Marzano's 21 Responsibilities Poll

Responsibilities of the Instructional Leader

There are many factors that contribute to the instructional program of a school. It is the responsibility of the leader to make a positive impact upon the instructional program of the school through knowledge and involvement with the factors that most directly impact curricular design, classroom instruction, instructional practices and professional development.

The factors that have the most impact on the instructional process are broken into three categories: School-level factors, Teacher-level factors, and Student-level factors. Leaders must realize that they have the ability to actively influence each of those factors for increased teacher instruction and student learning.

As it applies to School-level factors, the school leader has a direct influence upon the outcome of the factors. When it comes to curriculum, the leader can guarantee a viable curriculum through their knowledge and involvement in the establishment and application of the curriculum. Ensuring time for teachers to map grade-level curriculum and establishing vertical teams between grades can determine the scope and sequence of curriculum. Through visibility in the school the leader has the ability to have knowledge of teachers instructional practices, and they can provide instructional based goals for the school to increase achievement and seek and provide feedback upon the progress towards achievement of the goals. Using various means of communication, the leader solicits parent and community involvement in the school, either through volunteering in the day to day activities of the school or serving on decision-making committees. The leader formulates efficient processes and procedures for a safe and orderly school environment through the development of positive behavior and character development. By developing a culture of trust and distributed leadership, the school leader fosters a sense of collegiality and professionalism. These are all factors where the school leader is directly responsible.

When involving Teacher-level factors, the school leader has more of an indirect influence. By demonstrating and communicating knowledge of instructional strategies, the school leader can encourage teachers to use effective instructional strategies, either through professional development opportunities or through the use of mentoring with effective teachers. Principals can also encourage proven classroom management procedures that provide an effective learning environment in the classroom. The principal can also establish an environment where teachers serve in professional learning communities to design consistent curriculum design for the grade. These are factors where the teacher must have direct influence to be effective, but the leader needs to exert their influence towards proven practices.

The school leader has a complimentary influence on Student-level factors. By complimentary influence, I mean that the leader can encourage and influence, but how neither direct nor indirect control of the outcomes. The leader can communicate factors related to a home environment conducive to student learning, but it is essentially the parents responsibility and efforts that determine whether it gets done. Learned intelligence and background knowledge is respective of students all coming to school with different backgrounds and contextual knowledges. The leader can compliment this experiential knowledge by providing extra-curricular opportunities for students and providing technologies that have the modal ability to provide context to the curriculum. The leader also has the ability to influence a student's motivation by providing opportunities for students to contribute to the community or society through service learning, or other forms of extension of their schooling, so that they have awareness of society beyond the school walls and how the student will participate and contribute to that society. Even without the direct or indirect influence towards the outcome, it is still the leader's responsibility to use the influence they have to encourage the outcomes needed for positive student experiences.

Marzano's 21 Responsibilities of the School Leader

These 21 Responsibilities of the School Leader are taken from Marzano's book "School Leadership that Works."  These are the results of his study to determine effective practices for school leadership and a description of each responsibility.



1.  Affirmation
When one mentions affirmation, one can describe it as communication of accountability.  The school leader has the responsibility to praise and celebrate accomplishments, but yet must still have the courage to address negatives.

2. Change Agent
It is the responsibility of the school leader to challenge the status quo, to challenge the practices that are in place and to push towards new practices.  Similar to Zygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development, the leader's responsibility is to take the staff out of their comfort zone in an attempt to develop new and better practices.

3.  Contingent Rewards
This responsibility is reflective of Transactional Leadership, or the swapping of rewards for performance.  It is fairly common to compliment groups, but isolated when recognizing individuals, and the leader needs to understand that not everyone should be treated equally.

4.  Communication
Communications seems to possibly be the most important responsibility because it is integrated into most aspects of leadership. 

5.  Culture
Culture is the shared values, beliefs, and feelings of a community, and is evident in the artifacts and symbols that illustrate those priorities.  Culture, like communication, is evident in many theories of leadership, and establishing a culture of achievement in the school might be one of the most important responsibilities of the leader.

6.  Discipline
Discipline refers to protecting teachers from issues and influences that would detract from their instructional time or focus. (Marzano, 2005)  Instructional time is paramount to teaching; more time on task, more learning, theoretically.  The principal has the responsibility to decrease the amount of distractions that impact instructional time.

7.  Flexibility
Conflict:Change.  Flexibility is about realizing, or creating, chaos, and then adjust to it.  Leaders realize the situations and adapt their behaviors to address the situation.  These traits also evident in the change agent responsibility.

8.  Focus
Focus is similar to discipline in that it also associates with lessening the distractions to instructional time.  Focus is the leader's ability to communicate and reinforce the goals and vision, and to minimize the distractions to those ends.

9.  Ideals/Beliefs
It is the leader's beliefs which shape the culture of the school, and creates followership. 

10.  Input
A school's effectiveness correlates to the amount, and type, of input that teachers have into the running of the school.  This input builds shared sense of purpose and consensus.

11.  Intellectual Stimulation
Learning about learning and inspiring the organization to grow is all about professional development.  Providing the research and theories allows the staff to implement and experiment with new strategies.

12.  Involvement in Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment
The involvement of the leader in Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment is critical to the concept of instructional leadership.  (Marzano, 2005)  The leadership should be hands on with curriculum and instruction so that knowledge of strategies and resources can be shared.  Assessment practices are also important because maintaining consistent and focused assessment allows for adjustment of instruction  for the content for greater student achievement.

13.  Knowledge of Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment
Having knowledge of curriculum, instruction, and assessment allows the leader to provide specific, research-based strategies to teachers for improved instruction.  While the Involvement responsibility is "hands on", the Knowledge responsibility involves maintaining current research and theories about those areas.  This also allows the leader to prescribe specific professional development opportunities for staff to increase areas of need.

