in the eyes of their school community. Furthermore, we analyzed the principals’ own perceptions of their role and task as a principal in a challenging urban school.

The qualitative data were analyzed according to the narrative categorical-content perspective, which is quite similar to an ordinary content analysis method, only the data are narratively constructed. We analyzed the data according to categories defined on the basis of the topic studied, and separate utterances of the data were classified and gathered into these categories (Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach, & Zilber, 1998). In narrative inquiry, stories describe human action (Polkinghorne, 1995), and the narrative serves as both the method and the phenomenon of study. The hallmarks of knowing in narrative inquiry are the acceptance of the relational and interactive nature of human science research, the use of the story, and a careful accounting of the particular (Pinnegar & Daynes, 2007). Narrative inquiry of the professions brings to light professional craft and experiential knowledge which are otherwise invisible to those outside the occupation (Morgan-Fleming, 2007). The interview data used in this study were narratively constructed. Thus, the use of the narrative perspective was a natural choice for the content analysis of the qualitative data.

In the 1990s, the moral base of the teaching profession and ethical dilemmas in teaching were popular themes in educational research (Colnerud, 1997; Oser, 1994; Sockett, 1993; Tirri, 1999). The everyday life of teachers involves relations with students, parents, and colleagues. The school provides an institutional context for teachers’ ethical dilemmas and interactive relationships. Previous research on ethical dilemmas in teaching indicates that teachers are not always aware of the moral impact of their actions (Jackson, Boostrom, & Hansen, 1993). According to empirical studies, teachers cannot separate their own moral character from their professional self. The stance of teachers’ moral character functions as a moral approach in teachers’ reasoning, guiding their interactions with students and giving them hope for the future. A professional approach in teachers’ reasoning includes rules and principles guiding teachers’ pedagogical practice and decision making. We have identified these rules and principles as the stance of teachers’ professional character in their practical knowledge. The findings of our study indicate that teaching can be seen as both a vocation with a deep personal commitment and as a profession with clear rational principles. In the search for effective teaching, both views should be acknowledged and joined (Tirri, Husu, & Kansanen, 1999).

Principals are teachers and leaders of their schools (Starratt, 2004). Their task is not to cultivate only their own integrity, but also the integrity of their learning community (Tirri, 2003). In addition to skills in the cognitive domain, leadership requires skills in both the emotional and ethical domains. Daniel Goleman (1995) has suggested that a new kind of intelligence—emotional intelligence (EI)—gives us awareness of our own and other people’s feelings, instilling in us empathy, compassion, motivation, and the ability to respond appropriately to pain or pleasure. Goleman has pointed out that emotional quotient is a basic requirement for the effective use of intelligence quotient. If the brain areas in which our emotions originate are damaged, we think less effectively (Goleman, 1995). EI also refers to one’s ability to identify, express, and understand emotions, assimilate emotions in thought, and regulate both positive and negative emotions in oneself and in others (Matthews, Zeidner, & Roberts, 2002). Goleman (2001) argues that an EI-based theory of performance relates directly to the domain of work and to organizational effectiveness, particularly in predicting excellence in various jobs ranging from sales to leadership. Goleman, Boyatzis, and McKee (2002) further state that EI characteristics are not innate talents, but learned abilities, and that the emotional task of the leader is the most important aspect in leadership. The true power of emotional leadership lies in people’s reliance on connections with other people for their emotional stability, thus empowering the leader with the ability to sway them towards resonance (to bring out everyone’s best) or dissonance (to drive emotions negatively). In principals’ work, emotional leadership skills are a prerequisite of successful social communication within the school community (Nokelainen & Tirri, 2007).

Narvaez (2005, 2006) has identified skills in the ethical domain that are typical for individuals of good moral character. These skills include: (1) ethical sensitivity (e.g., connecting with others, awareness of others’ feelings, controlling one’s social biases, understanding moral/social situations), (2) ethical judgment skills (e.g., applying a code of ethics, reasoning out what needs to be done, determining the best course of action), (3) ethical focus (e.g., making morality a priority, aligning one’s moral values with one’s identity, being an active member of one’s community, deriving meaning from living a moral life), and (4) competence at ethical action (e.g., implementing morally-related knowledge and action, engaging in moral leadership, showing courage and resiliency in the face of hardship). Skills in ethical sensitivity in particular deal with moral emotions and overlap with those skills in emotional intelligence.

