Abstract
This article highlights multiple ways in which kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12) school leaders can work collaboratively with education stakeholders in elementary and secondary school settings to develop distributed leadership environments in their school communities to address the persistent and often seemingly intractable teaching and learning improvement dilemma challenges that plague many schools today. Insights gleaned from a brief examination of the distributed leadership attributes of one communal cultural tradition are utilized as the basis for generating some creative strategies for nurturing distributed leadership environments in school settings. These strategies may be useful to elementary and secondary school leaders working in a variety of educational environments who are interested in broadening their collaborative teaming and instructional support networks and energizing their school turnaround and improvement efforts.
Highlights
As an organizational psychologist and school improvement consultant for K-12 schools and school districts for over two decades, I have spent a great deal of time working with large groups of teachers, campus administra-How to cite this paper: Claudet, J. (2014)
A recurring theme resonating through the efforts of all of these groups of education stakeholders in various school community contexts is the challenge of finding creative ways to energize community engagement in their schools and districts to build a critical mass of stakeholder support for needed school improvement initiatives
The most daunting school turnaround leadership challenges school leaders have to confront on their campuses are persistent, long-term dilemma challenges that have been festering for a number of years in their school and district communities as a result of entrenched educator and community stakeholder beliefs about teaching, students’ learning potential, the limitations of traditional schooling, etc., as well as because of lax and/or insufficiently funded school improvement practices
Summary
As an organizational psychologist and school improvement consultant for K-12 schools and school districts for over two decades, I have spent a great deal of time working with large groups of teachers, campus administra-. For school turnaround efforts in elementary and secondary schools to be genuinely effective, education stakeholders (teachers, principals, assistant principals, campus- and district-based instructional support personnel, parents, and community members) in these schools must learn how to work collaboratively and synergistically to engage in focused, ongoing data mining and analysis, and be able to creatively leverage the results of these data analyses to inform their instructional decision making Most importantly, this data analysis and instructional decision-making process must result in the generation of realistic school improvement plans and implementation strategies that can directly address students’ diverse instructional support needs and enhance their overall learning performance. These cultural traditions include a strong sense of communal responsibility for protecting and preserving the natural environment (including finding creative ways to adapt synergistically to this environment), a commitment to active collaborative teaming to maximize community-wide learning and sharing, and the importance of working for the common good
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