Servant Leadership
Applying Distributed Leadership and Servant Leadership
In a Middle School Environment
The effects of distributed and servant leadership within a middle school environment is best measured and made most relevant when student achievement scores, both in the short- and long-range, significantly exceed regional and national averages. Only by creating an agile, strong and highly effective distributed leadership plan for continual learning process and training improvement can any middle school hope to create a strong catalyst of education that will enable students to excel beyond the average (Shakir, Issa, Mustafa, 2011). The traditional, hierarchic and often transactionally-based leadership models that rewarded didactic, often inflexible techniques of teaching are being proven incredibly out of touch with 21st century student needs (Sussan, Ojie-Ahamiojie, Kassira, 2008). Distributed and servant leadership needs to concentrate more on create a learning ecosystem that can quickly translate tacit and implicit knowledge shared among all members of a school's staff, and unify these many forms of knowledge and intelligence for the student's benefit. The role of the educator is to seek to find these synergies and commonalities across all members of a school's staff, orchestrate them in such a way as to deliver the greatest value to students, and measure that contribution by students' progress over time (Sussan, Ojie-Ahamiojie, Kassira, 2008).
Applying Distributed Leadership in a Middle School Environment
Distributed leadership requires any educational institution to take on the attributes of both transactional and transformational leadership, while also striving to create a learning ecosystem that continually capitalizes on the expertise of each member of the staff (Hargreaves, Fink, 2008). Distributed leadership is a participatory, highly interactive approach to creating an effective learning platform or framework on which students can actively rely on for support, engage with for guidance, and query for support and interactive learning (Sussan, Ojie-Ahamiojie, Kassira, 2008). While distributed leadership in many studies have shown that hierarchical and highly structured...
The development of programs and initiatives that go beyond the strategic to the individual student are essential if the fully value of distributed leadership is to be effective (Shakir, Issa, Mustafa, 2011). Foremost in these many programs is the ability to tailor specific learning programs and plans to the unique requirements of all students in a middle school, from the gifted to the remedial. This tailoring or scaffolding is designed to ensure each student has the opportunity to benefit from the shared expertise of the team comprising the school's framework of distributed leadership (Reed, Vidaver-cohen, Colwell, 2011). When this occurs through the development of scaffolding-based learning programs and student-specific academic objectives can the full value of distributed leadership be attained. The aspects of servant leadership are the catalysts that transform educational institutions of any level, from elementary school through colleges or universities, to focus first on the student and make a positive impact in their learning progress (Reed, Vidaver-cohen, Colwell, 2011). Servant leadership serves as the catalyst and distributed leadership is the framework which allows students to progress towards challenging, meaningful learning outcomes following learning plans specifically designed for their needs. A transformational educational leader will have the ability to create a distributed leadership framework and through collaboration and orchestration, enable all members of the staff to contribute to the success of each student.
Analysis of Articles -- A Literature Review
In completing a literature review of the concepts and frameworks of distributed and…
