Transformational Leadership from My Perspective: Reflection Log Entry #1

After completing the readings, I spent a long time considering the last three years at my current high school. Three and a half years ago, we were labeled Persistently Lowest Achieving (PLA) by the state of Virginia. This label forced us to choose a transformation model, accept grant money, and fundamentally reorganize the way we worked in our school. The best thing that came out of that label was the introduction of our current Principal to the school. She closely exemplifies what I understand to be transformational leadership: the process of developing truly shared goals (not a bottom line), speaking about and working to motivate a staff to grow and develop their craft for the sake of being better for students, and organizing a school to ensure the systems are working to benefit each other. In fact, being a transformational leader would challenge any administrator to examine the way a school functions and have the courage and support from their staff and team to make drastic changes where needed. What worked years ago may not still work, and a transformational leader knows how to garner the support to directly engage those outdated processes and restructure them to fit the needs of their current and future stakeholders.

At the end of the chapter in the Jossey-Bass reader, Leithwood (2007) lays out three specific ways a school can begin to enact transformational leadership. His third option, “just do it- on the quite likely grounds that many of those to whom you are accountable don’t care what you do as long as it is ethical and gets results,” sounded familiar. While our Superintendent would often pass down programs and ideas to our Principal, she very clearly stated and worked to keep him out of the school building and out of our daily work. She took those programs and worked with a large group of administration and teacher leaders (known as the Instructional Council, of which all teachers were invited to attend) to decided how best to make the programs work to meet our goals in our schools. That last part, the context and environment where the leadership takes place, seems so integral to me. Transactional leadership speaks to me of a leader who does not really know their school, or know how best to work within it. That style of just getting things done for that day, accomplishing short term goals, etc., just never seems like it will accomplish long term change or sustain shared goals.

One of the worst things I’ve seen done with instructional technology is what I will call the “Hail Mary pass.” Someone drops off a new toy, the admin. or dept. head hands it to a teacher, says “make it happen!” and then walks away. The teacher has no real training on the technology, so they in turn throw it at their students and pray for great things to happen. The chances of this working out are equal to a Hail Mary winning a game- iffy at best. A transactional leader might just say they want to see more tech use in the classroom, and create a rubric to assess it. However, this doesn’t really speak to how appropriate or effective a specific tool might be or how well their teachers are prepared to bring it into their pedagogy. In contrast to this, a transformational leader would first look at an assignment or project and decide what technology would benefit or improve it. Then, they would organize training and support for teachers in not only knowing how to use the technology, but how to teach with it and support the effective use of it by their students.

References

Leithwood, K. (2007). Transformation school leadership in a transactional policy world. In                          Educational Leadership (2 ed., pp. 183-196). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.