Republic of th e PhilippinesDon Mariano Marcos Memorial State University

North La Union CampusBacnotan, La Union

GRADUATE SCHOOLDoctor of Philosophy in Educational Administration

FINAL EXAMINATION

EDAD 307 – EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP

JOEY B. BOLINAS ORLANDO P. ALMOITE, Ph.D. Student Professor

Question #1. Discuss the role of Educational Leadership in planning and performing the different academic activities in the various levels of education. Cite appropriate principles, concepts, and processes.

In my own understanding as a leader in my own area of perception, educational leadership matters, spreads and lasts. It is a shared responsibility, that does not unduly deplete human or financial resources, and that cares for and avoids exerting negative damage on the surrounding educational and community environment. Educational leadership has an activist engagement with the forces that affect it, and builds an educational environment of organizational diversity that promotes cross-fertilization of good ideas and successful practices in communities of shared learning and development. In my own thoughts as a student in educational administration, appropriate principles, concepts, and processes on educational leadership are cited as follows:

a. Educational leadership creates and preserves sustaining learning. This means that sustainable educational leadership promotes sustaining learning that goes beyond temporary gains in achievement scores to create lasting improvements in learning that are also measurable.

b. Educational Leadership succession is the last challenge of leadership. It means therefore that it plans and prepares for succession, not as an afterthought, but from the first day of a leader’s appointment. It also regulates the rate and frequency of successions so that a staff does not suffer from the cynicism that is brought on by succession fatigue.

c. Educational leadership sustains the leadership of others. It means distributing leadership throughout the school’s professional community - so it can carry the torch once the principal has gone, and soften the blow of principal succession.

d. Educational leadership addresses issues of social justice. It is therefore not only about maintaining improvement in one’s own school. It is about being responsible to the schools and students that one’s own actions affect in the wider environment. It is about social justice.

e. Educational leadership develops rather than depletes human and material resources. This simply implies that systems should know how to take care of their leaders and how to get leaders to take care of themselves.

f. Educational leadership develops environmental diversity and capacity. This simply means that leadership recognizes and cultivates many kinds of excellence in learning, teaching and leading and provides the networks for these different kinds of excellence to be shared in cross-fertilizing processes of improvement. It does not impose standardized templates on everyone.

g. Educational leadership undertakes activist engagement with the environment. It means that leadership is most resilient - not just because of its innovativeness or its strength as a learning community, but because it engages assertively with its environment. It influences the environment that influences it.

Question #2. Being a school administrator or “would be administrator, cite some situations where a certain leadership style is appropriate. Focus your discussion on human behavior.

In my own perspective, to be a leader in schools today, one must first have an understanding of what their particular definition of leadership is. I believe that everyone has and should have their own definition for what an effective leader should be. This is because that definition is directly related to their leadership style. Upon reflecting on my definition of leadership, one word initially comes to mind. That word is, “inspirational”. I have come to an understanding that effective leaders should inspire. This term really describes effective leadership more than any other I can think of. An effective leader must be someone who can identify the strengths of his team and be able to bring that out in each of its members. An effective leader must also establish an environment or feeling that is inspirational to students as well.

As educators, leaders, and professionals, we must not limit ourselves by one governing style or definition. We need to be flexible and fluid in all that we do. It is with great satisfaction I find myself having those qualities. In everything we do, we must constantly remind ourselves of why we are doing it. We are not teaching for ourselves. We are not teaching for our administrators. We are not teaching for the school-board. We are always teaching with the student in mind. As members of this team, we have a tremendous responsibility and we must treat it as such.

Question #3. Describe a 21st century leader in educational parlance within the context of this statement, “Character is power, excellence is a habit”.

For me, leaders do not command excellence; they build excellence. Excellence is “being all you can be” within the bounds of doing what is right for your organization. To reach excellence you must first be a leader of good character. You must do everything you are supposed to do.

Organizations will not achieve excellence by figuring out where it wants to go, having leaders do whatever they have to in order to get the job done, and then hope their leaders act with good character. This type of thinking is backwards. Pursuing excellence should not be confused with accomplishing a job or task. When you do planning, you do it by backwards planning. However, you do not achieve excellence by backwards planning. Excellence starts with leaders of good and strong character who engage in the entire process of leadership. And the first process is being a person of honorable character.