14.  Monitoring/Evaluating
Monitoring and evaluating are important because of the specific feedback they provide to teachers.  Through this process, the feedback provided can be specific and focused to aid in achievement.

15.  Optimizer
The Optimizer responsibility is the positive, inspirational emotion that the leader brings, especially when confronted with a meaningful change.

16.  Order
Order is the set of processes established to allow for the flow of work to be standardized.  Efficient procedures allows for effort to be focused on areas of greater importance, such as student learning.

17.  Outreach
The leader is an advocate for the school and the students to the various stakeholders in the community.  Communication  and partnerships are required for the school to achieve in a complex environment.

18.  Relationships
Relationships is central to the achievement of many other responsibilities.  It is with face-to-face connections that one can build the credibility with other people.

19.  Resources
It is imperative for efficient operations that one have the right tool for the task, and it is the responsibility of the leader to not only ensure that the tools are available, but that the teachers are trained to utilize the tool effectively and efficiently.  "Resources" can include physical resources (stuff), monetary resources (money), and human resources (people). 

20.  Situational Awareness
Situational awareness is knowledge of what is going on in the school, feelings and emotions, day to day activities.  This will allow the leader to anticipate any issues, or be better prepared should a situation arise.

21.  Visibility
 Visibility is the extent to which the leader is in classrooms and available throughout the school.  By being available, the leader shows that they are interested in what goes on in the school.  The leader is also able to communicate more informally with the teachers about classroom practices.


Works Cited

Marzano, R. J. (2005). School Leadership that Works. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Categorizing Leadership Philosophies

In my leadership course that I am taking, I am being presented with various philosophies of leadership in an attempt to describe the various purposes of each style.  But as i read the descriptions and the traits, there are many similarities between many of the philosophies.

In an attempt at oversimplification, I propose that all leadership philosophies fall into one of two categories:  Leading from the front and Leading from behind.

Leading From the Front
Audie Murphy, among others, popularized the phrase, "Lead from the front."  To me, this form a leadership connotates an active leadership.  Moving forward, pushing, developing and striving.  This seems like an autocratic type of leader, who maneuvers and manipulates to get things done.

The Total Quality Management and Positional leadership philosophies seem to fit this definition.  With TQM, if the leader is not active in supporting every part of the system, then the system will fail.  In a position of authority, the leader mandates/dictates the direction of the organization.  Neither position is bad, per se, so long as the personality of the leader enhances that style.  Leaders like Vince Lombardi and General Patton are active leaders, up front and decisive.  They lead the way.  Follow or get out of the way.

Leading From Behind
Leading from behind was described by Nelson Mandela as,"It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur."  This typifies a service or transformational form of leadership that distributes the power of the organization to the members of the organization.  The leader provides the shared vision, and then supports and celebrates those doing the work, creating a shared leadership.  The leader transforms from a leader of followers to a leader of leaders.

Without the reliance on a central figure head to destine success/failure of initiative, the organization leads tha initiative.  Great leaders of this style would be Bill Belichik from the New England Patriots, who develops a team where the whole is more significant that the individual, and that the individual contributes to the whole.  The superstar on the team is the team.  Another leader is Bill Walsh, from the San Francisco 49ers.  He has supported and developed his team by distributing leadership to his fellow coaches, and allow them the opportunity to succeed.  You can see the successes of this style in the genealogy of coaches that have been successful after being part of his family. 

Final Thoughts

There are times when these leadership styles are appropriate, but there are also times to adjust the style based on the situation.  Good leaders know how to be flexible in their delivery and communicate their vision.

Moral Leadership Chapter 9 Leadership as Stewardship: "Who's Serving Who?"

The leadership that counts, in the end, is the kind that touches people differently. It taps their emotions, appeals to their values, and responds to their connections with other people.

Stewardship in Practice
In the end, it is servant leadership, based on a deep commitment to values and emerging from a groundswell of moral authority, that makes the critical difference in the lives of Blaine's students and their families.

The Many Forms of Leadership

• If command and instructional leadership are practiced as dominant strategies, rather than supporting ones, they can breed dependency in teachers and cast them in roles as subordinates, with the consequences discusses in chapter six.
• Command leaders and instructional leaders alike are being challenged by the view that school administrators should strive to become leaders of leaders.
• Successful leaders of leaders combine the most progressive elements of psychological authority with aspects of professional and moral authority.

Servant Leadership

• People's confidence is strengthened by their belief that the leader makes judgments on the basis of competence and values, rather than self-interest
• It is best to let those who will be served define their own needs in their own way
• All members of a community share the burden of servant leadership
• The more crucial role of the principal is as head learner, engaging in the most important enterprise of the schoolhouse - experiencing, displaying, modeling, and celebrating what it is hoped and expected that teachers and pupils will do

Practicing Servant Leadership

• Purposing- that conscious stream of actions by an organization's formal leadership which has the effect of inducing clarity, consensus and commitment regarding the organization's basic purposes
• Empowerment- derives it's full strength from being linked to purposing; everyone is free to do what makes sense, as long as people's decisions embody the values shared by the school community.
• Leadership by outrage- it is the leaders responsibility to be outraged when empowerment is abused and when purposes are ignored... As important as leadership by outrage is, it's intent is to kindle outrage in others

Power Over and Power To

• Power over emphasizes controlling what people do, when they do it, and how they do it.
• Power to views power as a source of energy for achieving shared goals and purposes.
• Myers understands the difference between charting a direction and giving people maps, between providing a theme and giving teachers a script

The Female Style

• Female principals need to feel free to be themselves, rather than have to follow the principles and practices of traditional management

Servant Leadership and Moral Authority

• Moral authority relies heavily on persuasion
• Servant leadership is practiced by serving others, but it's ultimate purpose is to place oneself, and others for whom one has responsibility, in the service of ideals
• One theme of this book is that administrators ought not to choose among psychological, bureaucratic, or moral authority; instead, the approach should be additive.

