Page 14 - Leadership Basics Educative Leadership

1. Personal Insight

Becoming an educational leader means learning to encourage staff to develop personal insights into
improving some aspect of the learning in their school.
The role of an educative leader in this process centres on communicating a sense of personal
excitement, originality and freshness into an organisation (adapted from Duignan and Macpherson
1993). Unfortunately there are no proven recipes for communicating these qualities. Each leader has
to discover for themselves ways that work within the structures of their schools, i.e. the ways that
people in the workplace communicate and interact and what they see as normal or acceptable.

To explore this idea consider the following two strategies:

Kaizen (1)
A roster for continuous improvement
Ask a staff member to come up with one new idea at each of your Unit or Department meetings. Draw
up a roster; for example, if a team of 5 meets every two weeks then an individual can articulate an
innovative idea once every 10 weeks.
Focus issues can be set for defined periods of time. For example, in the first five weeks, all new ideas
must relate to ways of improving communication between staff, students and parents. For the next
five weeks focus on improving classroom management.

Kaizen (2)
Create a challenge
A standing item for alternative staff meetings is known as the ‘challenge’, where a specific aspect of
the unit’s or school’s functioning is put under the microscope and the staff must think up ways of
dealing with or solving the challenge over the following two weeks. Staff members are divided into
two or more teams, with one taking a turn to create the challenge while the other finds an innovative
or effective solution.
For example, Team A may challenge: “We have noticed that one particular student in Rm 8 spends all
her time alone at break times. She is lonely and is beginning to hate school. Her mother is upset and
wants to know what to do.”
In two weeks time Team B, having come up with effective solutions to this challenge, come back with
the following challenge: “So far this term we have lost over 12 readers from the library. They nearly
all seem to be from the Form 7-9 section. At this rate, by June we will not have enough books!”

Note: Kaizen is a Japanese term meaning one small step after another, or continuous improvement.
It is a term used in Total Quality Management systems and related to ‘Just in Time’ ‘systems ap-
proaches’ to management.

10