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Hello everyone.  My name is Mrs. Jennifer Morse.  I am the wife of an amazing (retired) Army Veteran, mother to 5 outstanding children (4 living and 1 deceased), step mom to 2 unbelievable adult children, grandma to 2 beautiful little girls, the sole Math Specialist for our Kindergarten through fifth grade campus, the new UIL academic campus coordinator for the elementary school and now a member of the Laso Math Grant Committee.  All of these are of course in addition to being a Masters student in this program.  I am hyper busy and always strive to do the absolute very best in each of the aforementioned areas.

I have been in education for 23 years, 18 of which have been at this same campus.  I love being able to support our military children with all that they work toward as they bring a unique set of struggles and achievements with them.  I have taught in grades 1, 2, 3, 4, 8 as homeroom teacher and then moved to my self created math specialist role, three years ago.

I am eager to learn with you all this summer and always look forward to constructive feedback. I do not currently have any questions or concerns to be addressed for this course. Happy learning!

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I connected mostly with the video "How To Be A Leader" by Simon Sinek.  This is a very powerful video that reflects on how leadership may or may not have been expressed accurately in multiple roles, not just education.  I listened multiple times to his suggestion that leaders should not practice giving their own opinions and then requesting input from others, but more importantly to practice being the last one to speak.  This is huge in education and in learning to become a better leader.  Teachers and administrators that take on a leadership role, must learn to listen to others and take what they express as key or important factors, into consideration before putting things like regulations into place.  I will be sharing this video with my campus when we return for the new school year.

References

Center for Creative Leadership. (2023, January 24). The 10
Characteristics of a Good Leader. CCL.
https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively
-articles/characteristics-good
leader/#:~:text=A%20good%20leader%20should%20have

Gardiner, M.-M. (2016, May 2). Administrative Leadership:
What Is It? Why Is It Important? And How Does It
Connect to CLASS? Info.teachstone.com.
https://info.teachstone.com/blog/administrative
-leadership-what-is-it-why-is-it-important-and-how
-does-it-connect-to-class

REDDOT X. (2018). HOW TO BE A LEADER - Motivational
Speech By Simon Sinek. In YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urrYhnaKvy4

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Strong Leadership:  Link:  Photo Explanation

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Strong Leadership:  Link:  Photo Explanation

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https://www.successbydesign.com/blogs/news/makes-a-good-school-administrator

After reading the learning materials articles, my own researched articles and watching the provided videos, I have selected the above photo to reflect what leadership is.  To me, this photo represents the qualities of a good leader; strong but understanding of when to ask for help.  In this photo, your opinion of whether the person at the top is the leader or the person that is still climbing is the true leader depends entirely on your perspective of whether leaders need strong supports as well and show others how to become good leaders themselves.

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Venn Diagram Comparing Leadership Styles

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Venn Diagram Comparing Leadership Styles

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Resources cited on black tab of Padlet. See "Citations and References for Leadership."

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Citations and References for Leadership (part 1)

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Citations and References for Leadership (part 1)

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References

Blad, E. (2023, February 17). Difficult Times Call for a New Approach to District Leadership, Author Says. Education Week. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/difficult-times-call-for-a-new-approach-to-district-leadership-author-says/2023/02

Educational Leadership in Challenging Times. (2021). Www.youtube.com. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXDpv-vx5bc

Gardiner, M.-M. (2016, May 2). Administrative Leadership: What Is It? Why Is It Important? And How Does It Connect to CLASS? Info.teachstone.com. https://info.teachstone.com/blog/administrative-leadership-what-is-it-why-is-it-important-and-how-does-it-connect-to-class

Patterson, J. (2001). Resilience in the Face of Adversity. School Administrator, 58(6), 18–24. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ630831

Pounder, D., & Crow, G. (2021). Sustaining the Pipeline of School Administrators - ASCD. ASCD. https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/sustaining-the-pipeline-of-school-administrators

REDDOT X. (2018). HOW TO BE A LEADER - Motivational Speech By Simon Sinek. In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urrYhnaKvy4

Stoltzfus, K. (2022). School Leadership Development? There’s a Framework for That - ASCD. ASCD. https://www.ascd.org/blogs/school-leadership-development-theres-a-framework-for-that

What Does Leadership in Education Mean to You? (2018, June 29). NCTE. https://ncte.org/blog/2018/06/what-does-leadership-in-education-mean-to-you/

What Makes a Good School Administrator? (2019, November 15). Successbydesignplanners. https://www.successbydesign.com/blogs/news/makes-a-good-school-administrator

Williams, A. (2022, March). Leadership Through Crisis: A Framework for Choosing Joy. ASCD. https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/leadership-through-crisis-a-framework-for-choosing-joy

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PART ONE: PREPARING TO CARRY OUT RESEARCH ON EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP

Introduction: Key Issues in Research on Educational Leadership

Theories of Educational Research

Ensuring Reliability, Validity or 'Trustworthiness' in Research

Reviewing Existing Ideas to Develop a Conceptual Framework

PART TWO: DESIGNING AND USING RESEARCH TOOLS FOR EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP RESEARCH

Interviews and Focus Groups

Action Research and Practitioner Inquiry

PART THREE: ANALYSING DATA AND REPORTING THE FINDINGS OF RESEARCH IN EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS

Analysing Quantitative Data

Analysing Qualitative Data

The Uses of Leadership Research

Conclusions: Writing Reports and Making Sense of Outcomes

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Benchmark Project Information: Jennifer Morse: EDUC6302

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If you manage staff or teach students, it's essential to adopt and hone an effective leadership style. When you work in education, some approaches may work better than others. Choosing from various options can help you select the right approach for each challenge. In this article, we discuss 10 leadership styles in education and explore how they can affect your organization, your team and your students.

