Leadership

This is the stuff poems are made of. I will try to remain a bit more practical than a poem.

Leadership is a charged term. Everybody wants to read something into it. Two types of leadership are interesting in the context of education: they can be called Everyday Leadership and Great Leadership.

Everyday leadership is what's necessary in order to motivate pupils to go into class, to listen to the teacher and others, to participate in the lesson, to make an effort. Day in and day out. It requires - or at least can use - the ability to know each student's state of mind, and what stimuli would benefit the student in terms of keeping them on track or bringing them back to the right track. It would be good if every teacher were a good everyday leader. The good news is that there are quite a few teachers who are. The even better news is that this seems to be a somewhat learnable skill, so teachers can improve their everyday leadership, for the benefit of the pupils, and for their own benefit.

Everyday leadership in a school principal can motivate the teachers to do perform their grinding work, to deal with unmotivated pupils, unruly parents, insulting pay check, inflexible "system", uninterested politicians, etc. Again, happily, this ability can occasionally be detected in the wild.

Great leadership is necessary to inspire people to achieve great things. More than they would have thought is available to them. A great leader who is a teacher, can inspire the students to aim towards academic achievement, and not just to get by. A great leader who is a principal, can inspire teachers to become great teachers - to have a profoundly positive formative influence on their students. A great leader who is visible by the whole education system can inspire all the pedagogues and administrator to become great. This may also work the other way around: A great student can inspire teachers and others and bring some sparkle into their eyes.

The discussion of Great Leadership this is largely theoretical, though. There is a severe dearth of great leadership, in the education system as well as everywhere else. And it doesn't seem to be a learnable trait. In the absence of leadership, an establishment often uses substitutes: Scaring people into submission, bribing them into cooperation, turning a blind eye or two. A sad way to live. And it doesn't work too well.

What does work?

It is essential for the leader to lead by example. If the supposed leader doesn't lives up to the goals they profess, people may follow for a while, but not for long. Living according to one's convictions should have been very easy and natural, but the flesh is weak, and a surprising majority of us do not live according to our own ideals. Somehow this one aspect of the leader's behavior is especially important, since it shows others how to be leaders themselves. Having more leaders in an organization, who are active and pulling in the same direction, makes it more likely that the organization will move in that direction. To a large extent, people learn by mimicking what they perceive. Oh Leader! Give us something to mimic!

It is also essential that the leader is able to communicate effectively, so those around him or her keep working together in some sense, and not in random directions. In almost all cases, this communication should go both ways: The teacher should be able to receive: To listen and hear the students, and understand - better than the students - what they need, whet they think they need, what they want, etc. Then the teacher needs to be able to transmit: To let the students know themselves better, to let them know what their options are, and to encourage them to work towards the desired goals, whatever they may be. Communication skills are learnable to some extent, and thoroughly neglected by most schooling systems.

Yet another essential is perseverance. Without perseverance, with only occasional and semi-random actions, there may be at most occasional and semi-random success, with much sliding backwards in between. This also beings back the issue of leadership by example: If the principal gives up on getting old teachers to do a new trick (like email), why would the teachers persevere in getting the students to do a new trick, such as taking personal interest in their own studies?

The sense of being too busy and the dissipation and fading of motivation to do something beyond the minimum have much to do with leadership. People’s genuine interest often dissipates over time, and they need to be “remotivated”. Someone needs to blow air into our sails. This is one of the leader’s roles. This is what makes self-motivated / self-propelled people so valuable.

Great Leadership is related to inspiration. The great leader inspires us to be more, and as a side effect, to do more. It would be great if the education system always has someone - at least one - in the role of providing inspiration. Centrally provided inspiration and centrally provided regulation are two poles of a framework: Inspiration doesn't say anything about what needs to be done, but gives us the strength to be great. Regulation doesn't ensure we do anything valuable, but keeps us from doing much damage. In between, there is a wide space for every one of us to do good in our own way.

So, how was the poem about leadership ?