Lesson II

Unit II: Leadership Roles: Challenges and Perspectives

a. What are the essential values, vision and moral purpose in educational leadership?

School leadership has become a priority in education policy agendas internationally. It plays a key role
in improving school outcomes by influencing the motivations and capacities of teachers, as well as the
school climate and environment. Effective school leadership is essential to improve the efficiency and
equity of schooling. As countries are seeking to adapt their education systems to the needs of
contemporary society, expectations for schools and school leaders are changing. Many countries have
moved towards decentralization, making schools more autonomous in their decision making and
holding them more accountable for results. At the same time, the requirement to improve overall
student performance while serving more diverse student populations is putting schools under pressure
to use more evidence-based teaching practices.

There are concerns across countries that the role of principal as conceived for needs of the past is no
longer appropriate. In many countries, principals have heavy workloads; many are reaching retirement
and it is getting harder to replace them. Potential candidates often hesitate to apply, because of
overburdened roles, insufficient preparation and training, limited career prospects and inadequate
support and rewards. These developments have made school leadership a priority in education systems
across the world. Policy makers need to enhance the quality of school leadership and make it
sustainable.
Research has shown that school leaders can make a difference in school and student performance if
they are granted autonomy to make important decisions. However autonomy alone does not
automatically lead to improvements unless it is well supported. In addition, it is important that the core
responsibilities of school leaders be clearly defined and delimited. School leadership responsibilities
should be defined through an understanding of the practices most likely to improve teaching and
learning.

The increased responsibilities and accountability of school leadership are creating the need for
distribution of leadership, both within schools and across schools. School boards also face many new
tasks. While practitioners consider middle-management responsibilities vital for effective school
leadership, these practices remain rare and often unclear; and those involved are not always recognized
for their tasks.
There is a need to reinforce the concept of leadership teams in national frameworks, to develop
incentive mechanisms to reward participation and performance in these teams and to extend leadership
training and development to middle-level management and potential future leaders in the school.
Finally, policy makers need to reflect on modifying accountability mechanisms to match distributed
leadership structures.

The challenge is to improve the quality of current leadership and build sustainable leadership for the
future. Evidence indicates that potential applicants are deterred by the heavy workload of principals and
the fact that the job does not seem to be adequately remunerated or supported. Uncertain recruitment
procedures and career development prospects for principals may also deter potential candidates.
Strategies to attract, recruit and support high-performing school leaders include the following:

 Professionalise recruitment
 Focus on the relative attractiveness of school leaders’ salaries
 Acknowledge the role of professional organisations of school leaders
 Acknowledge the role of professional organisations of school leaders

Video link: https://www.educationalleaders.govt.nz/Leadership-development/Professional-

information/Leadership-capability-framework/Embodying-the-organisation-s-values/Leading-with-
moral-purpose
b. What kind of challenges do multi cultural issues pose in educational
management?

Multicultural education is an idea, an educational reform movement, and a process whose major goal is
to change the structure of educational institutions so that male and female students, exceptional students,
and students who are members of diverse racial, ethnic, language, cultural, and religious groups will
have an equal opportunity to achieve academically in school. It is necessary to conceptualize the school
as a social system in order to implement multicultural education successfully. Each major variable in
the school—such as its culture, its power relationships, the curriculum and materials, and the attitudes
and beliefs of the staff—must be changed in ways that will allow the school to promote educational
equality for students from diverse groups.

The major variables of gender, race or ethnicity, social class, religion, and exceptionality influence
student behavior, both singly and interactively. Other variables, such as region and age, also influence
student behavior.
When many teachers think of multicultural education, they think only or primarily of content related to
ethnic, racial, and cultural groups. Conceptualizing multicultural education exclusively as content
related to various ethnic and cultural groups is problematic for several reasons. Teachers who cannot
easily see how their content is related to cultural issues will easily dismiss multicultural education with
the argument that it is not relevant to their disciplines. This is done frequently by secondary math and
science teachers. The irrelevant‐of‐content argument can become a legitimized form of resistance to
multicultural education when it is conceptualized primarily or exclusively as content. Math and science
teachers often state that multicultural education is fine for social studies and literature teachers but that
it has nothing to do with their subjects. Furthermore, they say, math and science are the same regardless
of the culture or the kids. Multicultural education needs to be more broadly defined and understood so
that teachers from a wide range of disciplines can respond to it in appropriate ways and resistance to it
can be minimized.
Due to diversity, multicultural teams are more prone to face difficulties including language barriers,
ineffective communication and differences in communication styles (Adler, 2002). When heterogeneity
in groups increases, it is considered that cultural differences bring about miscommunication in the
group and undermine the development of group norms (Bettenhausen and Murnighan, 1985; Jehn et al.,
1999; Ely & Thomas, 2001; Behfar et al., 2006). Diversity is likely to create a propensity toward
conflict and subconsciously-held cultural differences and sources of conflict are tough to detect and
annihilate (Kirchmeyer and Cohen, 1992). For example Different communication styles of group
members are likely to create controversy about certain issues including the deadlines of the assignments
and due dates of the projects. So, one of the problems that managers face within this context is the
controversy among group members about the deadline of a task or a project. For instance, when it is
said that the task must be submitted at the end of the day; some people are likely to regard it as the end
of the shift whereas the interpretation of ‘at the end of the day’ is likely for others to be the beginning
of a new day or midnight.
According to De Dreu & Weingart (2003), conflicts in multicultural teams are negatively related to
team performance. Team members, if they are not trained about diversity along with cultural tendencies,
will be more irritated and less tolerant about the differences. Intolerance and lack of awareness of team
members and managers about these issues lead to frictions and conflicts in the team. Then, team
members will underperform under these circumstances unless the manager knows how to tackle these
issues. However, working styles and attitudes towards work can be very different, reflecting cultural
values and compounding differences. If not recognized and accounted, conflicting approaches to work
can put the brakes on productivity.

https://youtu.be/sVtew_MpPww