Leadership Development in School - Essay Example

Insert Title: Name: Institution: Module: Instructor: 10th September, 2009 Introduction Scholarly work has shown that most leadership training programs or initiatives fall short of producing leaders. This is founded on the grounds that typical programs teach leadership theory, perceptions, and principles; they advance leadership literacy other than leadership competence. Robert (2008) argues that men and women turn out to be leaders by putting into practice, and by performing premeditated acts of leadership. The prime role of a good principal (one who is proficient and ethical) is to set up and strengthen values and purpose, in developing vision and strategy, put together community, as well as instigates appropriate organisational changes. This behavior calls for character, creativeness, along with compassion, which are core traits that cannot be obtained cognitively. A competent and strategic leadership practice is perhaps the cornerstone of developing and recognising the school potential. Having observed and evaluated educational leadership in various schools, it is a well known fact that a good school leader is expected to manage people; support both the students and staff, this contributes to building a niche of strong relationship among the learning community. This will automatically foster a friendly atmosphere of support, value and hope among students, staff, parents as well as wider community at large. For instance, majority of developing organisations recognises the fundamental precedence of people, working well with people and also the right choice of recruiting people, developing and retaining them is a good catalyst of enhancing partnerships, processes and products (good results). Leadership development in school There is slight proof that whichever course or plan creates better leaders, in spite of their numerous advocates. All the same, organisations have persisted in sending their staff to programs that purport teaching them on how to become leaders. The architects as well as the purveyors of these programs consist of the business schools along with their executive-education divisions, highly-regarded institutions like the Australian Management Association and the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), and the experientially-oriented organisations like the Outward Bound and the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS). These organisations form huge part of the industry; for example a Google search presently shows more than seven million matches for “Leadership Programs”. The doubtful suggestion of the entire activity is that an exhaustive educational plan may hoist consciousness, change behavior, as well as transform managers into leaders. As a result, they prey on the common aspirations of those who inquire about rising to leadership positions. After all, roughly every person wants to be a leader, for leaders are thought to have more power and status as compared to his/her followers, and they usually earn more money. Schools that send some of its high-potential staff to leadership programs are hopeful that the individuals will become better leaders. In a modern-day analogue to the Hawthorne outcome, performance could progress when the organisation pays more interest to the auspicious candidates, who examine their selection as inferred backing and remuneration for past performance. Of course, those who graduate from leadership programs do obtain an expression that mean leadership literacy. This permits them to operate in the midst of greater authority, despite of the value of their decisions, and their followers who could be more inclined in the direction of supporting new leadership initiatives. Nevertheless, what do these leadership programs really achieve? They teach partakers about leadership, presenting historical perceptions on leadership theory, innovative paradigms, as well as lists of leadership virtues. They offer the aspiring leaders a cognitive understanding on leadership. McCauley and Van Velsor (2004) affirm that many scholars have wondered whether this leadership programs of educational partakers teach the participants how to lead, that appears uncertain, for learning to lead involves learning to act in a different way. No individual can gain knowledge of to riding a bicycle, or performing a graceful golf stroke by either reading a manual or listening to a lecture. Mastery of these activities involves conducting tests and learning, followed by repeated as well as dedicated practice. Taking a course on wise men could be of assistance in learning about them; however it seems improbable in making someone wiser! Leadership is no different. Formal leadership programs in schools may challenge principals, teachers or other stakeholders or strengthen their self-esteem, although they do not consistently create a long-term change in their psyches or conduct within a school setup. They may increase their understanding of the behavioral patterns of others (students and parents), but they cannot duplicate the surroundings within which school leaders have to perform their expertise nor present the time necessary to reform behavior. As a result, basic behavioral change is rare, and graduates more often than not regress to old models within weeks. Participants in leadership programs often do polish certain skills, particularly in communications, and they may develop greater awareness of how they present themselves to others. But true leadership is much more than glossy packaging. Leadership is a potentiality, inchoate and unrealised until it is developed. For a case in point, within Aristotle’s representation of virtue, men become just by performing just acts (Robert 2008). They become brave by performing acts of bravery. In the same way, men become leaders by performing planned acts of leadership. Leadership is merely not a skill that should only be taught in schools; men and women turn out to be leaders simply after tempering in the callous crucible of organisational or school practice. So paradoxically, even as leadership cannot be taught, it can be learned. Plan to develop school leadership Good school leaders conduct themselves in ways that allow them to do well in these roles. Compiling lists of the requirement traits is an unavoidable exercise for leadership theorists (Stogdill, 1948). Latest nominations for such traits consist of humility (Collins, 2001), credibility (Kouzes and Posner, 2002), and modesty (Badarocco, 2002) all this traits reflect the existing response in opposition to the cult of charisma. Scholars have recommended that effective leadership behavior entails character, creativity, and compassion, core qualities or traits that cannot be attained cognitively. Character is the basis for ethical leadership behavior in most schools. It includes scope of integrity, courage, honesty, as well as the will of doing better. According to the majority of developmental psychologists affirms that character forms as a result of early training and exposure to appropriate role models. Moral training later on in life (throughout leadership programs) appears to narrow down the impact on inherent moral partiality. For example, sermons on morality may possibly remind the worshippers not to sin, however they obviously have slight effect on venality, greed and corruption. Creativity