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Article Review: Leadership and Change
According to Ankrum (2016) in his article “Utilizing Teacher Leadership as a Catalyst for Change in Schools,” teachers are an often-underused resource for schools to institute meaningful changes and to provide critical data to educational administrators to support new initiatives. Rather than viewing teachers as passive followers, they should be viewed as active participants in the change process. The article is founded upon a concept of leadership theory known as distributed leadership (versus charismatic or visionary leadership) which suggests that leadership is best distributed in different ways throughout an organization for it to function effectively. Given the individualized nature of instruction and the fact that teachers do function in many ways already as de facto leaders in the classroom, this would seem like an appropriate paradigm.
Teacher leadership, the article notes, can take formal and informal roles. Teachers as a whole are already more apt than other types of employees to take leadership in occupational settings and to go above and beyond their job descriptions to help students. The article also suggests the value of teacher collaboration to offer different strategies to help struggling students. A quantitative survey conducted by Ankrum (2016) of 175 leaders who were attending...
Professional development was also flagged as critical to foster school improvement.
As an instructor working in a school setting for children with emotional and behavioral disorders, I believe the results of the survey have additional validity, given the special needs of students experiencing challenges. In such instances, students often struggle with completing tasks of everyday life, and regardless of their job descriptions, teachers must fill in the gap to ensure that students are willing and able to learn. Also, parents often lack critical coping mechanisms to deal with their children and teachers may need to act as the educators of parents as well as educators themselves. Finally, because students can present a wide spectrum of functionality and emotional difficulties, individualized attention is a must. This makes professional collaboration even more essential, as teachers must always be learning from one another. Teachers can also offer emotional support to their fellow educators, since instructing emotionally challenged students can be very stressful from the instructor’s perspective.
My main concern in…
References
Ankrum, R. (2016). Utilizing teacher leadership as a catalyst for change in schools. Journal of Educational Issues, 2 (1), 151-165.
Organizational Leadership Change Competition in the modern day business community has become cutting edge and the economic agents have to seek new means of creating competitive advantages. This situation has been brought about by the emergence of numerous important changes, all which generated important impacts upon organizational operations. For instance, the customers are now no longer the people buying what the company is offering, but they have become so powerful that
Most conclusions on this approach were vague or indecisive in terms of social, psychological or mental significance (Rice, 1978, 1981; Graen et al., 1972; Ashour, 1973). Furthermore, over the years, many scholars have come to the realization that leadership is situational and hence there are many realistic settings like the environment, the employees, the resources, etc. that determine the characteristics needed in a leader as well as his/her business approach
It is hard to make too much out of the importance of collaborative teams in the improvement process. It is just as important, though, to highlight that collaboration does not lead to better results unless people are paying attention to the right issues. Collaboration is a means to an end, not the end itself. In a lot of schools, staff members are willing to work together on a diversity
Multicultural education researchers and educators agree that preservice teachers' attitudes, beliefs, and understandings are important: foci in multicultural education coursework (Cochran-Smith, 1995; Grant & Secada, 1990; McDiarmid & Price, 1993; Pohan, 1996). Teacher attitudes and beliefs influence teaching behaviors, which affect student learning and behavior (Wiest, 1998)." 1996 study used 492 pre-service teachers to try and gauge the attitudes and beliefs among the group when it came to understanding diversity and
Leadership Skills Impact International Education CHALLENGES OF INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION Practical Circumstances of International schools THE IMPORTANCE OF LEADERSHIP IN EDUCATION What is Effective Leadership for Today's Schools? Challenges of Intercultural Communication Challenges of Differing Cultural Values Importance of the Team Leadership Style LEADERSHIP THEORIES Current Leadership Research Transformational Leadership Skills-Authority Contingency Theories APPLYING LEADERSHIP IN AN INTERNATIONAL SETTING Wagner's "Buy-in" vs. Ownership Understanding the Urgent Need for Change Research confirms what teachers, students, parents and superintendents have long known: the individual school is the key unit
Leadership, according to La Monica (1938), is when a person has authority that is recognized by others, and the person has followers/subordinates under them, who believe that the person will assist them in attaining certain goals (carrying out specific objectives for the followers). Furthermore, anyone that is willing to assist and help others could be referred to as a leader (p.8) Leaders see what others do not Most leaders have