A World in a Grain of Sand

What a wonderful storyteller is the mind! Under the slightest provocation, it may weave coherent wholes from random parts. My preparing to teach a master's class in Case Study Methodology tomorrow has elicited from my own mind a story on leadership, interpretative research, and William Blake. I'll start with Blake and work my way back to leadership.

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
To hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour. . .

You may have recognized the first stanza from "Auguries of Innocence" without necessary having known that William Blake wrote it. Two years as an English major and this is what I recall! It is fair to say that I am a charter member in the Club of Knowing a Little About a Lot.

So what do Blake's words mean? Most literary critics suggest that the poet was reflecting on the state of apprehending wholes from parts. Even contemporary physicists are beginning to believe that reality is kind of like broccoli--each little stalk is a microcosm of the stalk of which it is a part. What might one learn about broccoli by examining a little piece? Can we see a world in a grain of sand?

My training and experience with case study research suggests that it attempts to do just what Blake wished for his reader--to create from a unique and bounded case a universe of meaning. It does so by exposing the theoretical frame of the researcher, selecting with precision whom or what is to be studied, drilling deeply into the peculiarities of examined people or programs, and validating its findings through collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data from multiple sources.

While serving a doctoral internship with the regional education laboratory in the 1990s, I authored a case study of teacher leaders in a comprehensive high school. Even before its being codified in the North Carolina Teacher Evaluation Process, the concept of teacher as leader was gaining nation-wide currency as a strategy in school reform efforts. The principal, so goes the thinking, is a leader of leaders, one who leads not from the front but from the center.

My study, conducted as part of a class called, Interpretative Inquiry, occurred over the course of one school semester. I assumed an ethnographic stance, looking in as an outsider, an interested but objective observer. My data consisted of hours and hours of personal interviews and examination of archival documents, including journals and meeting minutes in a Piedmont North Carolina high school. I used a member-check strategy involving teacher-subject review of interview transcripts. Assisted by a software program called HyperQual, I distilled emerging themes from my tomes of data.

My attempt to remain a dispassionate observer, however, frequently left me sleepless. For example, after several meetings with the female head of the math department, I listened to a poignant story of how the teacher had been excoriated by a parent upset with a grade she had given a student, a grade which the principal ultimately changed to favor the disgruntled parent. Her eyes watered up.

"I don't think they understand why I gave the grade I did or why I teach as I do," she told me. "They accused me of 'not caring.' That really hurt. I do care. I love my students so much that I demand only the best from them. I care in the long run." When I left the high school that day, I think I cried a little, too.

For present purposes, the results of my study are unimportant. What is important is this: At the end of residency and return to my district to be a principal, her words became a cornerstone of my leadership code of conduct. I decided then that I would love my teachers so much that I would expect the best of them. And I would support them in doing their best. I would care in the long run. I hope that I did.

My University of North Carolina at Greensboro professor, Svi Shapiro, encouraged me to publish my case study. I was not as confident then as I later became, but I did present my paper at a research conference. And you are reading about it now. Despite a novice researcher's lack of courage in submitting his work for peer review, maybe it is enough that you may be encouraged to conduct a case study that could inform your leadership practice.

I can honestly say that of all the research that I have read, evaluated, or produced none have more influenced my career than the lesson offered me by that teacher leader on a cold, overcast Monday nearly 20 years ago. A world in a grain of sand.