A recent article by Schwartz (2007) explored the nature of modeled moral character for teachers and identified seven key attributes of such character by reviewing common themes across cognitive, affective, and action perspectives. These attributes were used to create a Seven-Item Attribute Questionnaire (SIAQ). The study also linked transformational leadership and emotional competence to the construct of modeled moral character, statistically showing that high school teachers identified as moral character modelers using the SIAQ exhibit higher degrees of transformational leadership style and emotional competence. Hence, the relationship between emotional leadership and character education should be more acknowledged in teacher education.

The participants of the study included the principals of four urban schools (two males and two females) and key informants from their schools. These informants included two teachers, two parents, and two students from each school. The principals chose the key informants from their schools and the selection criteria for the key informants was that they had worked closely with the principal and knew him/her well. The parents interviewed were, for example, active in parental involvement. The background information about principals and their schools appears in Table 1 and was collected during the winter of 2006. Two principals are men and two are women; all were born between the years 1948-1952. Their experience as a principal varied from 4 to 24 years. The male principals worked in elementary schools and the female principals in secondary schools. The school sizes ranged from 254 to 396 students. All these schools are located in urban areas: two in Helsinki (the capital of Finland, about 564,000 inhabitants) and two in Jyväskylä (a major city in Central Finland, about 84,000 inhabitants).

Three Finnish researchers of the Socrates Comenius project gathered the data through interviews in schools during the winter of 2006. The data comprised a total of 37 interviews: three interviews with each of the four principals and one interview with two teachers, two parents, and two students from each school. In addition, one interview with a school deacon from one school was grouped together with the interviews of the teachers from her school. The interviews represent narrative case studies in which the principals and key informants from their schools reflected the role and characteristics of their principal, the ethos of their school, and the reasons for its success. The themes and questions used in the principals’ interviews appear in the Appendix. The same themes and questions were asked of the other interviewees in a more limited extent. The same interview schedule was used in every country involved in the Socrates Comenius project.

Interviewees’ responses are often stories because people understand and retell their experiences in storied form (Mishler, 1986). The main focus in the data analysis was on themes describing the principals’ emotional and ethical skills as well as their moral role and characteristics. These themes were collected from the data, and the qualitative findings were reported as thematically constructed cases. A set of case studies related to the same topic is often used in narrative inquiries. According to Seidman (1991), this provides greater insight and understanding of the topic than does any single vignette (Polkinghorne, 1995). In our case studies, a general description of the school context appears first, followed by the principal’s own description of his/her values and characteristics. Last, the teachers’, parents’, and students’ descriptions of their principal’s moral role and characteristics are presented.

At the same time when gathering the qualitative data, three Finnish researchers of the Socrates Comenius project gathered the quantitative data from the same schools. The teachers of these four schools (N = 124) evaluated their principals’ emotional leadership with an Emotional Leadership Questionnaire (ELQ) that operationalizes four domains of EI with 51 items, on a 5-point Likert scale with 1 being “strongly disagree” and 5 being “strongly agree.” The ELQ was developed to measure a leader’s EI as perceived by his/her subordinates. In the conceptual level, the ELQ measures a leader’s competencies rather than his/her “intelligences” or “abilities,” as the leader’s subordinates are expected to be well aware only of their leader’s explicit, procedural abilities (metacompetence), and less aware of their declarative knowledge (metaknowledge) (Goleman et al., 2002; Nokelainen & Ruohotie, 2005; Nokelainen & Tirri, 2007).

The teachers’ task was to assess their principals’ emotional leadership characteristics on four dimensions of the ELQ: (1) self-awareness (8 items), (2) self-management (20 items), (3) social awareness (7 items), and (4) relationship management (16 items). The first two dimensions measure how teachers rank their principal’s personal characteristics (i.e., self-management capabilities). The remaining two dimensions measure the leader’s social skills (i.e., how they manage interpersonal relationships).

