Servant Leadership: Empowering Learners through 'Flipped' Classrooms

Abstract

The paper explains the concept of servant leadership in relation to teaching and learning. A teacher who is a servant-leader enables each student to be a servant-leader. The teacher empowers students to help each student to grow and have the opportunity of being a leader. To empower learners their lecturers must themselves be empowered, so that they can empower their students. To empower ourselves and our students our learning/teaching strategy should include the establishment of a community of learners. A community of learners is established by the teacher moving from the position of lecturer to a position of a facilitator of collaborative learning, where the students learn from each other, as well as from their teacher, who is a co-participant in the learning process. When teachers give up their powerful position as teacher, students have the opportunity to take responsibility for their learning. An obstacle to empowering learners is the teacher-centred learning methods we adopt. The author argues that ‘flipped’ classrooms are the way forward to empowering learners and enabling them to become critical and independent learners, developing skills such as leadership and communication. ‘Flipped’ classrooms are classes where the lecture content delivery takes place before the ‘lecture’. The students can access the content of the lecture before the lecture. The ‘lecture’ slot will consist of checking understanding of key concepts and principles and a discussion of difficult concepts. The students who have grasped the difficult concepts could explain them to the students who have not done so in a collaborative community of learners. The ‘lecture’ time is used as an interactive team work session where students engage in active learning, applying the knowledge they have gained in their prior reading. The aim is to create a student-centred learning environment giving each student the opportunity of achieving their full potential.The research methodology is to conduct a literature review on servant leadership, empowering learners and ‘flipped’ classrooms to investigate whether the three concepts could be linked in the context of teaching/learning. The methodology is theoretical and exploratory.