Why are leadership styles important in education?

To lead teachers, students or administrators effectively, you need a framework that defines your approach. Adopting a leadership style helps you determine how to make decisions, what goals to prioritize and how to interact with others. When you choose the right leadership style for the situation, you may be able to solve complex problems, resolve conflicts quickly, change the course of a school or even transform educational systems.

Leadership styles in education roles

Here are 10 of the most effective leadership styles in education:

1. Affiliate

This approach focuses solely on the people you lead, such as faculty or students. Rather than focusing on your own needs or goals, you completely support those who depend on you.

Most leaders who use an affiliate-style approach focus on cultivating trust among followers and empowering others to carry out their goals. When you use this approach, you have to trust the process and believe that the students or faculty you lead are devoted enough to carry out your plans and strategies as directed.
Related: Leadership Skills: Definitions and Examples
2. Authoritative

If you work in an educational setting that requires or already operates under strict rules and policies, consider using an authoritative leadership style to ensure those you lead follow them. When you adopt an authoritative style, you establish a large-scale vision and the short-term goals needed to achieve it. You then delegate specific guidelines for how each person can help the organization reach those goals, supervise your staff or students to closely monitor performance and progress.

This style is especially effective when you have a significant amount of experience or expertise in an in-demand area that you can use to prove that your authoritative approach can work. With this approach, you can expect students, teachers and even administrators to respect you and your strategy.

When you adopt a coaching leadership style, you take on a mentoring role for your team or class. You build strong bonds with those you lead and focus on helping them develop their skills.

As a coach, you identify areas of weakness among your students or staff and show them how to improve. When you coach others, you strive to remain empathetic toward their needs, goals and capabilities while still maintaining focus on the organization's goals.
Related: 15 Leadership Qualities That Make a Great Leader
When you use a coercive approach, you expect your team or class to comply with all of your demands. This stricter authoritarian approach involves identifying what needs to be done or what changes need to be made to achieve a specific outcome and outlining very clear processes for how to complete tasks and make those changes.

Although a coercive leadership style may not be appropriate as a long-term approach, it typically works best for leaders who need to achieve substantial goals, often in a short amount of time, and who have the capacity to focus on those goals completely. Some administrators use a coercive approach during crises, such as financial strain, to place strict limitations on certain activities and reduce negatively impactful behaviors. Similarly, teachers can use this style when they need to improve their class's performance quickly.

5. Emotional

An emotional approach focuses on the feelings of the people you lead. To use this leadership style effectively, you must have keen emotional intelligence and understand how to read and interpret how your staff or students feel. You also have to understand how to motivate others using both their current feelings and the emotions you know they want to experience.

Related: How to Demonstrate Leadership Skills at Work

6. Instructional

Many teachers and administrators opt to embrace an instructional leadership style because it emphasizes improving teaching performance and student progress simultaneously. To achieve these goals, administrators take responsibility for advancing teachers' professional development, while teachers work closely with students to improve their performance. Instructional leaders also set high expectations for those they lead and provide incentives for good performance.

Administrators with an instructional leadership style closely monitor their teachers' performance, evaluating their abilities and identifying areas that need improvement. They arrange regular teaching evaluations and provide additional training as necessary. Teachers who use the instructional leadership style also review students' performance to identify strengths and areas for improvement to then provide additional help, such as tutoring or more one-on-one guidance.

7. Pacesetting

If you want to motivate your team of students, teachers or administrators to improve their performance, consider setting the pace yourself. Adopting this leadership style has the potential to work well when you lead people who are both experienced and motivated.

As a pacesetter, you focus less on having others establish goals and more on serving as a good example. To put this leadership style into action, set and work toward improvement goals for yourself, such as regularly acquiring new skills, increasing productivity and developing new knowledge about education best practices.

Related: Your Ultimate Guide to the Top Leadership Traits

8. Strategic

When you need to focus on long-term planning, consider using a strategic approach to better focus on analyzing current school and classroom performance and setting goals to reach better results.

As a strategic leader, you focus less on daily concerns and more on developing frameworks that allow others to reach long-term goals. When you take this approach, you should plan to focus on analyzing data, allocating resources and developing partnerships. Strategic leaders also consider partnerships and collaboration essential for accomplishing major goals.

9. Transactional

A transactional style could help you and your organization accomplish your goals because it allows you to view every interaction like a business transaction or an exchange of elements with equal value. These leaders set these expectations but also provide additional resources and support within limitations to set staff and students up for success.

