Leader Values-Needed and Student Values-Held: Dilemmas for Leader Educators 257from governing bodies. Additionally, principals must provide individual support to staff,
while challenging staff to think critically and creatively about their practices. Principals must
build a collaborative culture and develop those structures that allow collaboration to occur.
Furthermore, the need to maintain human relations in the school will shift to the larger
community beyond the school campus where community empowerment, involvement and
commitment are needed foci for the school leader (Leithwood & Prestine, 2002).
Principals must have the ability to engage and influence staff and community members to
work together, and “change the profession’s compass from management [back to] education”
(Murphy, 2002, p. 76). In so doing, school administrators will need to be intellectual leaders
and become “head learners” rather than “head teachers” (Murphy, p. 77). In order to be “head
learners,” school leaders should value openness to participation, diversity, conflict, reflection,
and mistakes (Patterson, 1993).
In conclusion, leaders demonstrate the values noted above by creating and maintaining
democratic processes and structures that nurture ‘thinking aloud together’ (Furman & Starratt,
2002). Values in a democratic community include open inquiry and the open flow of ideas,
the use of critical reflection and analysis, concern for the welfare and the empowerment of
others and the common good, concern for the dignity and rights of individuals and the less
powerful, and the responsibility of all to share and participate (Furman & Starratt, 2002;
Murphy, 2002).
METHODOLOGY
Data for this study were collected from 91 students over 3 years and 8 semesters of the
same course (Introduction to Leadership Theory and Practice). In the semester course, the
students spent the first four weeks completing a set of self-inventories, scoring the
inventories, and interpreting their data. Once the students interpreted their findings, they
wrote a 4-5 page reflective paper on their inventory results and meaning for their future as
school leaders. Additionally, students wrote the results of their various inventories on a “Data
Summary Sheet” (submitted independently and anonymously from their written reflections)
so that later this instructor could analyze the data of the collective group of students. The data
were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively using a combination of simple statistical
analyses of numerical data, and qualitative theme pattern analyses.
The Rokeach Values Survey is one of the inventories the students took and scored. This
list of end and instrumental values was taken from the work of social scientist Milton
Rokeach who studied values and how humans prioritize their values. (An instrument
developed from the Rokeach lists is included in Appendix A.) The Rokeach Value Survey
(RVS; Rokeach, 1973, 1979) is a 36-item questionnaire designed to measure specific personal
or social value orientations or belief systems. These belief systems relate to a set of end states
of existence or ultimate modes of living (delineated in the survey as terminal or end values)
and a set of modes of conduct (delineated as instrumental values) reflecting behavioral
characteristics viewed as socially desirable. The 18 terminal and 18 instrumental values are
listed in alphabetical order. Examples of terminal values include "a comfortable life (a
prosperous life)" and "a world at peace (free of war and conflict)”; "ambitious (hard working,
aspiring)" and "honest (sincere, truthful)" are examples of instrumental values. The task of the
research participant was to arrange the 18 terminal values and the 18 instrumental values, "in
order of importance to YOU, as guiding principles in YOUR life" (Rokeach, 1973, p. 27).
Then students were asked to submit, on their Data Summary Sheet, their top three ranked
terminal and instrumental values.