is the primary source of the leader’s ability of foreseeing rousing future, become accustomed to change and the formulation of new paradigms to substitute outdated old models. School leaders think creatively, articulate passion, initiate change and support diversity. Majority of principals in Australia praised on their ability to think linearly, favor reason, stability, and consensus in their execution of duties-this has been made possible because of ease in accessing leadership training programs. Principals are required to administer repetitive tasks, activities that may be catalogued in educational policy manuals and organised in guides to procedures. But when fresh challenges crop up, educational system in schools may call for individuals who can invent innovative approaches to resolving educational challenges. The system may require men and women who are capable of perceiving patterns and crafting a context that leads to foresight. Study has shown that such inventors in educational system in most cases are not the graduates of business schools or leadership training programs: they are iconoclasts, innovators, and creative dynamos. On the other hand, compassion is the trait that school leaders require in order to empathise with their staff and in the end build a munificent community in which both the teachers and students align themselves with the rationale of the school. After all, it is the loyalty of both the staff and students that gives a principal the power to carry out his or her agenda (Goleman et al., 2002). Path to leadership Majority of Consultancy Organisations in Australia, which mostly train school leaders, advocates the development of self-management competence, social capabilities, as well as work facilitation capabilities (McCauley and Van Velsor, 2004). For those charged with the responsibility for developing leaders, its believed that there are three basic steps involved: (1) Select the right candidates. Preparing men and women for leadership positions is a responsibility of in office leaders that dates back to the fifth century BC, as Plato campaigned for the training of individuals who were supposed to sooner or later lead the nation as philosopher-kings. These days’ leaders ought to be evenly considerate as they implement authority. Selecting the right candidates for leadership position (identifying potential principal) is not simple. There are four basic traits to look for: Strong motivation. Potential leaders have to demonstrate a strong need to achieve set goals (and a history of taking initiative) in addition to a drive for power. Such individuals time and again have a “redemptive urge”. Those who lack this passion and the readiness to build an extended loyalty to the leadership path are not likely to be successful. Positive attitude. The motivational force of leaders can be persistent only if they show hopefulness in the moments of hardship. Resilience and adaptability are key virtues for apprentice leaders in most learning institutions. Morality. Potential school leaders ought to have positive values as well as benevolent motives, for they have to take on the responsibility of helping their schools and the surrounding community discharge its potential and fulfill its apparent destiny. A moral backbone is vital for any school leader who aspires in the direction of virtuous goals. Poor leadership practices and crooks guide people off track rather than down the lane of long-term accomplishment, often with devastating outcome. Potential for growth. Great leaders in most schools make obvious the capacity to improve the leading practice in office; they are willing to learn and refine their leadership expertise. (2) Create learning challenges. On-the-job training is the sine qua non of the leadership development process. Leadership is undeveloped awaiting possible leaders to display their determination in unique situations. Leadership proficiency builds up when an individual is required to tackle the test innovation, inspiration, and adaption. Trial and error is a key aspect in the education of leaders; many school executives account that their utmost learning occurred as the result of a failure compared to a success. Bennis and Thomas (2002) propose that all possible leaders ought to pass through a crucible that grants a transforming knowledge. An excellent model for leadership training comes from the field of medicine. Surgical training, for instance, is founded on a classical series of procedures: see one, do one, teach one. In top most surgical departments, leaders begin with interns who happen to have a superior foundation in anatomy and other applicable disciplines but no experience in surgery, they spend more time training them, and afterward recruit faculty from the same ranks. This is the similar case in many line of work; top performers in medicine detach themselves from average performers by practicing diligently. The moral for school leaders who desire to promote a legacy is this: once apprentices have comprehended the theory, give them as much practice as possible, by this means allowing them to learn from the very process of teaching. Eventually, the leader in training will develop a portfolio of behaviors which he/she can use while responding to specific challenges. The trial-and-error cause of learning can be boosted by observation as well as the study of role models. Case histories that elaborate on the rise and fall of leaders can be helpful. (3) Provide mentoring. Teaching leadership is like teaching enlightenment. However, in the same way as great religious leaders communicate on the road to enlightenment, leaders in the learning institutions can show direction for their learners. This is the role of an instructor, a person who inspires, educates, and leads by example. Tichy (2002), for case in point, supports the significance of a “teachable point-of-view”. In these days’ company lexicon, this is identified as mentoring. A sage senior principal can provide helpful response to an inexperienced junior principal. The best response will recognise the individual’s successes as well as failures in handling particular leadership disputes. Based on the latest survey, more than 70% of the Fortune 500 learning institutions set up formal mentoring programs (Fortune Magazine, 2000). Good leadership development in schools depends mainly on what leaders (principals) do, not on their qualities or style. For that reason, to develop potential leaders in their learning institutions, principal (leaders) should model leadership behaviour themselves, so that staff members can truly examine leadership in action. Plan for improvement in school leadership The best leadership plans will focus on building skills. It has been suggested that the critical skill for a leader is rhetoric – portrayed by Robert (2008) as the “convincing marshaling of fact”. In modern expressions, rhetoric can be taken to encompass skills in critical thinking, communications, as well as negotiation. These kinds of skills can be taught, even though, translating leadership skill into proficiency requires practice. And leaders in one professional background cannot be anticipated to execute his/her duties equally well in another professional background, this explains the relative incompetence of simulation exercises presented in many leadership programs. Leaders also need knowledge