CEDO 565 Entry Six

Leadership is a complicated and challenging skill. It requires a great deal of communication, understanding, persistance, and work. Schools have historically favored a top down leadership model with occassional directives from administration and teachers being isolated and independent. Newer models favor collaboration and teacher leadership. Leading peers can be extremely challenging as there is technically very little formal recourse that can be taken by the leader. For this reason teacher leaders must be positive and focus on improvement and communication. They must win over the support of their peers by establishing themselves as on their side and there to improve them and not judge them. This is especially challenging in a historically isolated profession.

I have always felt, and continue to feel, that I possess good leadership qualities. As a relatively young teacher I still have many facets of leadership to develop and experience is one of them. I have already went to conferences and presented at an inservice as positive steps towards teacher leadership. It will be important for me to continue to positively communicate and collaborate with my colleagues as I hope to grow into a leadership role. I due enjoy sharing my successful classroom strategies with others and want to play a key role in improving education in the future.

Although I believe that to truly improve education the stakeholders within the system will play a vital role it is hard to say that it can only be improved from within. As much respect as I have for my fellow educators and as seriously as I take my profession the reality is teachers have a limited scope of what is necessary for students to succeed in modern private sector jobs. There are universal skills and values such as hard work, discipline, punctuality, and quality that ring true in any line of work but the job market is constantly changing and educators are isolated from it a lot of the time. Therefore it will be necessary for schools to continue to partner with the community and local businesses to help bridge the gap that exists. I will continue to grow professionally by staying up to date on best practices and new educational initiatives. Someday I hope to possibly also become an Instructional Technology leader in a school district and maybe even an administrator.