A transactional approach tends to work best when the people you lead are motivated by money or another tangible reward. Since many educators are motivated by greater purposes and goals rather than money alone, a transactional approach may work only for select faculty.

For example, an administrator might expect teachers to reach certain performance standards in the classroom in exchange for funding a field trip, and in turn, a teacher may expect their students to reach those same performance standards in exchange for organizing a field trip.
Related: 10 Common Leadership Styles
10. Transformational

As a transformational leader, you take a collaborative approach to management and serve as a strong role model for those you lead. By empowering others, you can create a shared desire to improve and reach goals. This style involves clearly communicating at all levels, setting large-scale objectives and delegating tasks without having to closely monitor performance and progress.

When you take a transformational approach, you have to be familiar with the basics of several other leadership styles. You have to know how to inspire and motivate others, how to focus on their self-interests and how to stimulate others emotionally and intellectually. As a transformational leader, you can expect to cultivate mutual trust, loyalty and respect among your students or team members.

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10 Effective Leadership Styles in Education

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If you manage staff or teach students, it's essential to adopt and hone an effective leadership style. When you work in education, some approaches may work better than others. Choosing from various options can help you select the right approach for each challenge.

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Educational Research and Policy Podcast 2021

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Educational Research and Policy Podcast 2021

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Educational Leadership in Challenging Times

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District leaders should shift from a traditional "command and control" structure to an approach that focuses on trust and inspiration of the educators and administrators they lead-one that recognizes "the inherent greatness of people," best-selling author Stephen M. R. Covey said Friday.

"Our job as leaders is more like a gardener than it is a mechanic ... Our job is to create the conditions for people to grow-both the students but also our own people, our teachers and administrators," Covey told about 3,000 district leaders from around the country on Feb. 17 at the National Conference on Education, an annual event hosted by AASA, the School Superintendents Association.

Sessions at the three-day event focused on the urgent need for academic recovery after pandemic disruptions and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on school and district employees.

Factors like changes in technology and the workforce, concerns about employee burnoutand attrition, and looming financial concerns all contribute to a need for a different type of leadership, said Covey, who is the son of Stephen R. Covey, author of the influential book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Today's challenges require an all-hands-on deck approach, he said, and people at all levels of school systems need to be empowered to be part of the solution, rather than being forced into a compliance mindset. Leaders should "be efficient with things and effective with people," treating the flourishing of educators as an end goal in itself, Covey said.

"The moment we start to manage people as if they were things, we are going to end up with no people and a lot of things," he said.

Conditions for flourishing

That mindset shift is especially important for leaders in education at this moment, Covey said. He cited the results of a June Gallup poll, which found that K-12 workers reported the highest burnout rates of employees in any profession. Forty-four percent of K-12 workers who responded to that poll reported that they "always" or "very often" feel burned out at work, outpacing all other industries.

And schools are competing for employees against businesses offering remote work and new flexibilities, which may draw teacher-candidates and other K-12 professionals away from the field, Covey said.

"To try to lead in this new world, this new environment, this new reality, the way we have been leading in the past, is not going to work very well," he said. "People don't want to be managed, they want to be led, they want to be trusted, they want to be inspired."

While the current moment may seem frustrating and overwhelming, growth is possible given the right conditions, Covey said.

He cited Death Valley, Calif., as an example. The typically barren desert land, known as the hottest place on earth, saw a rare "superbloom" of yellow wildflowers in 2005 after an unexpected rainfall.

"Wildflowers popped up and carpeted the entire valley," Covey said. "It turns out it wasn't dead after all; it was just dormant ... The seeds were there all along. They just needed the right conditions to flourish and to grow. In a sense, people are like that."

A mindset shift for leaders

Leaders can make several key mindset shifts to create a culture of trust and empowerment in their schools, Covey said.

Leaders should unleash employees' potential, rather than trying to control or contain their ideas, he said, and they should inspire employees to explore solutions, rather than motivating them toward fixed ideas.

Good leaders fight against a scarcity mindset, focusing instead on an abundance of things like respect, capacity, and trust, Covey said.

Finally, districts shouldn't expect trust from educators until they extend trust to them, he said.

Teachers have echoed those ideas in many districts, asking for space and autonomy to try new approaches in their classrooms, and for a voice at the district decision-making table.
"Inspiring others is a learnable skill," Covey said. "And, as a leader, it is a stewardship that we have."

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Difficult Times Call for a New Approach to District Leadership, Author Says

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District leaders should shift from a traditional "command and control" structure to an approach that focuses on trust and inspiration of the educators and administrators they lead-one that recognizes "the inherent greatness of people," best-selling author Stephen M. R. Covey said Friday. "Our job as leaders is more like a gardener than it is a mechanic ...

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Planning for Online Learning and Keeping It Engaging- By Jennifer Morse

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Planning For Online Learning and Keeping It Engaging (1).pptx

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Final Benchmark Reflection - EDUC 6302 - Summer 1

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Final Benchmark Reflection - EDUC 6302 - Summer 1

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Citations and References for Leadership (part 2)

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Citations and References for Leadership (part 2)