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A reflective paper on Book Review
Introduction
This paper expresses the in-depth understanding from the book review exercise and critically reflects on the learning and experiences of the process. It discusses about author, summary of book and Learning, critique, reflection on group work, reliability of individual leadership, communication skills, presentation challenges, self-learning and conclusion. The paper also throws light on my own and as well as group work reflections.
About Writer and Book
The book named "Values for Educational Leadership" by: Graham Haydon published in 2007 by SAGE, is reviewed by our group of six members as a part of Pedagogical Leadership (PL) course offered in Master of Education. The author is lecture of philosophy in University of London.
Summary of Book and Learning
In this book, the author describes values and their places in educational leadership, educational aims for moral purposes, the value of the individual leader, the vision in education, school ethos and culture and finally, the values for community and democracy in educational leadership. Author has expressed a way based on philosophical approaches to values, in order to encourage practitioners to examine their academic practices, make the connection to leadership. The author gives a clear picture about the nature of values in first chapter he points out that values can make a difference to work of educational leaders. My understanding about this portion is that, values are important and author invites to think about values such as value implicated decisions. The second chapter defining values, aims and purposes, morals author utilized different models with references form Fullan (2003) studies. My learning is that leaders in education need to be able to think about these moral various possible purposes. Then the author concentrates on individual leadership and suggests that the good leaders have some characteristics of positive mind, clarity of thought, interpreting skills, supportiveness, teamwork skills and respect for people. From this chapter my learning mirrors that, to be a good educational leader one must have sense of responsibility moral aims for working in a school, system or organization. Discussing about the vision the author describes four aspects: interpreting vision, facing challenges, sharing the vision and find an alternative vision within the vision. Eventually, the author discusses about the context, culture, and community of school. I appreciate the author's ideas that first vision must be there, in any educational setup. Then, it is function of leader that how does he/she looks into the matter.
According to my understanding, systemic change is required to change the school culture when I reflect on the chapter of school ethos. The author suggests ways to educate the leaders to be value oriented will help teachers to become a leader. In addition, he argues that the individual character is directly related to social norms and values. This mirrors me that values are significant across the present culture of school, the leader must decide ways according to the school culture to implement the positive change.
My critique
The author has handled the book in a decent way. However, selecting six different themes it makes much complex to understand this book easily. Looking into organization of book connection in ideas is found. However, a collection of philosophical definitions have overshadowed authors own point of view and synthesis. Moreover, the author has focused on leadership as a position and has prescribed ways to educate the leaders to be value oriented in the tasks. He did not talk about impact of ethical standings and moral preferences of society on leadership. I reflect this, keeping my context in my mind as the book is written for Western context and one has to be careful about value judgments.
Reflection on Group work
The given task was a group work, therefore, our group worked and planned together for the whole process of the book review. In the initial meeting, we developed some group rules for the group in order to ensure each member's participation. We distributed the tasks among each other. The book review helped a lot our group to reflect on changing aspects of educational leadership. The Teamwork was evident in our group because all those members who had previous experience of book review shared their understanding with other members of the group. Consequently, each member of our group developed the understanding about the book. I understand that teamwork is essential in any type of career, and by doing group work tasks while still in school will continue to help me prepare for my future. Eventually, the presentation preparation work itself turned out to be a great learning experience for every member of my team, including myself.
I will further reflect my learning within or outside the group work as:
Communication Skills
Communication is also a key to a successful team. If a person is reluctant to communicate with the rest of the team, his or her ideas will not be expressed in a completed work. I feel that in small teams like we had, it helps a hesitant person become involved in doing practice to make it perfect. I believe that every person's opinion is important in running a team, and I tried my best to get every person's input before a final decision is made. Overall, I learnt that the communication skills or clear voice is a big benefit for group work, where one critiques or encourages the other's ideas. I was given task critically look at presentation work and compilation. This task improved my critical thinking skills and communication skills.
The Presentation Challenges
The presentations presented by each team member in front of the class proved to be a good experience. However, people have different attitudes while presenting like as: loudly or slowly speaking. I reflect myself that throughout the presentations, some passive speakers like me get experience in speaking in front of people. I learned that during presenting I should turn my face to audience rather than watching the slides because, reading the slides is not a good practice for presentation. After rehearsal of presentation every member was ready and prepared in presentation skills. I learned that practice is the only way to become comfortable and perfect in front of people.
Reliability of Individual leadership in my own context
The author suggests the characteristics of good individual leader in this book. To reflect on my experiences, I have some exposures regarding leadership practices in my career such as I am only male teacher in my school who encourage other teachers for team work, supportiveness and for respecting one another to become a successful personality. The book enabled me to understand individual leadership concept and to reflect me on my own practices of leadership. Individual Leadership is one of the distinct styles of leadership, which focuses on capacity building in school. (MacNeill, et. al, 2003).
Conclusion
In general, Book review is a stirring exercise to reveal a thoughtful learning. Working in group develops the sense of shared leadership. Similarly it improves our leadership skills. It has been a great team building experience for me, and I learned the dynamic collaborative work, to help one another, the aspects of individual leadership improved critical and communication skills and also to deal with challenges which arose during this exercise.
References:
MacNeill, N., Cavanagh, R., & Silcox, S. (2003). Beyond Instructional leadership: towards pedagogical leadership. Annual conference for the Australian Association for research in education. (p. 2-11). Auckland:
Fullan, M. (2003). The moral imperative of school leadership. UK: Corwin press.
Group work
Group work can help students to become more active in their learning (Ruel and Bastiaans, 2003). When working with peers in a group, students are encouraged to articulate their ideas and question the ideas of others. When it works, this leads to a social process of constructing ideas and developing possible solutions to problems. Hendry et al. (1999)
Educational Leadership
Effective leaders manage the process: they help the group decide how to work efficiently, and monitor the group's progress in relation to the intended plan. They should not merely lead the group toward their own desired outcome. Thus, a good leader is an excellent listener and is also prepared to re-evaluate his or her own opinion on a topic.
Pedagogical Leadership
Pedagogical leadership is all about developing humans in a school and helping them to be caring to each other as a community and curious to learn at all times. According to Sergiovanni (1998), "Pedagogical leadership develops human capital by helping schools become caring, focused and inquiring communities within which teachers work together as members of a community of practice" (p.37).