Stewardship

• The rights and prerogatives inherent in the administrator's position move to the periphery, and attention is focused on duties and responsibilities- to others as persons and, more important, to the school itself.

Thoughts...
Successful leaders of leaders combine the most progressive elements of psychological authority with aspects of professional and moral authority. the people trust that the leader will use their influence for the benefit of the organization, and not self-interest. When an organization gets to the moral level, leadership is flattened and widened across the organization, and the organization becomes the servant of one another. In this situation, authority is spread across the organization. Therefore the leader is responsible to make the choice from power over others to power to empower others. This empowerment and sense of purpose are the hallmarks of schools of virtue with moral purpose for student success.

This concept of wider, flatter leadership within the organization is not new, it is shared amongst many other leadership philosophies. But the association of moral purpose to the leadership and virtue in the organization are what distinguish this theory. Achievement and success are not the end goal, but a byproduct of the accomplishment of becoming a virtuous school. If you do things the right way, positive results will follow.

Works Cited

Sergiovanni, T. (1992). Moral Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Moral Leadership Chapter 8 The Virtuous School

• Although virtue is a justifiable end in it's own right, the evidence from research on school effectiveness and school culture increasingly suggests that effective schools have virtuous qualities that account for a large measure of their success.

Focus Schools

• Autonomy over budgets, schedules, educational programs, hiring, and other factors was effective only if it directly facilitated the establishment of purpose and social contract.

Building a Covenant

• When purpose, social contract, and local school autonomy become the basis of schooling, two important things happen. The school is transformed from an organization to a covenantal community, and the basis of authority changes, from an emphasis on bureaucratic and psychological authority to moral authority.
• The family has always been one of the most important kinds of communities. Families inspire deep loyalty. Family members work together and benefit one another, supplying economic and social needs. Tradition and social rules are passed along from parents to children.

The Moral Imperative

• Moral imperative refers to what is good; the term managerial imperative, to what works.
• The virtuous school seeks to operate on the basis of both what is good and what is effective.
• Like individuals, schools can be thought of as having character.

Moral Principles

• The principle of justice is expressed as equal treatment of and respect for the integrity of individuals.
• The principle of beneficence is expressed as concern for the welfare of the school as a community
• Kant- Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only
• Over the long term, the leader's influence should not be directed at providing teachers with answers or solutions but rather with helping them invent their own answers and solutions.
• The heart of the school as moral community is it's covenant of shared values.

Guidelines for Deciding

• Private schools can handle the problem by publicly declaring their purposes and values.
• Public schools generally have little control over the teachers to be employed or the families to be served. One option is for them to build, within the larger school, smaller communities that function as semiautonomous schools.

1. relationships with other people create obligations of various kinds, and these should be honored unless there is compelling reason not to do so.
2. Certain ideals enhance human life and assist people in fulfilling their obligations to one another.
3. The consequences of some actions benefit people, while those of other actions harm people.
4. Circumstances alter cases.

Examples

• Covenants must be built from the bottom up, as each school (or school within the school) strives to complete the transformation from organization to community.
• Statements of values are intended to provide direction and inform decisions

A Personal Perspective
1. The virtuous school believes that, to reach it's full potential in helping students learn, it must become a learning community in and of itself.
2. The virtuous school believes that every student can learn, and it does everything in it's power to see that every student does learn.
3. The virtuous school seeks to provide for the whole student.
4. The virtuous school honors respect.
5. In the virtuous school, parents, teachers, community, and school are partners, with reciprocal and interdependent rights to participate and benefit and with obligations to support and assist.

• Rules should be viewed and understood as a constitution, which comes complete with a rationale shared with students and other members of the school community.
• Hawthorne effect - when people believe their talents are valued and they are important, everything works; when they do not, nothing works.
• As servant, the school fully accepts it's responsibility to do everything it can to care for the full range of needs of it's students, teachers, and parents.
• Respect is a form of empowerment. It invites people to accept higher levels of responsibility for their own behavior and for the school itself.
• The virtuous school respects diversity.

Thoughts...

effective schools have virtuous qualities that contribute to their success. Virtuous schools move from bureaucratic and psychological to professional and moral authorities when purpose, social contract and local school autonomy become the standard practices, which develops a covenantal relationship, doing what is both good and effective as a moral imperative. As Kant says,"Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only."

I agree with many of the assumptions that moral authorities are inherent in virtuous schools, but the mention was made that private schools have an easier case to establish a virtuous school than public schools. It was said that private schools hire staff focused on the already established morals of the community, while public schools often have issues with this because there is not as much say in the hiring process. I feel that both organizations face similar issues related to the establishment of virtuous schools based on moral principals, but schools that have longevity of leadership and purpose, with leaders willing to lead leaders, are the organizations that have an easier ability to sustain moral imperativity. Private schools with inexperienced leadership or focus will have similar issues hiring and retaining staff as does public schools. However, due to the nature of the private schooling, I agree that the morals are more clearly established, and people may seek to work in that environment. Also, possibly the issue of tenure may be a hurdle that public schools face which private schools do not when dealing with the removal of ineffective staff. But the stages of organizational development to achieve a gift us state that emphasizes moral authority is inherent in all schools.


