Leadership

 A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.

Lao Tzu

Introduction

This page describes leadership, leadership skills, outcomes for effective leaders, the importance of leaders to know that leadership includes distributed leadership and its importance to facilitate curriculum change, effective classroom management, and the development of other leaders.

Characteristics of leadership:

• Problem identification
• Flexible thinking
• Prototyping
• Persistence
• Ability to mobilize others

Leadership is an interaction between the environment and people, their motivations, and social cooperation to influence and enable others to create a harmony to achieve common goals.

Leadership skills

To achieve this, the following skills and habits of mind are helpful in the three dimensions: affective, cognitive, and physical.

Cognitive

• Communicate clearly to inspire, motivate, guide, empower, and achieve success
• Pro social skills - group dynamics - team building - team success to interact with others in positive beneficial ways.
• Problem solving
• Decision making
• Conflict resolution
• Planning - set and achieve group goals - adapt as necessary to be successful
• Risk taking
• Interpersonal skills to notice others goals and adapt to encourage, build, and sustain relationships to achieve beneficial common goals. Know how to provide feedback and feedforward, inspire, motivate, plan, provide workable strategies, to move in positive direction to achieve success.
• Personal development - self-regulation, select mastery oriented behaviors, reflection
• Motivation and encouraging and enabling others
• Right of assertion and saying no

Affective

Habits of mind, values, ...

Motivation

Physical

• Body language non verbal communication

Outcomes for an effective lead teacher

A teacher leader can

• Leads efforts to develop, test, model, or promote equitable opportunities and outcomes for all student groups
• Promotes understanding of how data can be used to address students’ academic, physical, social-emotional, and mental health needs
• Establishes, communicates, and maintains high expectations, effective routines, procedures, and clear standards of conduct and involves students to engage parents and the educational community in a sustained collaborative communication process
• Leads efforts to develop, test, model, or promote processes for reflection of professional practice and high expectations for lesson preparedness
• Leads efforts to develop, test, or promote processes that foster an understanding within the educational community of cultural competence and responsiveness and models the implementation of evidence-based, district-supported curriculum, instructional materials, and strategies that confront and eliminate institutional bias and student marginalization
• Leads efforts to develop, test, model, or promote reflection on how assessment practices and assessment bias impact institutional bias and student marginalization.

Source Nebraska Teacher and Principal Performance Standards

Guidelines to initiate leadership for change (better situations)

Decide on change, set goals, and implement changes using a rigorous model for eduational curricular change.

Listen to the community in which you are involved to gain knowledge to set goals or make changes.

Immerse ourself in the community to implement and adapt for successful change.

Advocate to build capacity within the community to sustain change and achieve established goals.

Partnership with community members to create advocates for the change or adapt and create distributed leadership for continual positive change.

Leadership development

Leadership can be learned by starting small as in Kauffman & Beghetto 4C Model of Creativity (little c - decorate a room ... Big C painting a masterpiece) as adaped by Rubenstein, Johnson, Southworth, & Ramirez for their Leadership model (4L) outlined below.

• Mini L - leading oneself effectively. Understand yourself and strive to improve in skills necessary to cooperate with and support others.
• Little L - leading a small group. Understand how to be responsible, aware of everyone's needs to set and achieve appropriate goals.
• Pro L - leading in a professional situation. Understand the conditions that influence a particular profession and those that can drive change.
• Big L - leading in society to drive systematic change. Understand cultural dynamics thst influence people and create competent innovations that can drive change.

Teacher Leadership in a classroom

Characteristics of leadership which can be used to explain three general types of classroom leadership: totalitarian, laissez-faire, and democratic classrooms. Observable characteristics for each source of power is included for a classroom environment, social and behavioral interactions, and atmosphere. A chart is also included touse to identify your personal leadership goals.

Five characteristics which can give power to leaders to create classroom Leadership Power for Totalitarian, Laise-faire, and Democratic classrooms

Different combinations of these five characteristics can lead to: Totalitarian, Laise-faire, and Democratic classrooms:

1. Attractive: charisma, good looking, socially fun to be with, has a genuine regard for people - created with positive self regard and a caring attitude
2. Expert: have superior knowledge, enthusiasm, love of learning, academic environment, desire to solve problems and learn alone and together
3. Reward: grades, recess, stickers, privileges, activities, praise, pat
4. Coercive: removal of recess, time-out, stay after school, sarcasm, put downs, humiliation, damages self-esteem, reduces self-reliance, and builds barriers. Causes students to feel resentment, desire to rebel, withdraw from participation, play power games, seek retribution, plan revenge, strike back for revenge, commit vandalism, or assault to cause personal damage.
5. Authority: student believes the educator is fair, has a risk free environment will not allow another person to harm another person physically or verbally. Empower students through goal setting with little to no use of the coercive or reward base allowed by the school system, which will vary from community to community.

Three general types of classroom leaderships: totalitarian, laissez-faire, and democratic classrooms

Different percentages of each can lead to different kinds of power that can lean towards one of the three or range between them.

Personal leadership goals

Fill in the chart with your personal goals for what learners and visitors will see related to leadership in your classroom or learning space.

Pedagogy - curriculum, teaching, learning, human development, & planning

Management - Self Development & Individual, Group, & Classroom Management

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