Educational Leadership: Personal Growth for Professional Development (Published in association with the British Educational Leadership and Management Society)

239 Pages·2004·0.68 MB·English

by  Harry Tomlinson

EDUCATIONAL
LEADERSHIP
PERSONAL GROWTH FOR
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Harry Tomlinson
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Educational Leadership
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Published in Association with the British Educational Leadership, Management
and Administration Society
This series of books published for BELMAS aims to be directly relevant to the
concerns and professional development needs of emergent leaders and experi-
enced leaders in schools. The series editors are Professor Harry Tomlinson, Leeds
Metropolitan University and Dr Hugh Busher, School of Education, University of
Leicester.
Titles include:
Rethinking Educational Leadership: Challenging the Conventions (2003)
Edited by Nigel Bennett and Lesley Anderson
Developing Educational Leadership: Using Evidence for Policy and Practice
(2003) Edited by Lesley Anderson and Nigel Bennett
Performance Management in Education: Improving Practice (2002)
Jenny Reeves, Pauline Smith, Harry Tomlinson and Christine Ford
Strategic Management for School Development: Leading your School’s
Improvement Strategy (2002)
Brian Fidler
Subject Leadership and School Improvement (2000)
Hugh Busher and Alma Harris with Christine Wise
Living Headship: Values and Vision (1999)
Edited by Harry Tomlinson
School Culture (1999)
Edited by Jon Prosser
School Improvement After Inspection? School and LEA Responses (1998)
Edited by Peter Earley
Policy, Leadership and Professional Knowledge in Education (1998)
Edited by Michael Strain, Bill Dennison, Janet Ouston and Valerie Hall
Managing Continuous Professional Development in Schools (1997)
Edited by Harry Tomlinson
Choices for Self-managing Schools: Autonomy and Accountability (1997)
Edited by Brian Fidler, Sheila Russell and Tim Simkins
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Educational Leadership
Personal Growth for Professional
Development
Harry Tomlinson
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© Harry Tomlinson 2004
First published 2004
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or
private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication
may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by
any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the
publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in
accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright
Licensing Agency. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside
those terms should be sent to the publishers.
SAGE Publications Ltd
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British Library Catalogue in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
ISBN 0 7619 6776 1
ISBN 0 7619 6777 X
Library of Congress Control Number: 2002115859
Typeset by Dorwyn Ltd, Hampshire
Printed in Great Britain by the Athenaeum Press, Gateshead
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Contents
Series Editor’s Preface viii
Biographical Note x
Introduction xi
1 Self-Management and Personal Development 1
2 Self-Understanding, Personality and Psychometric Instruments 11
3 Emotional Intelligence 22
4 360-degree Feedback 33
5 Accelerated Learning, the Brain, Competencies and Interviews 43
6 Neurolinguistic Programming and Professional Development:
Improving Communication Skills 53
7 Developing Creativity, Intuition and Innovation in Schools 64
8 Managing Stress and Managing Time 75
9 Career Development and Development as a Professional 86
10 Training, Coaching and Mentoring 97
11 Interpersonal Skills, Decision-Making and Team Learning 107
12 Leadership Development 118
13 Performance Management 129
14 Ethics, Values, Vision, Mission and Gender 140
v
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vi EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP
15 Culture, Change and Organizational Health 150
16 Strategy 161
17 Quality Models 172
18 The Learning Organization and Knowledge Management 185
19 Business Process Re-engineering: Achieving Radical Change 197
20 Work and Life: Achieving a Balance and Planning for the Future 207
Index 217
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With thanks for personal support from Berry, Kate (and Nodd), and Bob for
keeping asking.
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Series Editor’s Preface
I am delighted to celebrate the arrival of another book by Harry Tomlinson, for
the BELMAS series of books. In it he discusses how important it is that leaders of
educational organizations know themselves in order to be successful. How that
process of self-knowing can be undertaken is carefully developed in the first six
chapters through discussion of a variety of approaches for this. Clearly the pagan
oracle at Delphi was sharper at developing resourceful humans than have been
many modern secular perspectives on leadership and management. It, too, recog-
nized the importance of people understanding how they related to the cultures
and systems of the communities in which they worked, especially if they wanted
to be successful leaders. It, too, encouraged people to understand themselves,
their emotions, their strengths and weaknesses, and their values and the quality
of their communications with other members of their communities, in order for
them to be successful as leaders.
Harry, however, uses a different process from the smells and incantations of the
oracle to gain and offer insight into the complexities of human interactions in
educational organizations although he, too, recognizes the importance of leaders
offering counselling, coaching and mentoring to help their colleagues develop cre-
ativity. This, he argues, is necessary to support the quest of staff for innovation
and change to cope with the impact of alterations in the contexts of their schools
and colleges on the ways in which they work. Six chapters consider ways in which
leaders can support the professional development of their colleagues. In drawing
on an extensive and up to date literature from business management as well as
from educational management on personal and professional development and the
implementation of change in schools and colleges, he shows how the priestly class
of leaders at institutional and middle level can develop particular organizational
cultures and sub-cultures to project their core values and shape the working envi-
ronments of a school or college for staff and students. These values he argues are
particularly visible in the visions projected by leaders to guide the missions of
their schools and colleges, and in the systems and organizational structures that
are established and maintained in them.
Learning is placed at the centre of personal and professional development and
so at the fulcrum of organizational development: processes of individual and
institutional change require participants to learn and to act within consciously
rather than tacitly understood value frameworks and social, economic and polit-
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SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE ix
ical contexts. Those cultures (value systems and their manifestations) and prac-
tices that are more able to cope with ambiguity seem to help their participants
accommodate to change more smoothly. Seven chapters consider the processes of
change as they have been debated by a variety of recent scholars. Implicit in these
and in some of the other chapters are the asymmetrical power relationships in
schools and colleges between leaders at all levels and other staff and students, and
the ability of successful leaders to project power effectively in order to bring
about change.
This learning is, however, of a self-reflective nature that invites the actors in
schools to consider their actions in their current contexts in order to resolve how
to improve the quality of schooling to benefit all participants. The structure of the
book reflects this concern with active learning, spattering the text with a series of
questions as well as lists of actions which readers might undertake, to encourage
readers to juxtapose critically their learning from engaging with the text with cur-
rent practices in their schools and colleges.
It is perhaps fitting that the book should close with a chapter on one of the
great conundrums of working life: sustaining a balance between work and life.
And it is intriguing that the chapter places these notions in contradiction with
each other rather than considering work as part of life. This chapter seems pecu-
liarly apt, but offers no solutions except for people to tune into their values, at a
time in English society when the importance of people’s dedication to the pursuit
of organizational goals has been emphasized by central government and private
industry, heedless of people’s personal and social needs or of the needs of others
in their role sets outside the compass of the organizations for which they work.
We have all suffered in this period from the impact of this individualist neo-lib-
eral ideology destroying notions of community and social life and replacing
values of collaboration and shared decision-making in pursuit of agreed common
goals with ones of aggressive competition to generate increasing individual wealth
regardless of the needs of those people lacking in sufficient social, personal or
intellectual capital to compete effectively.
So it is of great value that this book reminds readers that there is more to living
than work and that successful adaptation to changing circumstances, at least in
educational organizations, depends more on cooperation and teamwork in pur-
suit of shared values and goals, developed through self-awareness, emotional
understanding and collaborative learning, than it does on competitive cutting
edge strategies that promote the aggrandizement of the implementer and the
destruction of the opposition, be that construed as the neighbouring producer,
neighbouring school or neighbouring classroom.
Hugh Busher
School of Education, University of Leicester