Mauri. The most experienced of these four principals worked in Jyväskylä, about 300 km north of Helsinki. He led an elementary school of about 400 students and 27 teachers. The students come from residential and rental apartment areas of different socioeconomic backgrounds. One of the biggest challenges in this school was students with learning difficulties who required special support. The school had a project aimed at integrating these students into normal teaching with the help of school assistants.

The principal described his view of the principal’s role as follows:

The principal said that he is responsible to show the way for the school and to create opportunities: “The principal shows the direction with his/her own values, example, and work ethic.” Humanity and trust in leadership and doing things together were important to this principal:

Two teachers from the same school described their principal as “a positive and warm creator of atmosphere who understands diversity and the needs of special children.” Furthermore, the teachers considered the principal

In addition, both the parents and students viewed their principal in a positive light and highlighted his role in creating and sustaining a good atmosphere in the school. According to parents, “the principal is very good at selecting the right teachers for the school and at obtaining resources for our school.” They also felt the principal supported, for example, parental involvement. The students praised the principal as “very nice and kind, and he doesn’t shout.” They described him as a principal who is easy to talk with and who assists students.

Jukka. The elementary school principal from Helsinki faced the challenges of multiculturalism in his work. In his school, 38% of the children had an immigrant background and came from 15 countries. His school is located in the capital area of Helsinki with about 250 students and 20 teachers. He had served as a principal for 13 years. The greatest challenges in his school included multicultural families. The school had supportive projects for families such as, for example, Finnish language courses for immigrant mothers. Because multicultural families are very community-oriented and the family has the greatest influence in their life, the school attempted to influence the mothers in order to help their children to learn in school.

The principal described his personal values and characteristics as follows:

Jukka also stressed the importance of having some kind of call to the teaching profession and previous experience in teaching before beginning work as a principal. In addition, he said that he has the ability to encourage people to cooperate, respect, and trust each other, and considered these abilities a fundamental strength.

The teachers of the school reported that “the principal has a clear vision of where he wants this school to go. Knowing how to handle difficulties is one of the principal’s strong points. He has also chosen very competent teachers; it is his job and he has done it well.” They also admired his important networks with diverse people. One teacher said that “he is extremely diplomatic and empathic in problem-solving situations, and manages to achieve consensus even in difficult situations.” The other teacher mentioned that “he knows the Muslim Imam personally and contacts him if there is a problem with Muslim families.” Teachers noted that the principal is often absent from the school because of his trainer’s work, but the principal had created a vice-principal system to compensate for this. Parents praised the principal’s ability to lead a multicultural school in an easily approachable and modern way. According to them, “an urban principal should have a broad perspective on multicultural matters.” Students said that they liked the principal, but had seldom seen him.

Auli. One secondary school principal had led the school for 6 years. Her school is located in Jyväskylä with about 400 students and 41 teachers. The area belongs to the low income level. The families in that area, many of whom are among the long-term unemployed, live mostly in city-owned rental flats. Furthermore, such areas contain more than the average of single-parent families in need of special support from the school. Students with special needs were the greatest challenge for this school, which had developed a project to create personal curricula for these students. As a result, over 60 of the school’s 400 students had a personal curriculum designed to meet their individual needs.

The principal had been trained as a study counselor, so her previous education had proved very useful in this situation. She had also taken many in-service education courses, such as a special professional degree in leadership that lasted for 1.5 years. According to her, she was “a vocation teacher; the teaching profession has always been a natural choice for me. I can be here as a mother, a pastor, a police officer, a social worker, a nurse, a porter, and a school assistant. The job description is all-round and also contradictory.” This principal said that she does not give up easily and that she tries to be present as much as possible so that she knows what happens in the school. The most important educational values for her were “tolerance, caring, interest in new things, and open-mindedness.” In addition, finding one’s own inner balance, emotional sensitivity, and cooperation were also important to her:

According to the teachers, tolerance was the main strength in their school. They also reported that

Teachers also said that the principal is very hardworking and effective, and that they hoped that she could delegate her duties more. According to the parents, “the principal has managed her responsibilities well and is more responsible than an innovative one.” They also said that the principal is both assertive and empathic, and that she keeps the school together. The students noted that “principal helps immigrants to have assistants. She is a good teacher, speaks peacefully, and solves students’ problems.”