Works Cited

Sergiovanni, T. (1992). Moral Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Moral Leadership Chapter 6 Followership First, Then Leadership

• Beyond a certain point, the more professionalism is emphasized, the less leadership is needed; the more leadership is emphasized, the less likely professionalism is to develop.
• Leadership becomes less urgent and less intensive once the wheels of professionalism begin to turn by themselves.
• Professionalism has a way of encouraging teachers and principals to be self-managers
• The term professionalism was derived from the religious setting, where it pertained to the public statement of what one believed and was committed to.

The Old Leadership Recipe

• If self-management is our goal, then leadership will have to be reinvented in a fashion that places "followership" first
• Leadership is about two things: trying to figure out what needs to be done to make the school work and work well, and trying to figure out how to get people to do these things
• The standard management recipe was based on two kinds of authority: bureaucratic and psychological

From Subordinate to Follower

• A major theme of Value-Added Leadership (Sergiovanni, 1990) is the importance of building followership in the school, as an alternative to subordination
• Subordinates do what they are supposed to do, but little else, and what they do is often perfunctory
• If we want sustained and committed performance from teachers, then we must think about leadership practice that helps teachers transcend subordination - one that cultivates followership
• Followers work well without close supervision, assessing what needs to be done when and how, and making necessary decisions on their own. Followers are people committed to purposes, a cause, a vision of what the school is and can become, beliefs about teaching and learning, values and standards to which they adhere, and convictions.
• Neither the managerial mystique nor the messiah syndrome can form the basis of the kid of followership needed in schools.
• When followership and leadership are joined, the traditional hierarchy of the school is upset. It changes from a fixed form, with superintendents and principals at the top and teachers and students at the bottom, to one that is in flux. The only constant is that neither superintendents and principals nor teachers and students are at the apex; that position is reserved for the ideas, values, and commitments at the heart of followership.

Leadership Through Purposing

• True change involves looking at what we are doing from a vantage point other than that of doing something because that's what teachers (or students or principals or board members) want. We must be able to give reasons for what we do, not only to others but to ourselves. And we must be able to see the connection between why we do what we do and some larger purpose. If we can't see the connection, then maybe we're doing the wrong thing.
• Contracts are a small part of the relationship. A complete relationship needs a covenant... A covenantal relationship rests on a shared commitment to ideas, to issues, to values, to goals... Covenantal relationships reflect unity ad grace and poise. They are expressions of the sacred nature of the relationships.

The Practice of Purposing

• Say it.
• Model it
• Organize for it
• Support it
• Enforce it and commend practices that exemplify core values
• Express outrage when practices violate the core values

Purposing and the Stages of Leadership

• Leadership by bartering helps get things moving when the goals and interests of the leader and those of the followers are not he same
• Leadership through building... He focused his attention on providing the kind of climate and interpersonal support that enhanced opportunities for fulfilling the needs for achievement, responsibility, competence and esteem
• Leadership through bonding allows the use of moral authority as a basis of leadership
• Only when strategies evolve from purposes, however, do they become powerful substitutes for leadership, enabling people to be driven from the inside.
• Use enough style to build an interpersonal climate characterized by trust, and demonstrate enough knowledge of and commitment to issues of substance to build integrity.
• Motivational technology, change theory, and the skilled application of leadership styles certainly all contribute to the success of ventures like this one. Ultimately, however, it is not just personality that counts. At least equally important is the leader's ability to establish a climate of trust and a sense of integrity in the ideas being proposed. Key to this effort is something worth following. Without ideas, values, and commitments, there can be no followership. Without followership, there can be no leadership. In this sense, the most basic principle of leadership is "followership first, then leadership."

Thoughts...

Professionalism requires less management. If less management is the goal, then leadership needs to put followership first. A follower is not a subordinate, a follower believes in the vision and goals of the leader and chooses to follow. A subordinate is forced to follow through bureaucratic or psychological means. This changes the leadership format from hierarchal to a flatter, wider leadership. Purposing can be used to illustrate important concepts or goals to an organization by reinforcing the important values of the organization by say it, model it, organize for it, support it, enforce it and express outrage about it.

I feel that the purposing format is valid in bureaucratic leadership styles, but for an organization that is professionalism and moral, purposing seems to me to be a form of manipulation rather than facilitation. This seems to me to be a way that the leader forces change, and if a professional or moral organization creates shared values together, it seems like this process can seem more dominant than servant based, but depending on the growth of the organization purposing might be required for maturation.

In my organization, I have employees whom I trust and who shares an organizational vision for our team. My style supports their efforts to do what is right, similar to the moral and professional levels. Conflicts arise at times when leaders of other departments attempt to provide direction to my employees, because their style might demonstrate bureaucratic authority style that expects followership due to position, while my employees are beyond that style as they are self-directed, and the bureaucratic style connotes orders, lack of professional respect, and grates on their emotional impact. This illustrates that, even in the same organization, different departments can work with different levels of authority and motivation, and leaders need to realize those difference when interacting with the other communities within the community.


Works Cited

Sergiovanni, T. (1992). Moral Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Moral Leadership Chapter 5 Creating a State of Flow at Work

• We humans are driven not only by self-interest but also by our emotions, values, and beliefs, and by the social bonds that emerge from our identification with and membership in various groups.
• It has also been argued that the failure of leadership can be linked directly to our obsession with self-interest and to our resulting neglect of emotion and social bonds.
• By focusing on performing for someone else's approval, corporations create the very conditions that predestine them to mediocre performance.
• School leaders have a moral obligation to do whatever they can to arrange the context of work in a fashion that allows teachers and students to be meaningfully involved.

What is Rewarding Gets Done

• Two fairly independent sets of job factors that seemed to be important to workers
• One set of factors affects whether people are dissatisfied with their jobs
• If administrators take care of these factors, so that they are no longer sources of dissatisfaction, workers' performance will improve to the level of "a fair day's work for a fair day's pay."

