when I say show horse leadership I am not describing an arrogant leader patting themselves on the back for a moment of leadership. Instead, I am describing moments and events of leadership that we have the capacity to personally acknowledge as good leadership. Examples of this would be a situation where you help someone on your team overcome an obstacle or you go out of your way to care for those under your leadership. There is nothing wrong with show horse leadership, in fact, I think it is extremely beneficial to identify when you are doing good leadership so you can make that behavior a trend.
plow horse. To explain, these individuals don’t view him as a leader because he is leading a big initiative or he has a position of authority. They view him this way because of how he makes them feel. I had heard countless individuals explain how he approaches meeting and interactions and it aligns perfectly with Simon Sinek’s idea of a “circle of safety” in his book Leaders Eat Last.
Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization, argues that fear is not a useful tool in a leader’s toolkit when it comes to managing interpersonal relationships in a workplace.
Psychological safety is the antidote to fear.psychological safety is not about being nice or lowering performance standards.
A virtual reality headset can take students on an immersive journey to another world. But no matter how cool it is, if that $3,000 piece of equipment enters a classroom and doesn’t provide any real instructional value, it can quickly become a very expensive paperweight.
Most schools don’t do edtech procurement really well yet. Sometimes we buy products that end up in closets because they don’t fit the instructional needs of students, and we end up not being good stewards of taxpayer dollars.
Located in the district’s central office, where hundreds of teachers and staff members stop by each week for professional development, the playground offers a creative space that encourages teachers to explore new tools that have been vetted and approved by the district’s tech department.
In the United States, K-12 schools spend more than $13 billion a year on edtech — often without any idea whether it will make a difference in learning outcomes.
My note:
This is another example of blanket statements aimed to bank on buzzwords and fashionable tendencies. Indeed, use of social media is an imperative skill for any educational leader, since it provides a modern venue to communicate with the rest of the stakeholders in the educational process: parents, students etc.
However, the process of social media use in education is rather more complex as presented in this article. e.g.:
why the hashtag use is the one and only altmetric consideration for deep data analysis? The author suggests taking “advantage of an analytic tool to measure effectiveness and participation,” but there is no specific recommendation and the choice of the analytical tool as well as the process of analysis is a science on its own
how educators, as suggested by the author, “want to guide students on comment intensity and type while keeping them on topic”? Indeed, an educator abiding by constructivism will facilitate and guide, yet there is a fine boundary between facilitating and dominating the conversation with “guidance.”
The most useless suggestion in the article:
“For administrators, Twitter chats also provide an opportunity to gain student and parent perspectives while giving them more voice in what’s going on within a school or district.”
Are administrators willing to yield that power to their constituency? What does the current research on educational leaders’s attitude reveal regarding their willingness to engage in such open (and difficult to control) discourse? How is such attitude to be changed: this is missing in this article.
What is your approach to the institutional use of social media at your school?
Tracks: Age-Friendly Environments; Business and Aging; Global Aging Curriculum and Policy Issues; Translating Research to Education and Training; Program and Curriculum Development; Workforce Development
A typical Finnish teacher teaches just under 600 hours a year, whereas the average American teacher teaches students over 1,600 hours annually.
Our teachers in Seattle meet about two hours a week for common planning, like you do in Finland, but the big difference is that in our two hours we are supposed to receive professional development, but teachers in your country get to create their own professional development to further their school.
three shifts in policy and leadership culture may help move these efforts forward:
New types of assessment are gaining ground. Several states are piloting performance-based assessments to replace standardized testing.
Exemplars in the business community are now promoting flat organizational structures, where employees work in smaller teams and have more voice and power over how they work.
Teachers are more networked than ever before, providing a unique opportunity to share and spread good teaching practice.
While the hybrid roles that teachers play at teacher-powered schoolsmay seem like a lot of work, they give teachers the power to decide what programs, textbooks, software, etc., should or should not be used in order to make space for the community’s vision. And when teachers decide together on the vision and strategy to reach all students, they are often more invested and excited by the change they are creating from within.
Some of the best available examples of how to improve teacher quality and promote teacher leadership lie in models offered by other high-performing places, like Finland and Singapore.
Seven qualities must be in place.
A vision and strategy for teacher leadership, “with stated goals and clear images of tasks to be done, must be in place.” Teachers must feel part of creating this vision in order to buy in.
A supportive administration. “Principals must be willing to share power with teachers and must have the skills to cultivate them as leaders,” most educational leadership programs focus on supervising teachers, not supporting them as leaders.
There need to be appropriate human and fiscal resources.
Work structures that enable authentic collaboration are crucial. While more resources help on this point, there are creative ways to stretch limited dollars.
Supportive social norms and working relationships are key to teacher leadership. “All too often, policymakers develop incentives to motivate teachers and administrators,” . “Instead, policies and programs should be in place to value teachers spreading their expertise to one another, allowing teaching to be exercised as a team sport.”
Organizational politics must allow for blurred lines between roles. Teachers can only take on leadership roles at the expense of principals and district-level administrators. This also requires teacher unions to act more as “professional guilds” and for districts to follow the example of some for-profit businesses that are flattening bureaucracies.
The school and system must be oriented toward risk-taking and inquiry. Just as students need hands-on applied learning rooted in inquiry, so, too, do teachers need powerful driving questions to push their work forward. “School systems must be able to interrogatethemselves about the extent to which they create opportunities for teachers to learn and lead in ways that spread teaching expertise and improve student outcomes.”
Guajardo, M., Oliver, J. A., Rodríguez, G., Valadez, M. M., Cantú, Y., & Guajardo, F. (2011). Reframing the Praxis of School Leadership Preparation through Digital Storytelling. Journal of Research on Leadership Education, 6(5), 145–161. http://doi.org/10.1177/194277511100600504
p. 149-150. Digital storytelling applies techniques that cross disciplines, fields, and subject matter. Digital storytelling pioneer Dana Atchley used the varied techniques such as case study, personal experience, introspection, life story, interviews, artifacts, cultural texts, observations, historical interaction, visual texts, and others (Lambert, 2002, 2006). Atchley’s techniques are firmly rooted in research methodology and collectively describe routine and problematic moments and meanings in individuals’ lives (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000; Lambert, 2006). Qualitative researchers often refer to this process as a bricolage, or the creation or construction from a variety of things. This bricolage helps Downloaded from jrl.sagepub.com at SAINT CLOUD STATE UNIV on June 8, 2016 Guajardo et. al./REFRAMING THE PRAXIS OF SCHOOL LEADERSHIP 150 to clarify our ontologies and inform epistemologies. Ladson-Billings (2000) explained epistemologies as more than the traditional way of knowing. Instead, epistemologies are a system of knowing that has both internal logic and external validity. The assortments of experiences used to inform our way of knowing then become the deliberate choices between hegemony and liberation. This process allows individuals to move beyond a traditional epistemological stance, or what Stanley (2007) has called the master narrative. Shujaa (1997) has called it a worldview epistemology that looks at knowledge as a symbiotic interaction of how we view the world, the knowledge we possess, and the knowledge we are capable of passing on to others.
p. 156 digital storytelling has been found to help organizations understand themselves (Militello & Guajardo, 2011). When organizations delve into introspective practices through the use of digital media, small and large organizations alike invite the opportunity to learn from deep, digital reflection.
