MASS: Field-Led Leadership

From my observations and understandings of road construction (through the eyes of the mother of a worker) there were a lot of inefficiencies in the construction process. There was no clear leader. Multiple companies were hired to work independently – with clear outlines of duties and responsibilities and crossover or collaboration between these companies was discouraged. Many systems were at play that affected the project. Besides weather, there were municipal and provincial governing bodies, various workers’ unions and safety regulations that came into play.

In a school, there are also multiple systems at play – divisional policy, provincial policy, unions, budgets, health systems (Covid) on a large scale, as well as family systems, cultural systems, classroom and school systems on a more individual level. Management of these systems was identified in this course by current administrators. This course confirmed that I was not suited for school administration. System management seemed to be the primary pull of a principal’s attention, time and effort. This takes a strong and confident individual to make decisions at this level. Many times, it also seemed like making real change in the realms that matter to me – teaching and learning – were difficult to grow or encourage growth. I often referred to the course Issues in Educational Administration where I learned about “Teacher Leadership”, but this field did not appear as a dominant focus over the “business” of education.

One of the projects of this course was to do an observation of an administration. This was valuable to see the daily events in an administrator’s position. Below I reflected on and summarized by experience.

I took a risk on the final presentation. I do not know if it was a success or not. I was just coming off of a course where we used a story-telling pedagogy, so I thought I would try to incorporate it into a presentation. I wanted to simplify the presentation – remove the “flash and bang” of media presentation and simply – tell a story.

The thought was good – but the execution was poor. I got nervous and ended up reading it. I feel it came across as a traditional “chalk and talk” lecture. Sigh!