102098 Contemporary Teacher Leadership - Assessment 2

The leadership and fellowship are reciprocal and interdependent for teachers (Sterrett, 2015). Educators in the classrooms often adopt charismatic, transformational, servant or authentic leadership theories to ensure the learning efficiency of the students, while democratic, situational and distributed leading frameworks are frequently observed in the faculty offices to forge a collaborative team. Teachers are different by multiple means; the conflict of the pedagogies, teaching philosophy and personal traits significantly impact the effectiveness of their teamwork. As a result, teacher leadership is the critical component that bond teachers together, secure the cohesion and execute the implementation (Harris & Muijs, 2004). In this critical reflection, I would revisit the developing process of our group project “Merrylands Insight” and evaluate how teacher leadership contribute to the designing, implementing and reflecting phases of it, and discuss what can be achieved in the future program improvement. 

 

Our joint efforts are aiming to develop a cross-faculties project that improves the literacy skills of Year 7 students in Merrylands High School, where more than 80% of its enrolment has language backgrounds other than English (LBOTE). Leadership plays a significant part as it bonds members together in order to develop the project in an effective manner. When working as a team, it is essential to learn the strengths of each group member, to bring out the best possible solutions. Our group has a clear understanding of how to utilise our knowledge and limited time, as we adopted the theory of distributed leadership, which is more human-centric and coordinated according to Spillane & Diamond (2007), as our prominent theoretical framework. This allows us to establish a collaborative atmosphere and avoid overlapping workload (Chatwani, 2017). For example, by sharing the authority to all members, one of our team members could focus on the school data collecting, as our target school was where she did her first practicum and knows the school well. At the same time, I could contribute to the visual research part and the video presentation, since I have a design background closely related to the research project. 

 

Our project features a conceptual design that involves multiple school faculties, including Science, TAS and HSIE. The cross-faculties strategy provides the consistency of the implementation, as the core theories are adopted by teachers from a range of subjects. This could benefit both the learners and participating teachers: students can easily fit in all these subjects without spending extra time to fit in; while teacher-researchers would have access to a broader data pool, which has critical value for analysis, modification and further improvement. Personally, this cross-faculties project does not only provide us with an opportunity to learn how to plan action research as a group, but it also gives us a valuable lesson of how effective leadership would improve the communications between teachers and establish a collaborative relationship.

 

However, the cross-faculties brings challenges to the teacher leadership, since the teacher do not have the same background knowledge, teaching philosophy and timetable. These challenges not only increase the difficulty to organise meetings but also generates possible variables to the project. In action researches, educators usually intend to have more control over the variables in order to collect more valid and reliable feedback. Giving the fact that cross-faculties research brings much data, it also impacts the validity of the data due to the nature of different subjects and participants’ teaching style. For example, most of TAS subjects are project-based and influenced by teachers’ specialised areas, as well as the interest of students. Subject-specific terminology lists in these units are often limited on a small scale comparing to other subjects, as students tend to select different topics and use different techniques to solve their research problems. According to the Design and Technology Syllabus (2019), students are encouraged to research various factors affecting the design process, including different theories, style, and techniques. As a result, a compulsory SST list sometimes can be irrelevant and limits the creativity of students. The difference between the subjects and teachers creates uncertainty in the data validity and causes potential problems during the implementation. 

 

One possible solution to minimise the uncertainty would be preparing the lists more comprehensively and collecting relevant data from students regularly. For subjects with open solutions such as D&T and graphics, teacher-researchers need to develop an awareness that the SST and visual aids need to be updated in a timely manner to ensure the implementation. Also, as discussed in our proposal, the project would benefit future Year 7 students in these KLAs, since the range of SST lists and visual stimuli would keep growing thanks to the contribution of preceding and current students. The project requires much dedication in its initial phases, but the outcome is yet promising.

 

Sterrett (2015) stated that:

They prepare for years to become a teacher; they work tirelessly to engage students; they continually strive to meet the needs of today’s learners and reassure the anxious and worried parents…but we are losing too many of them-every year-because they feel burnt out, under-appropriated and overworked… and it is the leadership keeps the teachers grow, innovate and contribute to the profession. (p. 4)

 

As Sterrett (2015) emphasis, leadership is crucial to support teachers who dedicate to their profession and careers throughout all these pressures. 2020 is a challenging year for all of us. In fact, our life has been dramatically affected by the current situation, and we are all facing different difficulties. Although our group project was far from perfect, it is the mutual understanding and support between the group members, which keeps us staying on the path to become teachers. I believe this specific experience has implanted an indelible seed to our comprehension of leadership, which would thrive and make a difference throughout our future career.