Leadership And My Middle School Career

The responsibility of preparing today’s students for tomorrow’s future involves more than orchestrating the curriculum students learn and the teachers who teach it. It involves the ability to employ the leadership styles fluently based on the everyday demands of running a school (Goleman, 2000). Informed by both research and real-world application, the Wallace Foundation identified five key functions of a successful leader: “shaping a vision of academic success for all students, creating a climate hospitable to education, cultivating leadership in others, improving instruction, [and] managing people, data, and processes to foster school improvement” (Harvey, 2013, pg. 4). To be an effective 21st century educational leader, one must cultivate a sustainable vision and school culture which are globally-minded, yet locally applicable to the community they serve.

Leadership might be the most discussed and written about topics in our modern society. Thousands of books have covered this topic and people are often using this term correctly as well as in the right format. But what does it really mean? Strength? Power? Leadership could be as simple as holding the hand of a small child crossing the street, or as complex as signing the Declaration of Independence. A leader is not someone who cheats their way to the top, or tricks others into doing things. Being a leader is also not all about power and control. Power is not leadership because leaders don’t necessarily need any source of “power,” but instead are looked up to by their followers. The assertion of power can create feelings of fear, betrayal,

I used to believe a leader was the person who was in the front of the room or the crowd, the one in the news, on the billboard and the one who is the most popular. A leader to me had to be the person with the most authority that was above everybody else like a teacher to a classroom or a chief is to cops. Being put into leadership positions taught me how wrong I had been. A leader can’t get nervous? I was nervous. A leader is always prepared and won’t wing anything. I have learned with my mistakes how important preparation is for social force. A leader is an authoritative role? Nope. Not at all. I don’t believe I’m any better than any of my peers or club member so I don’t see a reason to behave as though I am. Being a leader is being innovative, futuristic, individualistic, open and humble. Through these acquired taste, I have

When attending middle school, it is consider most students’ “awkward stage” of schooling, from their physical appearances and to the idea of becoming a young adult with a variety of choices to choice from such as their classes to the clubs or sports teams that they might want to join. For most middle school students, the idea of changing from a young elementary student, who was not given much variety in school to the idea of entering into middle school where they are learning how to become their own advocate by becoming a leader within and outside of the classroom. Within the middle school setting, all of these events of student’s life don’t happened over night. It takes time and the guidance of the teacher to help the student make connection

Leadership is defined in many different ways by many different academics and professionals. A few words that resonate with the meaning include management, control, guidance, headship, direction and governance. My basic definition for the word describes it as a technique used to manage and guide individuals or groups of individuals in a specific direction to achieve a common goal. However this is a bit too basic for my liking. While conducting the research for this manifesto I found two definitions that I thought were more interesting and quite charming. Tom Landry defines leadership as “getting someone to do what they don’t want to do, to achieve what they want to achieve” (Murphy, 2010). Alternatively Otto Scharmer stated, “at its core, leadership is about shaping and shifting how individuals and groups attend and subsequently respond to a situation” (Scharmer, 2007).

According to Collins English dictionary, Leadership is the art of leading others to deliberately create a result that wouldn’t have happen otherwise. A leader helps himself and others to do the right things. They set direction, build an inspiring vision, and create something new. Leadership is about mapping out where one need to go to achieve a goal as a team or an organization and it is dynamic, exciting, and inspiring for those who participate in this journey. Yet, while leaders set the direction, they must also use management skills to guide their people to the right destination, in a smooth and efficient way.

The principal aspects of leadership are oft debated; to attempt to define what leadership is would most certainly result in broad and varied definitions dependent on who is queried. Nonetheless, in the preeminent

There are so many definitions of leadership and it is difficult to establish a specific definition;

Traditional leadership models tend to portray leader as to be all the things to all the people. To command and to control and to orchestrate the actions of others at all the levels of organization. To have the intellectual capacity to make sense of remarkably complex issues while at the same time have creative powers to paint the future that spawns everyone’s enthusiasm.

There has been vast amounts of research done on the topic of leadership, and yet despite this it continues to be ‘‘riddled with paradoxes, inconsistencies, and contradictions’’

Leadership is very broad topic which is being discussed for many years now and over 30 years ago Stogdill (1974) claimed that the issue for understanding leadership is getting worse over the years because there are nearly as many definitions of the leadership as there are people trying to characterize it. Rost (1993:6) agrees with the statement by explaining: “neither scholars nor the practitioners have been able to define leadership with precision, accuracy, and conciseness so that people are able to label it correctly when they see it happening or when they engage in it.”

Leadership, according to Bryman (1992), is “purpose-driven action that brings about change or transformation based on values, ideals, vision, symbols, and emotional exchanges”.

First of all, according to Matthew R. Fairholm, (Fairholm, 2004) there are two different approaches to studying leadership. First one and the most popular is a focus on the leader, suggesting that the best way to understand leadership is when we studying concrete individuals in concrete situation. In addition, supporters of this method mainly focus on the qualities, behaviours of those who state to be or are given the title of leader. (Fairholm, 2004). In other words,

It is about the ability of leaders to transform values into actions, visions into realities, obstacles into innovations, separateness into solidarity, and risks into rewards. Leadership itself can be defined as a process of persuasion or example by which an individual (or team) influences a group to pursue objectives held by the leader or shared by the leader and his or her followers (Gardner, 1990). Authors Kouzes and Posner (2007) describe leadership as “ultimately about creating a way for people to contribute to making something extraordinary happen”. In addition, author Chemers (2002) expanded the definition of leadership as the “process of social influence in which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task”. Meanwhile, Daft (2008) summarized “leadership involves the influence of people to bring about change toward a desirable future”. Leaders have a desire to make something happen, to change the way things are, to create something that no one else has ever created before. They have to enlist others in a common vision, and in order for leaders to enlist support, they must have the necessary “knowledge of people’s dreams, hopes, aspirations, visions and values because leadership work best through dialogue” (Kouzes & Posner, 2007, p. 17). Most of the time, leadership is practiced on four levels: 1. Personal – the relationship with own self. 2. Interpersonal – the relationship of own self and

Taking a deep further look at the definition, we can consider Leadership as ‘the process of influencing an organized group’, engaging them to maximize group effectiveness, ‘towards the accomplishment of a goal’. (Hughes, Ginnet & Curphy 2015, p. 5)