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Communication & Collaboration- Initial Reflection


While each model of distributed leadership had clear differences, they all seemed to base their ideas on the premise that leadership can take place within a variety of contexts and are not limited to just one specific person or role.  This is also true of my experiences in a school setting.  I related most to Ogawa, Pounder, and colleagues' model of leadership as an organization-wide resource of power and influence.  There are various types of leadership within our building and my district, each which comes with its own set of power and influence.  While certainly administration holds a significant amount of power and often times influence as well, certain teachers in our building share and equal amount of influence, especially with other colleagues and with parents. 

I also related to this model's criteria for effective organizations, particularly being able to control relationships within an environment and building a sense of commitment amongst staff.  Without these two things, I don't know if one could consider themselves a leader in the building at all, regardless of position or authority.  I believe this is why we often see administration struggle to get teachers "on board" with various visions or missions of the building- because they haven't first instilled a sense of commitment and aren't stakeholders themselves of the relationships within the building. 

Fortunately, I currently have amazing administrators who invest in their staff and trust them to take on various leadership roles or involve staff members in completing administrative tasks to see input.  This is where I also related with Firestone's task-oriented model.  There are many tasks that need to be done throughout the school year, and while a teacher may not have a specific named leadership roles within the building, usually teachers that have more responsibility are viewed more as leaders than others.  Also when considering this model, I thought the seven ways to break up leadership tasks were unique.  Among the tasks listed, I realized that almost all of those items would fall under either our principal or assistant principal.  It would be interesting to see our building run under a similar model, and how that would shift some of our leaders within the building. 

When considering professional learning, our building often relies on experts in the field or instructional coaches/TOSA's to provide much of our professional development.  Within the past year or so, however, we have begun allowing teachers to be the experts of their own craft and open up their rooms to various professional development sessions.  I think this is where the best learning can happen as an educator.  I appreciated the reflective question about social justice, as that is intensive but extremely important work that needs to happen both as a district and within a building.  The Issaquah School District has committed years of their whole district PD to social justice issues and also has paid for experts in the field to conduct repeated work with each building.  It is important when considering aspects of social justice that there is a lot of personal work that needs to be done by leaders themselves before they can bring along staff members on their journey.  This is a great instance to use the diversity you have in your building and pull out "leaders" that haven't previously been named. 

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