Character develops over time. Many think that much of a person's character is formed early in life. However, we do not know exactly how much or how early character develops. But, it is safe to claim that character does not change quickly. A person's observable behavior is an indication of his or her character. This behavior can be strong or weak, good or bad. A person with strong character shows drive, energy, determination, self-discipline, willpower, and nerve. She sees what she wants and goes after it. She attracts followers. On the other hand, a person with weak character shows none of these traits. She does not know what she wants. Her traits are disorganized; she vacillates and is inconsistent. She will attract no followers.

A strong person can be good or bad. A gang leader is an example of a strong person with a bad character, while an outstanding community leader is one with both strong and good characteristics. An organization needs leaders with both strong and good characteristics — people who will guide them to the future and show that they can be trusted.

Question #4. Relate Organizational Change to Organizational Climate.

Organization Change  is a change that is deliberately planned, organization-wide effort to increase an organization's effectiveness and/or efficiency, and/or to enable the organization to achieve its strategic goals, its multiplicity of definitions reflects the complexity of the discipline and is responsible for its lack of understanding while organizational climate is the process of quantifying the “culture” of an organization, it precedes the notion of organizational culture, it is a set of properties of the work environment, perceived directly or indirectly by the employees, that is assumed to be a major force in influencing employee behavior.

Question #5. According to observations, our educational system is highly. Moral and ethical standards tend to be seemingly disregarded. If you agree, What would be the picture if our educational system is the other way around? If you disagree, are you content with what is happening?

Being a teacher and as part of the educational system, I do believe that successful teaching and good school cultures don't have a formula but they have a necessary condition: teachers and principals must feel free to act on their best instincts. This is why we must bulldoze school bureaucracy. Bureaucracy fails, in part, because it honors leadership as a primary quality over expertise, commits to ideological solutions without identifying and clarifying problems first, and repeats the same reforms over and over while expecting different results: our standards/testing model is more than a century old.

Public education is by necessity an extension of our political system, resulting in schools being reduced to vehicles for implementing political mandates. Bureaucracy bestows authority and a hierarchy on education that allows and perpetuates leadership without expertise or experience. For me, the consequences include the two most vivid examples of why education reform will continue to fail:

(1) inexpert leadership is ideologically committed to solutions and thus implements solutions without identifying and clarifying the problems first, and

(2) inexpert leadership that is in constant flux, with the perpetual changes in administrations, is apt to implement the same solutions over and over with different outcomes expected.

Bureaucracy can't teach, but educators and researchers can lead schools if we will commit ourselves to genuine social reform that addresses poverty, and to education reform that allows teachers to do that which they know how to do.

Question #6. In not more than 300 words, what do you think is the significance of your individual report to educational leadership?

My report for Educational Leadership (EDAD 307) is POLICY FORMULATION and IMPLEMENTATION. My report has its own significance specifically on research and other programs. The steps for implementing a program for children and youth may seem straightforward: identify a need, hire staff and provide the service or product to a target population. However, implementing programs that work requires careful advance planning, the involvement of multiple stakeholders, and a process that ensures accountability. When programs are implemented poorly, it not only reduces the potential for helping children and youth in need, but it wastes scarce public resources because poorly implemented programs are unlikely to be very successful.  In addition, when a program is implemented poorly, we don’t know whether or not it works.

Research on quality program implementation has identified a number of factors that can significantly improve implementation process to increase the effectiveness of programs. This issue brief discusses some of the fundamentals of quality program implementation that have been identified through research and practice and that may be useful for practitioners, policymakers and researchers alike.

Policy formulation and implementation defines quality program implementation, and highlights the importance of a high quality implementation, identifies factors that affect implementation, discusses steps in achieving quality implementation, and notes that responsibility for quality implementation is shared by key stakeholders. The factors that can affect implementation quality range from societal, community, program, practitioners, and organizational influences, as well as the implementation process itself.  This explains how implementation should focus on core components, allowing adaptation of other aspects to suit the population and setting.