• The second set of factors, called motivators, seem not to cause dissatisfaction or poor performance if neglected or even absent
• The motivators, however, seem to motivate people to go beyond the "fair day's work for a fair day's pay" minimum contract

• Three psychological states believed to be critical in determining whether a person will be motivated at work:
• Experienced meaningfulness: "The extent to which a person perceives work as being worthwhile or important, given her or his system of values."
• Experienced responsibility: "The extent to which a person believes that she or he is personally responsible or accountable for the outcomes of efforts."
• Knowledge of results: "The extent to which a person is able to determine on a regular basis whether or not the outcomes of her or his efforts are satisfactory."
• (Hackman, Oldham, Johnson, and Purdy, 1975, p.57)

• When the three psychological states are present, people are likely to feel good, perform well, and continue to perform well, in the effort to experience more of these feelings in the future.

Experiencing Flow at Work

• The key to intrinsic motivation is an optimal experience that he calls flow, "the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it"
• To experience flow, one must be convinced that one's skills and insights are strong enough to cope with the challenges at hand. The matching of skills to challenges is critical, for this is a condition of growth.
• Few teachers following a script are challenged to work anywhere near their abilities.
• If we want to harness the power of the work itself as a substitute for leadership, then teaching jobs will have to be redesigned, and systems of support will have to be developed in a way that helps teachers work in conditions of job enrichment.

Thoughts...

When we work for someone else's approval, we destine ourselves to mediocrity. To raise the performance, the conditions must exist where people in the organization do the work for intrinsic reasons, professionalism and moral obligation. This can be developed by addressing two factors: making sure the environment is positive and motivators that encourage growth. Leaders have an obligation to encourage this meaningful involvement in the environment by creating meaningfulness, encouraging responsibility, and communicating out the results of the efforts. This creates a state of flow, where people work for the love of the job.

I feel the concept of Flow in this example can be synonymous with confidence, as described by Rosabeth Moss Kanter. http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/4388.html She describes confidence as the state of the organization when leadership is shared amongst the organization. She describes confidence as the development of three traits: promoting responsibility, cultivating collaboration and encouraging initiative. These traits create successes, which when strung together build to a state of confidence. Flow is similar to this concept, in that motivation and meaningful involvement encourages the organization to work as a team, stringing wins together so that the people in the organization do the right things because the culture says the right things must be done, breeding a confidence in one another and the organization.


Works Cited

Sergiovanni, T. (1992). Moral Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Moral Leadership Chapter 4 Substitutes for Leadership

• To have leadership, you need to have a person who will lead and others who will somehow tag along. Leadership has to do with the leader's working directly to get others to do what she or he wants and, if skillful, getting them to enjoy doing it.
• Interpersonal leadership represents an early stage, whose ultimate result is a shift of attention away from the leader and to something else.
• The "leader" can focus more on removing obstacles, providing material and emotional support, taking care of the management details that make any journey easier, sharing in the comradeship of the march and in the celebration when the journey is completed, and identifying a new, worthwhile destination for the next march. The march takes care of itself.
• The only way a principal can survive in a growth-oriented environment is to relinquish control in many areas and let people work in their own ways.
• When people are involved in solving their own problems and working out their ideas, a school has a rich body of creative energy to draw upon.
• Needs should be met because that is the right thign to do, not because we want to get people to do certain things.
• Buildings norms and providing opportunities for teachers and others to experience intrinsic satisfaction in work are bottom-up propositions.
• Promoting the professional ideal requires effort that involves legislators, professional associations, and the public at large.

Community Norms as Substitute for Leadership

• Establishing community norms within the school can serve as a substitute for direct leadership
• Instructional delivery systems are designed to be larger than people
• What people do depends on external motivation and monitoring
• Instructional delivery systems are management- and leadership-intensive
• Culture refers to "the deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs tht are shared by the members of an organization, that operate unconsciously, and that define in a basic 'taken-for-granted' fashion on organization's view of itself and its environment."
• All schools may have cultures, but not all schools are communities. The idea of a school as a learning community suggests a kind of connectedness among members that resembles what is found in a family, a neighborhood, or some other closely knit group, where bonds tend to be familial or even sacred.
• Schools are much closer to families tht to large corporations, not only in size, but in affect and in focus
• Communities are defined by their centers - repositories of values, sentiments, and beliefs that provide the needed cement for bonding people together in a common cause.
• When nroms are violted, problems surface and become legitimate topics of discussion.
• As a collective practice becomes established in a school, the principal can afford to give much less attention to the traditional management functions of planning, organizing, controlling, and leading, for these become built in to the everyday life of a school.
• "Use shared leadership, with a heavy emphasis on following a vision rather tan a person."
• Core values are not set in stone, nor are they easily changed. They are resilient enough to withstand casual change yet flexible enough to accommodate new imperatives that may arise.

The Professional Ideal as a Substitute for Leadership

• There are two sides to the ledger of professionalism: competence and virtue. Enhancing the competence side is admittedly a long-term proposition, but school leaders can do much to enhance the virtue side while working in the broader context to improve competence. Enhancing the virtue side means establishing a moral basis for practice.
• Professional values is defined as the virtues that enable one to practice in an exemplary way, and which result in the accomplishment of valued social ends.
• Expertise and position are forms of power, which can be used by teachers and administrators to dominate, exploit, or otherwise take advantage of people with less power
• Conforming to a code, without making commitment to its ideals and values, means giving only the appearance of ethical behavior
• "It is important to note that acting ethically and being ethical are substantially diffeent. One can do the right thing, but for the wrong reasons, as, for example, when a person is honest as a way of manipulating another. We would not regard such a person as morally good person. It is this distinction that is obscured by restricting professionalism to the adherence of the rules."
• Commitment to exemplary practice and valued social ends requires one's practice to be linked to the professional's quest for a sense of goodness as a person
• School administrators have a special responsibility to share int eh professional idea of teaching, for whatever else they are, they are teachers first.
• From the moral perspective, one purpose of leadership is to establish substitutes like norms and ideals as conditions that make leadership no longer needed.

