TMA 2

TMA 2

Post 1

My planned leadership activity involves organising the homework club in the evening after classes to ensure the pupils’ academic performance in order to meet local, national, and international educational standards. The activity will involve organising and overseeing the teaching materials used by the teachers and ensuring that they possess the skills and competence needed to realise this objective.  By spearheading this activity, I will be called upon to exercise leadership traits as manifested by various theories of leadership (Gosling & Mintzberg 2004). The most dominant theories of leadership are transformational and transactional leadership (Grint 2008). I regard myself as mainly possessing traits of transactional leadership although I also demonstrate various traits of transactional leadership. Such a blend of leadership styles is important because I can borrow the best traits from each of these leadership styles to facilitate the realisation of my proposed leadership style. Transformational leadership will enable me to identify novel goals that will in turn facilitate in the proposed change (Bush 2011) namely, to improve the academic performance of the students. Moreover, transformational leadership will enable me to persuade both students and teachers involved in the homework club that they can achieve more than they think is possible (Deal & Paterson 2009). On the other hand, transactional leadership will enable me to partake in a ‘social exchange’ of tacit knowledge and skills with the goal of improving the student’s academic performance.

Post 2

In order for the leadership activity to be successful, I will be required to demonstrate authority in terms of dealing with the staff and pupils. In other words, I ought to possess the power needed to compel pupils and teachers to act in certain ways.  There are four kinds of powers as identified by Hales (1993): ‘technical’ knowledge; ‘administrative’ knowledge; coercive; and normative which hinges on trust and shared values. I believe that normative power is the most suitable under the circumstances considering that I need to be seen by pupils and teachers as trustworthy in whatever I teach (Bacharach & Lawler 1980). I also expect that the propped leadership activity shall be gradual as opposed to incremental. This is because there is a dire need to improve the student’s academic performance as a matter of urgency. A top-down change is thus desirable as it is very straightforward and easy to apply (Fullan 2007).

References

Bacharach SB & Lawler EJ (1980),Power and Politics in Organizations, San Francisco:

Jossey-Bass.

Bush, T. (2011), Theories of Educational Leadership and Management: Fourth Edition,

London: Sage.

Deal, TE & Peterson, KD (2009), Shaping school culture: Pitfalls, paradoxes, and

promises. New York, NY: Wiley

Gosling, J. and Mintzberg, H. (2004) The education of practicing managers, Sloan

Management Review, 45(4), 19-22.

Fullan, M (2007). The Six Secrets of Change. [Online].

Grint, K (2008),’Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions’, Clinical Leader. vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 54.

Hales, C (1993), Managing Through Organisation: The Management Process, Forms of

Organisation, and the Work of Managers, London: Routledge.