Educational Leadership and System Thinking - Essay Example

Educational Leadership Name: Course Title: Tutor: Institutional Affiliation: Department: Date of Submission: Leaders are people who can influence and persuade people to take a certain direction. A leader has the ability of directing and organizing others in order to achieve a common goal.(Stogdill, 1974). This ability enables the organization to transform its potential vision into reality. Therefore, effective leadership is a main pillar of life and success in school. The leader motivates the teachers and students with the aim of achieving higher goals. He also electrifies the dormant potential in the students causing an increase in desire to succeed in their work. Leaders can come up with clear goals, which are achievable and then help others in the school to accomplish them. Leaders use their social influence to accomplish common set goals. Though there is a close link between leadership and management, the two disciplines do differ in their core functions. Management aims at maintaining order and consistency. The manager measures the outcome of the processes and advises accordingly. The aim is to stabilize the outcome. The main function of managers involves planning, organizing, budgeting, staffing, controlling and directing. On the other hand, the leader's main role is to shape a vision for the organization and produce adaptive changes in the processes. The leader gives the organization the direction, inspires them and motivates them to take a certain course. Both the leader and the manager are indispensable. A school cannot exist with them. As the leader creates the vision and adaptive changes, the manager is needed to keep order. The manager deals conceptual side of the school making the vision a reality. Therefore, an effective school leader, should be not only able to coach, teach, inspire and serve the school but also be able to allocate the available resources efficiently. The school principal should ensure that the resources available are allocated wisely and where they can be bring the maximum benefit. The teachers should be allocated the subjects that they are most comfortable teaching while ensuring the physical resources, for example, the library and lecture hall are utilized optimally. The power to change the mind of people may come from many sources (Bass & Bass, 2009); some can influence other since they hold a senior position in the school. For example, the school principle. They have the legitimate power to come up with goals and enlist the help of fellow teachers to achieve them. Some get the power through rewards, promotions, salary increases and some assignment in the school may accord one of the teacher power to lead others. Moreover, unmatched knowledge in a certain field will give a person's opinion more weight due to the expertise held in that field. The ability to influence may due to subordinate identifying with the leader and the respect accorded to him/her. Hence, his/her opinion is taken seriously, and others back him up as he/she steers the organization. Another source of power is coercion. The leader may force the subordinate to act on the developed goals. The subordinate who follows the given instruction may receive rewards or punishment. Coercion will get the work done but at a low satisfaction level. The subordinate will most likely suffer from low self-esteem. The power enables the leader to propose new methods in the organization. Over time, different theories have been proposed to explain leadership in the organization. The trait theory argues that a leader differs from the average person in terms of traits, for example, intelligence, passion and endurance (Schyns & Meindl, 2005).Its main assumption is that people are born with inherited traits and that people who are good leaders have the sufficient combinations of traits. Hence, leaders with the right skills and traits are more likely to succeed than their counterparts. A leader, according to trait theory should be decisive, dependable, self-confident, persistent, dominant, energetic, ambitious, willing to assume responsibility, tolerant to stress among, many more traits. These traits make the leader unique among a group of people and enabling them to influence others. On the contrast, behavioral theories assert that leaders are made rather than are born. The average person can learn a set of defined behavior that constitutes a leader's personality. Behavioral theorist does not focus on the inherited traits but acquired behavior.(Stogdill, 1974) In this category, leaders show concerns of the people and that of production. The more a leader is concerned with the employees, the more the productivity increases and absenteeism decreases. A task-oriented leaders' leads to an increase in employees' performance. One of the behavioral theories is McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y. Employees are assumed to dislike work in theory X and also will try to avoid it if possible. Thus, they must be coerced so as to achieve the set goals. Furthermore, it is assumed that employees dislike responsibility, and thus must receive clear direction. On the other hand, theory Y, assert that employees view work as natural. They are committed to the objectives, and even the average employee can learn to accept responsibility. Moreover, good decision-making is dispersed across the population and not necessarily reserved for managers alone. Another theory of leadership is participative leadership(Schyns & Meindl, 2005). It is assumed that the involvement in decision making improves the understanding of the issues by those who will implement the decisions. The involvement generates commitment to the set goals, and the employee tends to be more collaborative than competitive when they generate goals together. Moreover, several people making a decision together reduces the risk of mistake. Lewin outlined three styles of participatory leadership. One is autocratic leadership style. In this style, leader does not consult subordinate in the decision making. It is used where subordinate input is not required. The second style is democratic, where the employees are involved in the decision making, but the leader has the final say. Lastly, the laissez-faire style minimizes the involvement of leaders in the decision making. Other theorists assert that the best action to take depends on the situation. The action that the leader takes depends on