Thoughts...

The act of leadership requires a leader and followers. The goal of leadership is to get others to do what you want and enjoy doing it. It is necessary to provide followers with leadership opportunities and allow them to participate in the connectedness of the learning community. This can be accomplished by establishing norms that develop a culture of shared leadership through professionalism, developing competence and virtues.

I believe that the leader/follower relationship is the foundation for the establishment of the organizational structure. Developing organizational competence can provide the instructional direction for the school, but the true value that the school can provide for the students is in the virtue with which the organization develops their professionalism. This develops a community of learners working together for shared purpose.

Works Cited

Sergiovanni, T. (1992). Moral Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Moral Leadership Chapter 2 What Motivates? What inspires?

Underestimating Human Potential

• The problem is that we often lead with the wrong assumptions. This situation will not improve if we merelytry harder to do the same things, fine-tuning current leadership practices. Improving our yield means changing our outlook.

The Importance of Moral Judgment

• Individual self interest- As individual, we do the things that provide us with the greatest gain or help us incur the smallest loss
• Self interest broadly conceived- we seek to maximize not only our individual self interest but also that of the commonweal, to enhance whatever promotes the general welfare, in the belief that it ultimately contributes to our own
• Kant maintains that any action, in order to be moral, must be taken in the belief and because of the belief it must be right- from duty, not because of personal inclination, gain, or love.

Moral Judgment and Motivation

• Etzioni acknowledges that individual decision making does exist but that it typically reflects collective attributes and processes, since decisions are made in the context created by people's memberships in various groups
• The position argues here is that we humans regularly pass moral judgments on our individual urges and routinely sacrifice self interest and pleasure
• Our actions and decisions are influenced by what we value and believe, as well as by self interest. When the two are in conflict, values and beliefs usually take precedence.

What is Important to Teachers?

• People choose largely on the basis of preferences and emotions. As members of social groups, they find that their memberships singularly shape their individual decisions.

The Traditional Motivation Rule

• What gets rewarded gets done
• although what gets rewarded often gets done, the reverse is also true: what does not get rewarded does not get done
• Leaders must constantly monitor the exchange of rewards for work
• What gets rewarded gets done discourages people from becoming self managed and self motivated
• What gets rewarded gets done can alter ones attachment to an activity, making it extrinsic instead of intrinsic or moral
• When calculated involvement is combined with narrowed focus, the ingredients for sustained superior performance are effectively removed
• It is neither powerful nor expansive enough to provide the type of motivational climate needed in schools. One alternative to this rule is "what is rewarding gets done.". The work gets done, and it gets done without close supervision or other controls. The sources of motivation are embedded in the work itself.
• What we believe in, and what we feel obligated to do because of a moral commitment, gets done. Again, it gets done, and it gets done well, without close supervision or other controls. One purpose of this book is to advance this motivational rule to a position at least equal to that of the other two.

Authenticity

• Deep down, we know what motivates and what inspires, but to tap these sources of motivation more fully we must embark on a journey to make school life more meaningful
• We must become more authentic with ourselves and others
• Our goal should be to develop a leadership practice based on professional and moral authority.

Thoughts...
This chapter reminds me of the saying, if you don't know where you are going, how will you know when you get there. Also, if you are not sure where you are going, then any path will do. this chapter outlines the how and why to provide motivation and goals, so that there is a shared purpose for the organization. There is a map that the organization can use to determine where they want to go and how they want to get there.

The adage that what gets rewarded gets done is widely known across leadership and management. However, rewards at time can have an opposite effect upon any meaningful change, because it takes the change from an intrinsic desire to do what is correct, and moves the emphasis of rewards to extrinsic factors, which tends to also equate that what does not get rewarded does not get done.

Therefore, to make a meaningful change, it is important to develop authenticity of motivation, so that as vision is shared by the organization, the motivation to achieve the vision is more on individual results that can achieve organizational results, implying that the followers have the capacity, competency, efficacy, and support to make a difference.


Works Cited

Sergiovanni, T. (1992). Moral Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Moral Leadership Chapter 1 Reinventing Leadership

The key qualities needed in school leadership are an understanding of how children and adults learn and keep on learning and the ability to build communities of learners

The Failure of Leadership

• the endless accumulation of empirical data has not produced an integrated understanding of leadership
• When is it best to "sell, tell, participate, delegate"
• Best is defined as what gets subordinates to do what the leader wants and be happy about it
• I believe there are two reasons for the failure of leadership. first, we have come to view leadership as behavior rather than action, as something psychological rather than spiritual, as having to do with persons rather than ideas. Second, in trying to understand what drives leadership, we have overemphasized bureaucratic, psychological, and technical-rational authority, seriously neglecting professional and moral authority

The Managerial Mystique

• Failure of leadership as a result of managerial mystique
• Places process before substance and form before function
• The result is doing things right , at the expense of doing the right things
• When policies and practices are based on the managerial mystique, there is a tendency to focus knowledge, attention and skills so narrowly that principals and teachers become incapable of thinking and acting beyond their prescribed roles.