Ulla. The other secondary school principal from the most urban school had led the school for 4 years. The school is located in the city centre of Helsinki and has about 300 students (a total of 546 students including the upper secondary school) and 70 teachers. The school is also a special unit of the faculty of behavioral sciences in the University of Helsinki and serves as a teacher training school. The greatest challenges for this school included differences between rich and poor families. The school had projects designed to resolve problems between different students, such as peer mediation in bullying situations.

The principal described her personal strengths as a principal as follows:

This principal said that she often plays the role of a listener and is easily approachable because of her personal characteristics. She noted that as a principal, it is important to be aware of what is happening in the society and environment from which students come.

The teachers of the school valued their principal’s relaxed attitude within the stressful school environment. One teacher especially appreciated the principal’s use of common sense in difficult situations, which also shows a model of patience which young people can see. According to teachers,

One teacher said that the principal is directed towards the school and that she is close to her staff and students. This teacher also described the principal as a reliable discussion partner. The other teacher also stated that the principal’s door is always open for discussion and that she has an open way of doing her planning work. The parents and students also praised the principal for these same qualities. According to the parents, “she has a capacity to negotiate and discuss with very different people, such as politicians, and is able to choose the best co-operation partners. Her interactive skills are also good.” The students regarded the principal “not as the ‘big boss’, but rather as a mother or a friend, though still with the necessary authority. She is hearty and empathic, and handles her duties perfectly.”

The quantitative data confirmed our qualitative findings on the importance of the principal’s moral role and characteristics for the ethos of the school. Table 2 presents the means and standard deviations of the four emotional leadership (EL) domains and of the 18 associated characteristics. The item-level details and psychometrical validation of the questionnaire appear elsewhere (Nokelainen & Tirri, 2007).

The first two dimensions measure principals’ personal characteristics (i.e., self-management capabilities). The two remaining dimensions measure principals’ social skills (i.e., how they manage interpersonal relationships). Teachers viewed their principals very positively in the dimensions measuring principals’ personal characteristics. According to the teachers’ evaluations, the principals of urban schools had quite strong self-awareness (M = 3.7–3.8, SD = 0.8–1.0). Furthermore, the principals were able to keep disruptive emotions and impulses under control (M = 4.1, SD = 0.9), adapt to new challenges (M = 3.9, SD = 0.8), and see the positive side of events (M = 3.9, SD= 0.6) (see Table 2). Teachers were less satisfied with their principals’ lack of high personal standards that would compel them to constantly seek improvements in performance (M = 3.5, SD = 0.7), with their ability to monitor parents’ and students’ satisfaction carefully to ensure that they are getting what they need (M = 3.5, SD = 0.8), with their skills in resolving disagreements (M = 3.5, SD = 1.1), and with their ability to generate an atmosphere of friendly collegiality (M = 3.4, SD = 1.0). We can, however, consider principals quite successful in these two dimensions as well because all the evaluations concerning principals’ social skills were still above the central value of the 5-point Likert scale (see Table 2).

Our empirical findings indicated that the moral role of the principal is crucial to the ethos of the school. The principals’ personal qualities, values, and social skills create an atmosphere in the schools that makes it possible to educate moral citizens who take responsibility for the future and respect other cultures as well as their own. The qualitative and quantitative data demonstrated that the principals of these urban schools shared some common values and characteristics that are needed in educating diverse students. Teachers viewed their principals very positively in the dimensions measuring principals’ personal characteristics. According to teachers’ evaluations, the principals of urban schools had quite strong self-awareness. Furthermore, the principals were able to keep disruptive emotions and impulses under control, adapt to new challenges, and see the positive side of events. Teachers were also quite satisfied with their principals’ high personal standards that would compel them to constantly seek improvements in performance, with their ability to monitor parents’ and students’ satisfaction carefully to ensure that they are getting what they need, with their skills to resolve disagreements, and with their ability to generate an atmosphere of friendly collegiality. All these qualities reflect emotional leadership skills that have been shown to correlate positively with moral character (Schwartz, 2007).