three forces; situation, followers and leaders. Therefore, the leadership style is very variable. Another closely related theory of leadership is contingency theory. It is broader than the situational leadership as it includes contingent factors on top of variables within the situation. Effective leadership at one place does not guarantee success in another place. The Transactional leadership theory assumes that employees are motivated by reward and punishment. Thus, the subordinate main purpose is to do what they are instructed to do. The transactional leader ensures that reward, work requirement and punishments are clear. When the worker accepts the job, he/she cedes the authority of the company. The transformational leader examines and searches for the needs of the others while aiming for a higher agenda. He is a change agent. A vision of the future is developed by the leader, which excites the employees and then sells it to the employees. It is assumed that employees will follow a person who inspires them and hence with his vision and passion he can achieve great things. In the above organization theories, the organizations are viewed as a machine that aims to produce the maximum performance with minimum resource use. Recently, the focus has been on individual behaviors and how they interact with one another. Learning Organizations are organizations that are capable of creating, acquiring and transferring knowledge, while people are changing behavior to reflect new knowledge. The employees in the organization continually expand the capacity to create the result they desire, remodel the prevailing thinking patterns and strive to see the organization as a whole. The learning organization has been popularized by Peter Senge under the fifth discipline. The Senge theory of organizational learning consists of five disciplines: systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision and team working(P. Senge, 2000). Peter Senge advocates the discipline of system thinking. Organizations are better off viewed as whole rather than disjointed parts. Organizations are complex and dynamic and hence the effect of individual actions takes time before they are reflected in the system. There are two basic concepts in system thinking; delays and feedback processes(P. M. Senge & Suzuki, 1994). The feedback can be reinforcing or balancing. In a system, a small change may lead to spiral of improvement. For example, a teacher may decide to incorporate the use of technology in the class. The use of technology may lead to improvement in class mean grade. The improvement in class mean grade attracts more students with better grades. The initial action reinforces the growth or decline of the organization. The balancing process will bring the system to a stable state. In the feedback process, there are delays that interrupt the flow of effect. In the above example, the effect of technology use may not be immediate but gradual. Moreover, the teacher has to balance the use of technology aided means and face to face teaching. Personnel in an organization are supposed to continually clarify, deepen personal vision, focus energies, develop patience and see reality objectively. The organization learns through individuals. The core of this discipline is to developing the ability to maintaining not only a clear view of present reality but also personal vision(P. Senge, 2000). In the process, a creative tension is created in the individual and as the tension is resolved the individual moves the reality closer to personal vision. The teacher should be a long-life student, always researching on new practices in the learning environment. Mental models refer to assumptions, hypotheses and generalizations that shape individual's comprehension of and interaction with his world. Most individuals are not aware of their mental models and how they shape their behaviors. Hence, the organization must foster dialog among individual. Two skills are crucial for his discipline: reflection and inquiry. Reflection enables individuals to recognize their mental models while inquiry helps the individuals to share their personal vision as they learn about each other assumptions about a given subject. The organization goals, values and mission needs to be translated into a shared vision.Shared vision constitutes a picture of the future that the organization seeks to create. A shared vision generates commitment and enrollment rather than compliance. The leader must be able to translate the individual personal visions to shared vision. Another discipline is team learning.It stems from personal mastery and shared vision. It is the process of aligning and developing abilities of a team to create the results that its member needs.The discipline builds on dialog; the capacity of members of a team to put away assumptions and think together(P. Senge, 2000). It is opposed to discussion. The aim of team learning is to share ideas while discussions focus on winning the debate. The dialog involves a free flow of meaning to enable members of the team to discover insight that could not have otherwise been discovered individually. The five disciplines are crucial to the success of the learning organization. In the school, as a learning organization, the teacher needs to understand school consist of interrelated parts that work together.And hence the actions of the teacher affect other departments. The teacher is supposed to keep up with the trends in the education sector, exploring new teaching methods that improve student mastery of course content. Furthermore, as the teacher learns the best practice, there is a need to abandon some of the assumptions and generalization about students and learning environment. These mental models must be scrutinized to ensure they align with the reality. The school principal, as the leader must communicate the school vision effectively, to build a shared goal and identity. The shared vision will produce enthusiasm and commitment. When teacher acts as a team, sharing information and learning from each other, the school records better results. The theories of leadership show that the success of the school most likely depend on the school principal who is tasked with the job of organizing and planning (Ubben, Hughes, & Norris, 2001). Research indicates that school variables considered separately have minimal effect on the learning. However, when the individual variables are joined together, the learning outcomes