During my attachment, apart from getting a better understanding of the SEM framework, I observed a group of school leaders interacting together during the validation process. They collaborated, having to work simultaneously on their own SEM criterion. There was much interdependency as the final validation of the school’s practice required inputs from one another. I had the chance to observe how the actions of these school leaders produce the outcome of the validation process through what I believed was distributed and collaborated leadership.
The team leader, a former principal herself, brings along her expertise in the area of management is well respected by the team. The team leader believed that the primary difficulty when reading the school’s reports is that we each read it in terms of our own context. I recalled her saying “… we cannot only read and judge an event of the written report from the perspective your life and experience today. …when you visit the school, when you immersed yourself in the actual school context, feel and see the school through their eyes, their understanding and their experience. “Otherwise, more often than not, your judgment of them will be wrong or even harsh. Another colleague of hers is her right hand person who was herself a former vice principal, looking at the student focused processes and key result performances. She comes to be in her role with 7 years of experience as a quality assessor. She is a detail person, identifying specific problems, offers suggestions for these concerns. Several times in the meeting, she reinforces concepts for others. For example, she gets others to teach the ranking points of JC students to those who do not teach JC. This validation team (comprising of another 5 team members) is representative of how both of them work with each other, especially of the team leader who constantly draws others in to emphasize their points and enable a common team consensus decision to be made in the end.
Through these 3 weeks of interactions and discussions, especially during the pre- and post-site visits meetings and the Caucus meetings revealed that the 7 school leaders each playing different roles and engage in different interviewing practices that weave together – collaborate – to come out with an common team decision in this validation process. There is one member of the team who is also a school principal herself, currently running a school. She now wears a different hat as a team member; she also brings in her management expertise and is often sought out by other fellow members for her expertise in staff management. During these meetings, the different team member’s roles converge and diverge. But the team leader always moves the meeting along, praising and encouraging her members, including the Special Assistant (SA), presenting specific expectations to the assessors and SAs and inviting all members’ inputs and sharing. I see my team leader as the big picture person. She periodically summarizes what has been said by others in order to share an important insight. In response to the various practices in the school, she states: “That’s the framework, the framework shows the approach, but always see if it is linked to the school’s mission vision.” To the SAs, many times she announces, “How much you learnt depends on how we want to be proactive”. She also serves to report critical and relevant information needed for the validation. The interactions of school leaders with each other (SAB assessors, school leaders) as well as how they interact with other non-assessing team members such as the SAs led to good concerted effort throughout the validation experience. One reason I believe is that the team members were given ownership and so encourage each member’s voice and build on consolidated interviews to assess the school. In this way, I see the relationship between the efforts of collaborated and distributed leadership, each requiring somewhat different inputs from one another in enabling the validation outcome to bear.
No comments:
Post a Comment