Improving Leadership Practices - Essay Example

High Leverage Leadership Practices High Leverage Leadership Practices Administrative leaders such as principals have an obligation to serve and lead, which causes their characteristic as well as instructions, be based on leadership style. Students who learn at high levels can uplift a school status from low level to high level even without the occasional instructional principal; this will require the actions of a principle whose leadership style is based on evidence of learning. According to Mendel (2012), learning curve identification of a student lead to effective leadership. High advantage leadership policy was created to guide educational leaders as they develop new rules and regulations, refine existing laws, and make new policies in order to enhance positive student outcome. The following four practices have been presented as high leverage leadership practices that constitute effective leadership: Creating a climate hospitable to education The power of place is quite important because it acts as a support structure as well as a leadership partner. An effective school leader will ensure that the students and teachers get a climate conducive for learning and teaching respectively, which is characterized by cleanliness and safety, uninterrupted timetable for the teachers and availability of resources that aid in learning. Modeling a vision of success Educational leaders should consider the following high leverage points to ensure they are effective: insist on teacher quality, research has clearly deduced that 33% of learning impacted on students is from teachers and that teachers are more likely to improve on performance when they work collectively with their pears. Principals can ensure teacher quality by creating central office functions where teachers interact during service delivery, continuously train teachers on better teaching methods and motivating them. Leaders can also define learning and ensure a guaranteed and viable curriculum, this will ensure both the students and the teachers are not confused on what is expected of them. The principal can then supervise by evaluating what the students learnt and how they learnt it. Manage people, data, and process The school leader can do this by forming learning focused partnership, carrying out teacher evaluations, family ties, and interactions, forming a data management system that records teaching habits and monitoring and providing feedback on teaching and the learning process in general. A leader in an educational setting should act to ensure that all stakeholders i.e. teachers, students and parents are alignment towards a shared goal that ensures quality student outcome. High expectations given to students and teachers will motivate hard work and quality, ensuring that parents attend meetings, interactions and that those students take their results slips home will be an emotional tactic necessary for learning. Cultivate leadership in others Leaders can ensure motivation by providing school-wide professional development. For example, teacher training will improve learning because student’s study is highly dependent on teacher knowledge. Forming teams in different groups and assigning team leaders also assists the principal easily manage different groups of people, example of such groups include students, parents and teachers. All team leaders are set to deliver an allocated learning target to ensure time management, effective curriculum, a friendly educational environment, parent-student interaction, and collaborative evaluation. Improving on instructions Halinger (2007) describes an effective educational leader as one who gives instructions; however, such a leader should act in the capacity of service and leadership. Instructions give and should communicate shared high expectations among teacher’s parents and students, communicate the goals and foster group acceptance.The shared goals among professional communities and teachers encourages levels of student effort over and above the levels encouraged in classrooms. Applications of the new learning to improve school leadership Classroom understanding is the most important determinant of learning, however, emotional and relational learning is important as it supports classroom understanding (Seashore et, al., 2010). Past effective principals used instruction-based style of leadership. Remarkably, for the principals to be able to ensure that the positive student outcomes are met, there is need to focus on learning based styles of leadership. According to Mendel (2012), a conducive learning climate can be effectively manipulated throughout the student’s educational journey i.e. 8th grade, 3rd grade to graduation so that the student’s outcome is sustainable and effective. All actions of a leader in a school context are centered towards classroom learning; any sports development and parent involvement are all done to foster classroom understanding. As illustrated above, teachers are the greatest influence to learning ability of their students. A leader should therefore improve and enhance the teacher’s skills to enhance learning in students. The following steps can be followed to evaluate level of classroom learning through teacher feedback evaluation. Step 1: precise praise- this have been proven successful as principals who praised the teachers on actions directly related to a previous action received triple the previous results. By praising the teacher, the principal validates the teacher’s efforts to ensure that feedback is provided on the classroom learning curves. Step 2: Probe- teachers are more likely to embrace conclusion they have reached at on their own rather than directives they have received. Probing can be done using open-ended questions targeted at various classroom variables and can be done in an open discussion. To carry out an effective probing exercise, narrow the focus of questions and begin with the purpose. Step 3: identify the problem and develop appropriate action- step 2 enables the teacher to identify the problem and develop the solution on his/her own. Nonetheless, four levels depend on the responsiveness of the teacher. Level 1-100% teacher driven where the teacher identifies problem on their own, level 2-50% teacher driven where the leader prompts for identification of problem through probing of questions, level 3- where the leader presents classroom data to prompt the teacher to identify problem and level 4, leader driven where the teacher is completely unable to identify the problem. Leaders are expected to exercise control over people and processes, a principal is expected to give instructions to both students and teachers. New learning strategies introduces a new approach to monitoring and evaluation where there is collaborative evaluation i.e. students, parents, and peers take part in evaluating performance of the teacher based on the common goals that are communicated to all stakeholders. This creates motivation for hard work and alignment of institutional goals that has in the past been a powerful tool in translating to a general standard that ultimately demonstrates efficiency. Each group of an institution plays its part in converting the institution from a good school to a great one. As a principal I would model all the new learning ideals to apply to the principal of benefits of working as a whole rather than one, where I communicate instructions to different groups with the same goal for all (Louis et al.,2010,p.50). Students and parents who focus on an appropriate climate for learning, teacher performance, availability of resources, emotional support for their children, self-improvement strategies forms some of the ways through which a principal can improve the practice. Consequently, common norm of acting as a watchdog and an instructor is replaced by an instruction towards common goal kind of a situation where every entity is responsible for successful leadership. A great school is made up of teachers who are effectively delivering on service delivery and students who are learning through effective engagement and understanding. Leaders are responsible for the enhancement of the student’s achievement levels, which can be done by designing a professional development initiative that is focused on improving quality of classroom instruction. A leader who has acquired the new learning will use centralized working spaces and feedback monitoring techniques (Mendel, 2012). Teachers should be evaluated on methods of delivery; tactics used to ensure students engage in learning and follow up on understanding levels through tests and quizzes. Conclusion Good teaching is not learned through discussion rather through practice to do things best. Supervised practice is the fastest way to ensure that all the teachers are doing the right things and as expected f them. A school leader should give structured and goal oriented instructions and supervise them hence the leadership role however being an administrative leader entails more than leadership, a school leader can therefore serve by training teachers, monitoring student progress and arrange student-parent-teacher interaction. Leadership is therefore a multi-faceted approach that entails the community (Seashore et al., 2010) References Hallinger, P. (2007). Research on the practice of instructional and transformational leadership: Retrospect and prospect. Mendels, P. (2012). The effective principal. Journal of Staff Development, 33(1), 54-58. Seashore, K., Leithwood, K., Wahlstrom, K., & Anderson, S. (2010). Investigating the links to improved student learning: Final report of research findings. The Wallace Foundation. Read More