Impact of Leadership in Organizational School Culture - Essay Example

Impact of Leadership in Organizational School Culture According to the textbook, there are nine tactical characteristics of effective schools that can be implemented quickly at minimal cost through administrative action. These include features such as collaborative decision making, strong leadership, coordinated curriculum, parental involvement, recognition for and focus on academic success, and an emphasis on teaching and learning. The first characteristic is the school management and democratic decision making, in which individual schools are encouraged to take greater responsibility in educational problem solving. The second feature is the support from district for increasing the capacity of schools to identify and solve significant educational problems, which includes reducing the inspection roles of central office personnel while increasing support of school-level leadership and collaborative problem solving. The third feature is diversifying leadership from school administrators to integrated teams of administrators. The fourth characteristic is Staff stability to facilitate a strong, cohesive school culture. The fifth characteristic is a planned, coordinated curriculum that treats the students’ educational needs holistically and increases time spent on academic learning. The sixth feature is the School-wide staff development that links the school’s organizational needs with the needs that teachers perceive should be addressed. The seventh characteristic is the Parental involvement in support of homework, attendance, and discipline. The eighth characteristic is the School-wide recognition of academic success, both in terms of improving academic performance and achieving standards of excellence. The ninth feature is an emphasis on the time required for focused teaching and learning by reducing disruptions. Select five of the Nine Tactical Characteristics and give a concrete scenario of each using leader behaviors along with a theoretical rationale for the leader’s behaviors. First: Strong leadership A principle has different cultures in her school; she realized later that there is racism between citizens and other students who are from other countries. She acknowledges that they do not respect each other due to lack of a consistent culture. The principal thus decides to institute a culture week to have the students showcase different cultures to ease the apparent tension. Lack of a homogenous school culture is both oppressive and discriminatory for other subgroups found within the school (Lough, 2004). The decision to include students in the management of their affairs is critical in effecting change that directly touches on their problems. Second: Staff stability to facilitate the development of strong cohesive school culture. Patricia Morgillo was posted to Quinnipiac Elementary School a priority school by designation of the state. The design was based students needing an intervention on the CMT. The school would receive more funding from New Haven school district, but stigma was directed to its teachers and pupils. She decided to refer to the school’s data to mobilize support for improvement from students and teachers. Previous administrators had not used hard data effectively to improve students' potential. "In fact, when I first came here, they used check marks to track students mostly on behavior," Morgillo said. Quinnipiac was a community school, and Morgillo knew staff had to examine statistics and soft (family, social, behavior) data to implement change. Dr. Elenor Osborne, an executive in the district’s priority schools devised an action plan for addressing low test scores, strengthened professional development, and using data to effect change in different strands of the Connecticut Mastery Test. Morgillo worked with the data and instituted the following measures: • Posted scores from assessments, including the Connecticut Mastery Test in her office so staff and parents would have a continuously updated point of reference. • Trained all staff to understand, gather, and share data using workshops to help team building. • Instituted grade−level meetings once a week, so teachers could exchange information about students beyond test scores to include behavior and social factors affecting learning. • Designated Robert Turner as the community liaison for the school. He regularly made home visits to gather information about challenges the students confront outside the school and what aspects of their culture could be used in school to further the learning process. Third: a planned, coordinated curriculum that treats the students’ educational needs holistically and increases academic learning hours. Bill Wallis a high school algebra teacher and mathematics department chair realizes that one of his colleagues is having a hard time teaching a certain strand: while the other students being taught by other teachers scores were in the 90th percentile. However, his students who have equivalent ability were scoring in the 60th percentile. There is a need for peer review with the concerned college at the mathematics department. The teacher would also be new to the school and needs to catch up on the school culture that is a shared vision shared by staff (Lough, 2004). Further learning the rules applied by the other teachers will most likely increase the performance of the students and subsequently increases the rewards. Rewards are crucial as an internal activity