from a certain background, an understanding of the educational issues, policy of the education sector, and the environment within which the schools operates, together with an understanding of their own roles, its competencies, strengths and weaknesses, as well as cultural biases. This type of knowledge can crop up from study, or from a cognitive development. Self-knowledge, which is a vital supplement to knowledge concerning the world, can arise through reflection and through feedback from others (Tichy 2002). Potential school leaders can also learn from the experience of peers who face similar leadership challenges. For those in charge of developing school leaders, the selection process is critical. They have to identify those potential school leaders who possess the building blocks of character, creativity, and compassion, those who also have an apparent sense of purpose along with the energy to pursue that purpose. Boards of directors and incumbent principals need to provide these apprentices leadership challenges among the upcoming school leaders – the only chance of gaining experience in school leadership roles, to get hold of the necessary knowledge, and to learn from others. Moreover, they need also to be providing mentoring and continuing feedback on leadership performance in various schools to gauge the success of the program. It is through this experiential process that men and women from various schools grow to be leaders. The call for strengthening preparation and professional growth and development programs for school leaders in Australia is recognized nationally and internationally. The quality of school leadership in the country has hardly ever mattered more. School leaders are expected not only to run schools well but to be acquainted with different ways of developing their schools as organizations with the capability of constantly assessing as well as improving their performance. The traditional methods of training school leaders and the continuing professional learning has encountered various setbacks forcing it not to withstand to the contemporary demands. Many scholars have written damning reports concerning the incapacity of university degree programs failure to prepare future leaders. They have asserted that majority of school leaders have been educated and appointed on jobs that hardly ever exist in the contemporary world. In Australia, many quality sets of standards for school leaders have been developed. However, they are not profession-wide and specific to employing authorities. A recent review explored approaches to standards for prospective and established school leaders and options for a national system for assessment against those leaders. Australia has been one of the countries that has experienced difficult in pointing out to any orderly programs for training school leaders across most states and territories. The school leaders’ field has been epitomized by short-lived courses, regularly unrelated to each other and rarely sequential over moment in time. Future leaders have jammed what they may perhaps been running for, this has made it possible I gaining school principal positions through little formal progress in school leadership. Corporate executives, consultants and senior school principals have created the largest part of the innovation in management practice. And with a small number of exceptions, they have taken over the latest literature on leadership. Unfortunately, the academic communities in Australia are yet to contribute scores of new paradigms for leadership or useful models for teaching leadership, although the case literature flourish in the midst of reports of institution’s success and failure in addition to the decisions taken by both the principals and other school leaders. This deficiency in learning institutions can be remedied by incorporating the findings of researchers in the educational field to: Set up a metric for evaluating leadership effectiveness in schools. However, if there is no consent on what a leader is or what a leader does in a school set-up, it may be difficult in reaching a conformity on how to develop leaders is, at best, as well as aspiration to satisfy. Develop an empirical correlation connecting leadership behavior and leadership qualities along with the outcomes. Historical cases and other anecdotal reports tend to support current mythologies. Plan experiments that authenticate a fundamental (or statistically significant) connection between educational and training initiatives in addition to the development of leaders. Conclusion Educators or leaders who work in the school settings time and again come across participants with a broad scope of individual leadership frameworks, beliefs, mind-set and experiences. Given all this situations, one of the key challenges stakeholders in educational sector face is the spotting effective methods and tools of either undertaking or teaching leadership in school or community settings. As an educator, it is very vital to understand and use quality learning as well as theory in leadership education. At the same time, it is also imperative to employ educational methods that revere the life experiences of the participants and that are simple to comprehend and converse. We need more and better principals in our schools. Conventional leadership programs that are still being used in other parts of Australia miss the mark, and they pander to the learning institutions that are looking for better leaders. They may offer leadership literacy, but cannot develop leadership competence. A courageous principal will trust his or her school’s staff with leadership authority so that they can learn how to use it wisely. And the sooner principal shares significant powers with a new generation of staff (other teachers), the sooner they will turn out to be the next generation of leaders in schools. That subtle process of sharing power charmingly and adroitly is what makes leadership training an art. References Allio, RJ 2004. The Seven Faces of Leadership, New York: Tata-McGraw Hill. Badarocco, JL Jr 2002. Leading Quietly: An Unorthodox Guide to Doing the Right Thing, Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Bennis, WG & Thomas, RJ 2002. Geeks and Geezers, Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Bhindi, N & Duignan, P 1997. Leadership for a new century: Educational Management & Administration, vol. 25, no. 21, pp. 117-133. Bush, T & Glover, D 2002. School Leadership: Concepts and Evidence A report to the National College for School Leadership, Nottingham. Collins, J 2001. “Level 5 leadership”, Harvard Business Review, January. Fortune Magazine (2000), January. Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R & McKee, A 2002. Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power Of Emotional Intelligence, Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Kouzes, JM & Posner, BZ 2002. The Leadership Challenge, San Francisco: Jossey Bass. McCauley, CD & Van Velsor, E 2004. Handbook of Leadership Development, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Robert JA 2008. Leadership development: teaching versus learning, Rhode Island: Allio Associates LLC, Providence, USA. Stogdill, RM 1948. “Personal factors associated with leadership”, The Journal of Psychology, Vol. 25. Tichy, N 2002. The Cycle of Leadership, New York: Harper Business. Read More

