So we got underway this first week by doing a lot of self-assessing and talking about qualities, virtues and traits of leaders. We also studied a Framework Approach to Leadership by Bolman and Deal consisting of 4 Frames: Structural, Human Resource, Political and Symbolic.
I'll start with the self-assessments. While I didn't really get any surprises in the results of my self-assessments, it made me think about my leadership qualities a little differently. All of my results reflected my strong interpersonal relationship skills so that was nothing I didn't know already. I also, not surprisingly, ranked low in creativeness and vision. The thing I really started to think about though, was that these were self-assessments and the results were essentially reflections of how I viewed myself. If I was ever going to mature as a leader and become proficient in vision and planning roles, the place I needed to start was my self-perception of my abilities concerning those roles. I am receiving training. I am becoming more confident. I am showing more assertiveness in presenting ideas. All of those things are leading me to become a better leader, especially in my former weaker areas. Now I just have to start believing in my abilities and the growth that I have made in order to be perceived as the balanced, effective leader that I am striving to be.
I thought the framework approach was interesting but it was often hard to distinguish between situations where Human Resource and Political frameworks applied. My group made the observation that name "Human Resource" has certain connotations that go with it and it would have been easier to keep it separate from Political if it had been named something different. The labeling exercise was pretty difficult because we felt that a lot of times you have to use skills from several frameworks to achieve the best possible result.
As far as my leadership role at my school goes, it is really an intriguing situation to try and analyze. In one respect, my position of Technology Coordinator/Integrator has many of the characteristics of being "one of the gang" of regular classroom teachers. I work with them hand in hand on collaborative projects, we interact with the same students in similar ways and I have similar teaching, grading, etc responsibilities. On the other hand, I am charged with other responsibilities that would fall under the category of leader or administrator responsibilities. For example, I run a portion of the staff meetings where I address the direction of the school concerning technology. I also run and administer training sessions where I try to introduce ways that I think the teachers could incorporate technology into their classrooms. I try not to make the teachers feel like they are being forced to give my ideas a try, but there is a certain expectation from myself and the administrator that they will make an effort to use what I have taught them. I have also recently been running informational parent meetings where we communicate the school's future initiatives. Each year it seems that my position transforms a little more into an administrative/leadership role. I welcome the changes and feel that I am prepared for the shift.
