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.