The qualitative findings showed that the principals shared the values of tolerance, care, and equality. These values guided their work in school-based projects and in cooperation with teachers, students, and families. All the principals had a good knowledge of different networks inside and outside of the school, which helped them to provide the best possible education for their students. The principals viewed the school as an important institution in a society where students can learn democracy and human rights. All our research schools are located in challenging urban contexts in which students come from varied socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, and have learning difficulties that require special support. These challenges require principals to lead the way with their values for the whole school community and to have good communication skills and an emotionally sensitive touch in their work. Our data showed that in this way, the principal’s moral role and characteristics are of great importance in meeting such challenges.

Studies in moral identity suggest that individuals with exceptional moral integrity are able to see beyond the immediate context and their personal needs, and demonstrate a strong, long-term commitment to ethical causes. Such moral exemplars are generally well aware of political and social issues, and have supportive relationships that contribute to their ability to identify or define situations as moral issues; moreover, they tend to be optimistic and to establish a coherent set of goals (Colby & Damon, 1992, 1995). The principals in our study reflected many of the typical qualities of a moral exemplar as defined by Colby and Damon (1992). These qualities included a generalized respect for humanity, mentioned in many interviews; a tendency to be inspiring to others, which was reflected in the teachers’, parents’, and students’ interviews; and a sense of realistic humility with regard to one’s importance relative to the world at large, thus implying a relative lack of concern for one’s own ego. All the principals served a greater purpose to improve the lives of their students and of the school community, not merely to advance their own careers.

The four principals also differed in their leadership roles. One elementary school principal was more present in his schools; the other delegated more leadership responsibilities to vice-principals and to other personnel. One secondary school principal was very informal and motherly in her work; the other was more professionally oriented and business-like. All four principals had a unique moral profile that reflected their role and characteristics as an emotional and ethical leader of their school. The moral profiles of these principals are further discussed in another article (Hanhimaki, 2008), which investigates the life histories of these principals and explores in greater detail the manifestation of their moral character in the everyday life of their schools.

All studies have limitations that must be taken into account before drawing conclusions and interpretations. We used both qualitative and quantitative approaches to study the moral role and characteristics of Finnish urban school principals. The emphasis was on qualitative, narrative interview data that can fairly be criticized as biased toward the positive qualities of the principals. The principals chose the teachers, parents, and students who were interviewed from their schools. The results may have differed with different selection criteria. The voices of the teachers, parents, and students, however, were very much in accord with each other and with the principal’s own voice, which supported the reliability of their stories. Our aim to receive an overall picture of the principal was quite well established with these different points of view. The analysis was conducted inductively without any given theoretical framework. However, the previous work on teachers’ ethics and emotional leadership guided our understanding and provided us with theoretical concepts to use in our analytical work. After the first reading of the narratives, the researchers established from the interviews the themes to be further analyzed. Each researcher selected the themes autonomously. After the selection, the researchers checked the reliability of the themes by comparing their analyses. In mutual discussions, some of the themes were dropped and others emphasized. All disagreements were discussed until the researchers reached a common interpretation of the themes selected.

According to the quantitative findings, principals had quite well-developed emotional leadership skills. The quantitative data mostly completed our qualitative study by providing a more general evaluation of the principals’ emotional leadership skills by their teachers. The reliability of the quantitative approach could have been improved by using the self-evaluations of the principals. Our emphasis in this paper, however, was on the qualitative findings; a more detailed description of the quantitative study appears elsewhere (Nokelainen & Tirri, 2007).

Our study adds to the existing case-study data in teacher education and in character education. Shulman (1992) believes that cases provide a vehicle for students in teacher education to identify how these concepts and actions arise in concrete situations. According to Shulman, cases have certain shared characteristics: (i) they are particular and specific, and are not statements of what generally or for the most part is or has been; (ii) cases place events in a frame of place and time, and are usually locally situated; (iii) human agency and intention are central in the accounts of case reports, for cases can reveal the working of human minds, motives, needs, conceptions, misconceptions, frustrations, faults, and more; (iv) cases reflect the social and cultural contexts within which events occur. We trust that our study will shed light on certain aspects of a worthwhile case study of the moral role and characteristics of principals in the context of challenging urban schools in Finland.