The Head, Heart and Hand of Leadership

• Things that are done in a school should be done because they have a purpose, not because they have always been done a particular way
• Hand of leadership: some behaviors seem to make more sense, in certain circumstances, than other do
• If we want to understand any leaders behavior, we have to examine the heart and hand of leadership
• The heart of leadership has to do with what a person believes, values, dreams about, and is committed to
• The head of leadership has to do with the minds capes, or theories of practice, that leaders develop over time, and with their ability, in light of these theories, to reflect on the situations they face
• If the heart and head are separated from the hand, then the leaders actions, decisions, and behaviors cannot be understood
• The head of leadership is shaped by the heart and drives the hand
• One of the themes of this book is that traditional minds capes do not fit today's world of practice very wetland are unresponsive to what people want from their jobs

A question of values

• Values play an important part in constructing an administrators minds cape and in determining leadership practice
• Expect and inspect
• Understand how to communicate what is important and use yourself as model
• An important source of interpersonal influence among teachers, as between principals and teachers, is their own moral perspectives and the views they hold of themselves, of their work, and of the purposes that guide their work.
• Beliefs and ideals shape practice and engage teachers at the moral level
• Six modes by which we arrive at knowledge
• Authority, taking someone else's word
• Deductive logic
• Sense experience
• Emotion
• Intuition
• Science
• Secular will refer to the authority of rule or law and to systems of bureaucratic rules and regulations
• Sacred refers to the authority of religious tracts, the authority of professional of community norms and shared purposes

Official and Unofficial Management Values

• We can group the modes by which we come to know and believe into three categories: those that are sources for the official values of management, those that are sometimes sources but are not fully recognized (semiofficial), and those that have become unofficial sources
• All modes are legitimate, and all have a place in school management and leadership practice

Moral Authority as a basis for leadership

• From sacred authority come such values as purposing, or building a covenant of shared values, one that bonds people in a common cause and transforms a school from an organization into a community
• They all focus on a particular group of people
• They all propound a particular way of life or a particular way of organizing society
• They all require an emotional stimulus, such as a mission, a sense of purpose, or a covenant of shared values
• This kind of leadership can transform schools into communities and inspire the kind of commitment, devotion, and service that will make our schools unequaled among society's institutions

Thoughts...

management has always been overemphasized in regards to school leadership, as opposed to seeking styles that develop a mission and vision, and shared leadership. Understanding that the development of moral purpose can transform schools beyond an organization and into a community. To do this, the school leader will have to transform the customary norms by emphasizing what a person believes, values, dreams about and is committed to.

Works Cited

Sergiovanni, T. (1992). Moral Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Moral Leadership Preface

Overview of Contents

• Chapter 1 Reinventing Leadership
• Critiques traditional views of leadership.
• Chapter 2 What Motivates? What Inspires?
• What motivates teachers and principals to work in extraordinary ways
• Chapter 3 The Sources of Authority for Leadership
• Sources of leadership
• Chapter 4 Substitutes for Leadership
• Substitutes for leadership
• Chapter 5 Creating a State of Flow at Work
• The potential for satisfaction that comes from the work of the school itself
• Chapter 6 Followership First, Then Leadership
• Difference between leadership practice that casts teachers in a subordinate role and one that helps them become followers
• Chapter 7 Collegiality as a Professional Virtue
• Importance of collegiality
• Chapter 8 The Virtuous School
• Expanding management values and sources of authority for leadership
• Chapter 9 Leadership as Stewardship: "Who's Serving Who?"
• With morally responsive leadership, principals and teachers will become stewards and servants

For Whom this Book is Intended
To provoke and raise consciousness without being too pedantic or intrusive

Thoughts...

This book moves from foundational aspects of leadership to a framework for developing a morally responsive leader, with the expectation that leadership that utilizes more of a morally observant, servant leadership style, will develop an organization that is more productive for student learning.

Works Cited

Sergiovanni, T. (1992). Moral Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Total Quality Management (TQM)

Total Quality Management, or TQM, is a leadership philosophy originating in business from Edward Deming and implemented as a strategy for post WWII Japan. Total Quality Management (TQM) is a philosophy that says that uniform commitment to quality in all areas of an organization promotes an organizational culture that meets consumers' perceptions of quality.  (cliffsnotes.com, 2011)  The premise is that everyone is a customer, including employees, and they have a stake in the quality of the product.  Through explicit understanding and training of the job roles, every member of the organization contributes to the outcome of the product.  When the customer wins, you win. (eHow, 2009)

In education, this means that parents and students are customers and have a stake in the quality of the product, their education.  Teachers are also customers of the administrators, so they have a stake in the quality of PD, curriculum and instruction, and facilities.  Administrators are customers of the suppliers of goods and services for the school, such as books and technology.  The leader explicitly indicates the performance levels that each is to be held accountable so as to ensure quality for the process (teaching and learning) and the product (student achievement). 


Deming's 14 Point Plan for Total Quality Management

1. Create constancy of purpose
2. Adopt the new philosophy
3. Cease inspection, require evidence
4. Improve the quality of supplies
5. Continuously improve production
6. Train and educate all employees
7. Supervisors must help people
8. Drive out fear
9. Eliminate boundaries
10. Eliminate the use of slogans
11. Eliminate numerical standards
12. Let people be proud of their work
13. Encourage self-improvement
14. Commit to ever-improving quality

Waldman organized those into 5 basic factors

1. Change Agency - Professional development to examine improved processes
2. Teamwork - Working together to accomplish
3. Continuous Improvement - Examine current processes and data and ensure each step is improved, thus improving the whole
4. Trust Building - Do your job well and trust that your teammates have the same dedication
5. Eradication of Short-Term Goals - eliminate quotas and minor individual accomplishments and focus on the successful outcome of the product

Works Cited

CliffsNotes.com. (2011, May 19). Total Quality Management (TQM). Retrieved May 19, 2011, from CliffsNotes.com: http://www.cliffsnotes.com/study_guide/topicArticleId-8944,articleId-8931.html

eHow. (2009, May 19). Business Strategies : Benefits of Total Quality Management. Retrieved May 19, 2011, from YouTube.com: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAp6KyY7gAg

Lakshman, C. (2006). A Theory of Leadership for Quality: Lessons from TQM for Leadership Theory. Total Quality Management, 41-60.