are increased significantly. The principal leads in a school environment and should be able to combine the individual elements in the school environment so as to maximize learning outcomes. Leadership is considered second only to classroom instruction among the factors that affects student learning (Leithwood & Riehl, 2003). This is because the school principal remains the single source of influence in a school setting. Hence, the ability of the school principal to focus on what is essential, the direction to take and how to move on is crucial. The school principle, no longer function as a manager whose job is to adhere to rules and avoid mistakes, but must learn how to develop the staff at the disposal and inspire them. There are five key functions that an effective school principal as leader play to improve student achievement. First, the school principal shapes the vision of academic success for all the students. Research in educational leadership shows that effective principals can come up with a school vision of commitment to high standard and success of all students.(Sergiovanni, 1996) The principal is responsible for each and every student performance. High academic expectations for all students will enable such principal to close the achievement gap between the advantaged and less advantaged students. The high expectation also raises the overall achievement of all students. Career success in a globalized economy depends very much on a strong education. Setting high and achievable learning goals increases the student motivation (Epstein et al., 2002). The vision shapes the future; students and teachers understand what is expected of them. The school vision must be communicated effectively to the faculty and the principal need to ensure that each member of staff embraces it. Therefore, developing a shared school road map around high and rigorous standards, and embracing success for all student notions is very crucial for effective school leaderships. Secondly, the principal should create an environment that promotes education. A healthy school environment is vital to allow both the teachers and students to thrive (Cunningham & Cordeiro, 2003). The environment should be supportive and responsive to student and learning should be at the center of the daily activities. Moreover, an effective leader should implement basic safety and orderliness measures in the school. The teachers should be supported and incorporated into a community of professionals whose focus is good instructions. Psychological support will help the teachers cope with hard situations in the school and foster a sense of optimism in teachers. An effective school principal will focus the energy on tackling negativism, teacher isolation and resistance. As these characteristics are being eliminated, the school community built upon respect will spring (Cotton, 2003). The community will be professional, school-oriented and very inclusive. Both staff and student should be involved in all major school event to ensure collaboration. The school principal to be effective needs to cultivate leadership skills in others. Leadership theory shows that a leader needs to depend on other during the decision-making process. A good supportive staff will enhance the school success. The theory asserts that spreading of power in an organization increases productivity (Schyns & Meindl, 2005). The school principal should distribute power among the members of staff. Effective leadership from all sections of the school, i.e., influential and senior teacher, staff teams and other members of the school fraternity will improve student performance. This improvement may result from the fact; delegation of power motivates the subordinate, and also group decision-making minimizes the chances of mistakes. Team work should be employed in the curriculum development, problem-solving and instructional practice to ripe maximum benefit. Fourthly, effective school principal works relentlessly to improve the quality of instruction. They develop a vision and set high expectation for both teacher and student, discourage teacher isolation, encourage teamwork and establish interpersonal relationship with teachers and student (Cunningham & Cordeiro, 2003). They encourage the members of staff to adopt a lifelong learning style, where the staff continues developing their skills. The principal need to keep track of teacher's professional development and evaluate the teacher in the classroom. The evaluation helps the teacher to develop and grow. The formal and informal evaluation focus on giving feedback that encourages professional growth. Lastly, the school principal needs to make good use of the resources available. It is important the principal be able to manage people, data and process in the school (Ubben et al., 2001).Nurturing and supporting staff member is one of the key functions of an effective leader. The principal should be able to recognize teachers who have the potential to grow and those who do not have. Apart from the people the principal is managing, he/she should be able to draw information from the data available and use it to make informed decisions. The data available should be analyzed properly, not only to pinpoint the problems in the school, but also the nature and their cause. The information can be used to plan and implement a new process. Furthermore, the principal should be able to support, advocate, monitor and communicate what to be done clearly. It is clear that the school principal needs to be a good manager, and also an effective leader. Comparing and contrasting the literature above with my experience with the educational leadership, it is clear that are some gaping holes. The above-noted points indicate the benchmark of educational leadership. They are supported by theory and hence very vital in ensuring the success in the school. One big problem we are facing in the school is the lack of collaboration. As seen above the school principal should encourage leadership in the school. The distributed responsibility enables the school to run smoothly and the staff to work in a team. Delegation of power is supported by theory. Both the participants and transformational leadership theories assert that involving subordinate in decision-making increasing productivity (Stogdill, 1974).This is different in the school. Though there is a delegation, it is not sufficient enough to improve staff morale. Most decisions are made then passed