that affirms good performance (Stangor, 2011). Thus, the head of the math department would help the teacher strive to see the need for higher performance for the benefit of rewards and maintaining a culture of success. Fourth: Parental involvement particularly in support of homework, attendance, and discipline. A new principle of low-performance score test students at suburban school decided to do a weekly meeting with the parents to help parents with their child’s school engagement. His aim was to provide information on children’s developmental stages and offering advice on learning-friendly home environments. He proposed that parents wishing to get involved in their children’s education would be through volunteering at the child’s school. Encouraging family participation through community collaboration and involving parents in committees and advisory panels during decision making (Dervarics & O’Brien, 2011). Thus, this engagement would allow to boost the performance of the low score test students through parents sharing their ideas with the teachers. At home, leaning would promote strategies instituted at school to help teachers monitor progress away from the classroom. Fifth: Putting an emphasis on the time required for teaching and learning through a reduction of disruptions that stress the priority to learn. Anna Thornton was posted as the new principal of Tree High School a previously white-dominated school. The school had developed a culture that learning was based on inherent abilities by the student, and thus teachers cultivated a traditional approach to teaching where all students needed to be self-motivated to achieve academic success. A shift in demographics, however, opened the school to other racial groups and performance dipped considerably. Gang violence and school safety were seen to lower learning periods as well as causing incessant interruptions. The teachers mindset was also initially opposed to change as they believed in less involvement in children’s personal lives and behavior (Lough, 2004). Ms. Anna was a firm believer in steering underperforming schools to achieve considerable high test scores. Instituted a significant change in the school’s culture can be reached by motivating, communicating and building relationships (Dervarics & O’Brien, 2011). These actions aimed to show the teachers that new standards had to be incorporated in their areas of teaching in order to motivate students. She also identified that since majority were African American and Hispanic students, cultural norms and value systems needed to be incorporated in the school culture to support ongoing reforms. You are the principal of a middle school in which several staff members have consistently shown up late at arrival time, leading to unsupervised homerooms. You know that some cases are due to family reasons, whereas others seem to have no apparent reason. How will you address this situation? Will you take into account their personal or home lives? Why or why not? Leadership skills in running a school environment require the growing of an acceptable and inclusive culture in the school. A school administrator should be capable of delegating responsibilities in line with objectives to the staff. Continuous engagement of the administrator and the school staff grows a culture of norms, past practices, honored values and celebrated achievements (Lough, 2004). Thus, the staff will be fully aware of the need to grow a culture. Issues at home would be a contributing factor to the challenges that the personnel and the school face in growing a school culture. I would thus consider the staff personal lives and the effect of these issues in school culture. Offering external rewards to teachers to maintain the school culture is one viable way to correct the situation. The rewards should be proportionate to prevent since extremely positive ones are counterproductive to the intended goal or interest (Stangor, 2011).there is need to remind teachers that the culture in the school is created, maintained and manipulated by those in the school (Lough, 2004). Thus, the acknowledgment that personal issues may be affecting school culture and performance should be seen as an obstacle to educational success. Further, effective principals strive to understand the source of the myths and problems while offering to support the vision of improving the achievement of all students. A primary role of the principal is to provide a forum for stakeholders to identify and confront myths within the school’s culture would prevent staff from contributing to students educational gains (Lough, 2004). The staff that experiences problems should consult with peers to facilitate the resolution of their concerns and anxieties. This is due to school culture does rely on their support and any behavioral changes could create unwanted attitudes and beliefs (Stangor, 2011). References Dervarics, C., & O'Brien, E. (2011). Back to school: How parent involvement affects student achievement. The Center for Public Education. Retrieved from http://www. centerforpubliceducation. org. Lough, R., (2004). School Culture. Retrieved from https://us.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/7068_loughridge_ch_1.pdf Owens, R. G., & Valesky, T. C. (2015). Organizational behavior in education: Leadership and school reform. New Jersey: Prentice Hall Stangor, C., Dr. (2011). Changing Attitudes By Changing Behavior. Principle of Social Psychology. 1st Ed. Creative Commons Publishing. Read More