Nevertheless, what do these leadership programs achieve? They teach partakers about leadership, presenting historical perceptions on leadership theory, innovative paradigms, as well as lists of leadership virtues. They offer aspiring leaders a cognitive understanding of leadership. McCauley and Van Velsor (2004) affirm that many scholars have wondered whether these leadership programs of educational partakers teach the participants how to lead, which appears uncertain, for learning to lead involves learning to act differently.

No individual can gain knowledge of riding a bicycle, or performing a graceful golf stroke by either reading a manual or listening to a lecture. Mastery of these activities involves conducting tests and learning, followed by repeated as well as dedicated practice. Taking a course on wise men could be of assistance in learning about them; however, it seems improbable in making someone wiser! Leadership is no different. Formal leadership programs in schools may challenge principals, teachers, or other stakeholders or strengthen their self-esteem, although they do not consistently create a long-term change in their psyches or conduct within a school setup.

They may increase their understanding of the behavioral patterns of others (students and parents), but they cannot duplicate the surroundings within which school leaders have to perform their expertise or present the time necessary to reform behavior. As a result, basic behavioral change is rare, and graduates more often than not regress to old models within weeks. Participants in leadership programs often polish certain skills, particularly in communications, and they may develop greater awareness of how they present themselves to others.

But true leadership is much more than glossy packaging. Leadership is a potentiality, inchoate and unrealized until it is developed. For a case in point, within Aristotle’s representation of virtue, men become just by performing just acts (Robert 2008). They become brave by performing acts of bravery. In the same way, men become leaders by performing planned acts of leadership. Leadership is merely not a skill that should only be taught in schools; men and women turn out to be leaders simply after tempering in the callous crucible of organizational or school practice.

So paradoxically, even as leadership cannot be taught, it can be learned. Plan to develop school leadership Good school leaders conduct themselves in ways that allow them to do well in these roles. Compiling lists of the required traits is an unavoidable exercise for leadership theorists (Stogdill, 1948). The latest nominations for such traits consist of humility (Collins, 2001), credibility (Kouzes and Posner, 2002), and modesty (Badarocco, 2002) all these traits reflect the existing response in opposition to the cult of charisma.

Scholars have recommended that effective leadership behavior entails character, creativity, and compassion, core qualities or traits that cannot be attained cognitively. Character is the basis for ethical leadership behavior in most schools. It includes the scope of integrity, courage, honesty, as well as the will of doing better. The majority of developmental psychologists affirm that character forms as a result of early training and exposure to appropriate role models. Moral training later on in life (throughout leadership programs) appears to narrow down the impact on inherent moral partiality.

For example, sermons on morality may remind the worshippers not to sin, however, they have a slight effect on venality, greed, and corruption. Creativity is the primary source of the leader’s ability to foresee the rousing future, become accustomed to change, and formulate new paradigms to substitute outdated old models. School leaders think creatively, articulate passion, initiate change, and support diversity. The majority of principals in Australia are praised for their ability to think linearly, favor reason, stability, and consensus in their execution of duties-this has been made possible because of ease in accessing leadership training programs.

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