down to junior staff without regard of their opinion. Therefore, staff does not identify with what is happening in the school. The vision of the school is not fully embraced by all stakeholders. Thus, developing a vision statement is not enough, we need to ensure the vision is embraced by the stakeholders. One positive guide is the school vision statement. The vision should guide the school, and this is a great thing that the school principal should ensure. The school principal needs to mobilize the members of staff, students and non-teaching staff to embrace and support the school vision. Another key point is that the school principal has laid emphasis on creating a conducive school environment. The step taken has created an environment that supports and promotes learning. The attitude toward children is supportive and very responsive. This has been a great encouragement to the student and has enabled them to pursue their goals. The school is well organized, with the location of the offices easy to find. The teachers are well supported in their endeavors to improve their professional knowledge. Transformational leadership theory shows that the leader should be able to influence others. The school principal should develop vision and influence others to take action. In this way, the principal will be able to raise other leaders in the school. The school principal has to try to some extent to foster leadership growth in the school, especially among the senior members of the staff. Literature reviews shows that, the school principal should encourage all the staff members to be leaders in their class (Leithwood & Riehl, 2003). The emphasize on the senior staff may not bear much fruit as compared to distributing power to all members of staff. Delegation of power ensures decision making takes less time, and better decisions are made. In conclusion, the school principal has been successful in some front like; creating a healthy learning environment and giving the school vision. However, she has been unable to influence the staff members. Influencing the staff to join hands and push ahead the agenda outlined in the school vision is vital. The challenges remain on how to form a team of staff, who the cares and trust each other. From the above, we can see a good leader should be a good communicator. As a leader, one must listen a lot. Good listening skills enables the leader to understand the needs and desires of the subordinate. The information gathered enables the leader to make the right decision and lead others. In addition, the leader should be an expert in his/her domain area. The school principal should be an expert in different fields of the education, understanding the best practices in instruction and management of the school (Leithwood & Riehl, 2003).The school principal should listen to the input of other teachers and work for the betterment of the whole school community. Besides this, the leader should also be proactive as opposed to reactive. The school principal should detect downward trend and arrest them before they harm the school. This call for flexibility on the part of the school principal (Valentine, Clark, Hackmann, & Petzko, 2002). In situational leadership theory, the acts depending on the information from the environment. Thus, when the leader recognizes new trends, he/she should be ready to adapt to new surroundings and situations. Adaptability and flexibility requires that the school principal be quite confident and enthusiastic. The leader should be sure of his/her ability to handle the new situations and also motivated enough to conquer any problem in the path chosen. In addition, other leadership characteristic seen from the models is the art of delegation. The school principal should not attempt to accomplish all on his/her own. He should delegate some duties to the staff. The leader should be the initiator. Exploring, planning and implementation fall under the docket of the leader. The leader should be able to come up with new ideas and suggest how they can be implemented. The leader should be able to evaluate and give feedback. This helps in improvement and progress of the subordinate. The failure in the global education sector to accept the changes occurring has led to great losses talent which can be harnessed from the school. Most of the youth in the globe leaves the school system with the prerequisite skills which cannot enable them to function in the job market. The trend has led to increasing unemployment among the youth. The school principal needs to get up their efforts and work toward success for all students. In conclusion, there are many desirable characteristics that a school principal should have. But the main amongst them includes; a leader should be a good planner, vision oriented, organized and implementer. The ability to come up with new ideas, pursue them relentlessly and implement them set apart the great leaders in the school and the mediocre one. REFERENCES Bass, B. M., & Bass, R. (2009). The Bass handbook of leadership: Theory, research, and managerial applications. Simon and Schuster.  Cotton, K. (2003). Principals and Student Achievement: What the Research Says. ERIC. Cunningham, W. G., & Cordeiro, P. A. (2003). Educational leadership: A problem-based approach. ERIC. Epstein, J. L., Sanders, M. G., Simon, B. S., Salinas, K. C., Jansorn, N. R., & Van Voorhis, F. L. (2002). School, family, and community partnerships: Your handbook for action . Corwin Press. Leithwood, K. A., & Riehl, C. (2003). What we know about successful school leadership. National College for School Leadership Nottingham. Schyns, B., & Meindl, J. R. (2005). Implicit leadership theories: Essays and explorations (Vol. 3). IAP. Senge, P. (2000). The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. New York: Doubleday. Senge, P. M., & Suzuki, J. (1994). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. Currency Doubleday New York. Sergiovanni, T. J. (1996). Leadership for the schoolhouse: How is it different? Why is it important?. ERIC. Stogdill, R. M. (1974). Handbook of leadership: A survey of theory and research. Free Press. Ubben, G. C., Hughes, L. W., & Norris, C. J. (2001). The principal: Creative leadership for effective schools. ERIC. Valentine, J. W., Clark, D. C., Hackmann, D. G., & Petzko, V. N. (2002). A National Study of Leadership in Middle Level Schools. Volume I: A National Study of Middle Level Leaders and School Programs. ERIC. Read More