Marzano, R. J. (2005). School Leadership that Works. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Principle Centered Leadership

Principle Centered Leadership is a leadership theory developed by Steven Covey, and based upon the premise of servant leadership.  By helping ourselves to look at the world based on principles, we can empower others by aiding them to realize their potential.  In education this is important because if I have focus and confidence in leadership abilities, I can empower others to realize their potential so that the organization as a whole will raise.  This theory is explained in detail by Covey in his book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989).  Covey describes the leadership style as:

If you focus on principles, you empower everyone who understands those principles to act without constant monitoring, evaluating, correcting, or controlling.

8 Characteristics of Principle Centered Leadership

• Continually Learning - Learn from their experiences
• Service Oriented - Life is a mission
• Positive Energy - Cheerful and optimistic
• Believe in others - See the potential in others and help to achieve
• Lead Balanced Lives - Stay current with social events
• See Life as an Adventure - Savor life
• Synergistic - Creative change agents
• Exercise Self-Renewal - Physical, mental, emotional, spiritual

Seven Directives

• Be Proactive
• Begin with the End in Mind
• Put First Things First
• Think Win-Win
• Seek First to Understand and then to be Understood
• Synergies
• Sharpen the Saw

Principle Centered Leaders promote:

• Shared vision
• Creativity
• Interdependency
• Continued learning
• Emotional stability
• Servant leadership
• Self-Supervision

Steven Covey video, Do the Big Rocks First

Works Cited

Covey, S. (2004). Seven Habit of Highly Effective People. New York: Free Press.

fawntb. (2010, July 23). Principle Centered Leadership. Retrieved May 19, 2011, from YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpqYekcr3x8

Marzano, R. J. (2005). School Leadership that Works. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Transformational Leadership

Transformational Leadership is a dynamic form of leadership.  Leaders strive to empower followers to take ownership of the vision and become leaders themselves.  As a collective group, the achievement of the vision is internalized and motivates the individuals to have a stake in the accomplishment.

This form of leadership is based upon the research of James Burns, who is considered a founder in modern leadership theory.  Burns defined leadership as "leaders inducing followers to act for certain goals that represent the values and the motivation - the wants and the needs, the aspirations and expectations - of both leaders and followers."

Bass (Bass, 1985) expounded upon that by introducing the "Four I's" of transformational leadership:
1.  Individual Consideration
2.  Intellectual Stimulation
3.  Inspirational Motivation
4.  Idealized Influence

Further, Kenneth Leithwood (1994) posed that the Four I's of transformational leadership are "necessary skills for school principals if they are to meet the challenges of the 21st century."  (Marzano, 2005)  As teaching and learning adapt to include new processes related to technology integration, leaders must be able to (1) realize that all individuals in the school are at different levels of technology proficiency, (2) allow for exploration to meet old challenges in new ways, (3) Communicate research and ethical need for new applications, and (4) model and reinforce the new approaches.  This approach will inspire the organization to take ownership for the knowledge and skills required for success in 21st century education.

Traits of Transformational Leaders

• Believe they can make a difference
• Living the change they wish to see
• Real change comes from within
• Courage to reach
• Encourage exploration of individual thinking
• Empower others
• Believe in others
• Strong values and principles
• Change is necessary for growth
• Failure is part of learning
• Compassionate
• Give meaning and purpose to others

An excellent video clip to illustrate the traits of transformational leadership is Facing the Giants- Transformational Leadership, posted to YouTube by SarkiUCI

References

Bass, B. M. (1985). Leadership and Performance Beyond Expectations. New York: Free Press.

Burns, J. (1978). Leadership. New York: Harper & Row.

Leithwood, K. (1994). Leadership for School Restructuring. Educational Administration Quarterly, 498-518.

Marzano, R. J. (2005). School Leadership that Works. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

SarkiUCI. (2008, August 27). Facing the Giants :: Transformational Leadership. Retrieved May 18, 2011, from YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRiW_RNuxus

Creating or Consuming

This is my first post for my blog Education and Leadership.  As I went through the process of creating this site, I thought about purpose.  What is the purpose of the blog and what will I say?  These are important points to consider when beginning the process.  These questions allow for vision and focus: vision for the direction of the blog, and focus to remain on target with the vision.  I have read and learned from resources created by others, but as an educator I am aware that learning takes place both as one consumes information, as well as one synthesizes and creates information.  For this reason, I look to extend myself and my learning to creating a discussion about 3 topics that I have a fair amount of professional knowledge.  As an educator in a leadership position, I feel I have voice in areas related to education, technology and leadership. 

I am currently working in a doctorate program for Education Leadership.  I plan to use this blog as a forum for exploration of leadership topics as I come across them in my studies.  I can expand upon thoughts and concepts in my coursework and solicit opinions and advice along the way.

As Director of Technology for a school district, I have a tendency to be fairly geeky at times, both with shiny new toys and integration of those resources into learning.  New technology enters the consumer and education markets daily, so I will use this site to expound upon ideas for collaboration and integration.

Lastly, since I am first and foremost an educator, I enjoy the discussion of teaching and learning, curriculum and instruction.  As strategies and standards develop, I enjoy the discussion about the impact that they will have for students.

Please follow and lead me in the journey of this blog, Education and Leadership.