Mind Lab - Week 25 - Act on your plan (Take Action) - Notes

Reflection on Action Plan?

Moral, Ethical and Legal Responsibilities When Blogging

At our school our employment contracts don’t specifically mention social media but do talk about the importance of confidentiality.

What type of leadership am I doing?

See Week 10 - Servant Leadership Theory - The key characteristics of the servant leader include awareness, listening, persuasion, empathy, healing, and coaching. Situational leadership means that the servant leader may act as a democratic leader, a laissez-faire leader, or an autocratic leader in different situations (Koganti, 2014). (Those are the leadership styles under the servant leadership theory) Leaders adjust their styles based on the readiness of their followers. 

From Week 10 notes:

Agile Leadership Styles
Agile leadership is situational, adaptive, empowering and inspirational. The most important leadership theory applied to agile is that of servant leadership (Highsmith, 2009).

“For the Agile Leader, servanthood is the strategy. Situational actions are the tactic” (Filho, 2011).
The key characteristics of the servant leader include awareness, listening, persuasion, empathy, healing, and coaching. Situational leadership means that the servant leader may act as a democratic leader, a laissez-faire leader, or an autocratic leader in different situations (Koganti, 2014).

Servant Leadership
The originator of the servant leadership concept (though inspired by a Herman Hesse story) was Robert Greenleaf. “The servant­ leader is servant first... It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead.” (Greenleaf, 1970). 

A longer extract from this work, which was this week's flipped preparation activity, is in this week's media

Teachers as Servant Leaders
Servant leadership has been applied by a number of authors to teaching. “The teacher as servant leader functions as a trailblazer for those served by removing obstacles that stand in their path. Part of unleashing another’s talents is helping individuals discover latent, unformed interests. Art, music, and science teachers are prime examples of educators whose genius lies in leading students to discover unarticulated interests.” (Bowman, 2005).

Ten Characteristics of a Servant Leader

• Listening
• Empathy
• Healing
• Awareness
• Persuasion
• Conceptualization
• Foresight
• Stewardship
• Commitment to Growth of People
• Building Community

These characteristics, that come from Northouse (2013), are outlined in a blog post by Penn State (2013).

Reflection on my growth mindset as I put this leadership style into practice.

From Leadership Week 5 - Developing a Growth Mindset

An Oracle blog post (Oracle, 2015) suggests that leadership is all about the willingness to grow and
change and to help your people do the same. The Harvard Business Review (2014) suggests that
organizations focused on employees’ capacity for growth will experience significant advantages.

One area we will need to address are our stakeholders. Students, parents and other teachers within
the syndicate and years 3-6. We want to motivate these teachers to improve and grow their practices.
How can we do that?

• By modelling the behaviours we want to see.
• By providing PD for those who are motivated to upskill themselves.

• Involve them in the decision making (PD in a reading task program that the teachers select

themselves (from a limited range of choices)

• Over communicating the vision / mission / goals - mentioning these often might normalise

them and make the whole idea less threatening.

• Building shared values - maybe talking about the pedagogy, our beliefs about digital learning

and its importance, talking about the new curriculum progress outcomes and how we can work

towards these,

• Providing specific, targeted, timely feedback - Maybe 10 mins in a staff meeting or in an

admin meeting

Reflective Thinking

Putting reflective thinking into writing. Partly looking back (what have you learnt from the experience) Also looking forward.(apply the lessons learned to future events.) 1) Looking Back 2) analysing 3) projecting into the future - VERY IMPORTANT
Don’t look back on event in isolation. Take a metaphorical step backwards. See the event in the context of other events and other learning.They should influence viewpoint when reflecting on that event. What, when, who, where is descriptive and does not help useful reflection Write about thoughts during, after and since. Write about feelings (uncomfortable, confident etc) Why? How? Implications SO WHAT?

Use hindsight to help you reflect. How can the learning be applied to similar situations, also adapted and translated to other situations? Wring every bit of learning out of your experience and show how you can put that learning into action.

Step 1: Briefly describe what you have done so far to take action

Action Plan

Need to speak to senior management about our research.

Have looked at our data and had some brief thoughts about who to include in the research - need more data to confirm.

Have thought about the activities that we will do to increase number knowledge but again need more precise data to confirm.

Step 2: Reflect on the actions

This that senior management may not be as interested or exciting as we would like them to be. They are concerned about the time frame we are working within. Need to stress that although we are gathering data for our assignment, the research project can continue in some form or other (depending on initial findings) Senor management - apprehensive as some of them do not value the course - they feel it is a lot of work (taking time away from our teaching) with no gain (particularly monetary). Data and activities - really do need more information to make final decisions. Feeling exciting about this part but don’t want to spend a lot of time devising activities for areas of knowledge that students feel confident about. Spending time learning how to use the bee bots - don’t want cognitive overload when we come to use the bee bots for learning number knowledge, So we have given the students lots of free time play with the robots so they feel confident using them. This will continue during our teaching time, with one group being taught, one doing an unplugged robotics activity, one having a free play time robotics activities and one reinforcing the number knowledge learning that has been done.

Step 3: Examine your reflection in relation to other phases of the Spiral of Inquiry and within wider frameworks/theories

Other phases of the inquiry

For example, how has the Learn phase, in which you consider the ethical issues of your inquiry, helped you to mitigate the possible intrusion of the inquiry in student learning. Or, for Develop a Hunch phase (examine the resources), does the literature provide you with ideas about how to act? What does it say? How do they play out in practice? What needs to be changed? 

Leadership styles

Or what leadership style/theory have you employed when you take action(s)? In what ways did it help you to take action?

Growth mindset