Coincidental excuse??

This morning, I slipped out for a morning exercise after seeing that the rain had stopped. After warming up and half an hour into it, I began to feel lazy and wanted to stop and go home. However, my fat physical body is ruling over my mind. That is to say my physical body wanted to go on but my mind wanted to go home. Then at this moment, it started to rain lightly. Hahaha... I thought God must have heard me and given me "an excuse" to go home. For those who have yet to know God, you might think that it is only coincidental that it began to rain then. Whether it was God's love or coincidental, I still went home. Hahaha... To me, it is always God's love but never coincidental.

Dreams

This morning I had a bad dream. I dreamt about my form class kids becoming more and more attitude. They are behaving very badly. In Jesus name, I rebuke this dream. I really hope that they will remain pure, innocent and grow into more responsible citizen of the world and, of course, in God's kingdom as well.

School Leadership

This is another one.

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In this short written dissertation, I would like to focus on the relationship between principal, in effect the leader of the school, and teachers. I will not take into consideration of the physical environment, and the demographic of both the students and the community.

Personally, I feel that school leadership is about fostering a safe learning environment for the students and a conclusive working environment for teachers. The only person that is able to revolutionise this will be the principal. The principal set the tone for the school. The principal is the instructional leader of the school.

Often, relationship is used as a vehicle to bring about changes. To strengthen the relationship between the principal and teachers, principal should first and foremost recognise the value of people. They should value teachers as individuals and not collectively. They should also realise the challenging and diverse demands of the job, and support teachers with facilities and resources needed to do their job effectively. Sometimes, being visible present throughout the school, without judgement, is also about being supportive of teachers. Principal could also arrange teachers to observe each others’ lesson to gain new strategies.

Principals should make an effort to have daily interpersonal interactions with teachers. More often than not, it is that small little concern that principals shower over the teachers that improve the relationship between them. In other words, the principal should attend to the fundamental components that are inherent in a quality relationship. The principal is also responsible for creating a collaborative, open, friendly, mutually respectful and supportive climate. This social environment will clearly make a difference in creating a trusting atmosphere.

With such an environment, principal are able to provide continual feedback to the teachers without them fearing of being label incompetent. Opportunities for teachers to develop professionally could also be created, whether it is in-house or off school. Collaborative work between teachers can also be arranged easily so as to improve teachers’ social and leadership skills.

This supportive and trusting relationship between the principal and teachers has a rippling effect on the students. As teachers begin to feel better about themselves, they are more effectively in class.

In wrapping up, teachers’ quality of work life is largely determined by the leadership style adopted by the principal.

School Vision

The following is an assignment I did.

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For a driver to get from one location to another, driving directions are needed. Similarly, for a school to initiate change in order to move forward, some sorts of directions are needed. And this form of direction is what I will call the ‘school vision’. School vision should essentially be the focus of school leadership. A vision expresses the values and beliefs that educators (in that particular school) have for their students, themselves and the community at large, taking into consideration of its own demographics.

The school vision provided the school a platform for it to have a shared purpose and a clear laser-like focused on student teaching and learning. Besides identifying direction and purpose, the existence of a vision will also provides continuity and avoids the falter effect of planning fits and starts. This will greatly increase the efficacy, efficiency and productivity of the school.

Another ripple effect of this clear sense of direction is that school is able to priories their resources. The school will know exactly how much funding should be allocated to programs that have learning objectives tuning towards the school vision. This will enable to keep the school and the improvement efforts of its staff and students on task.

A school’s vision needs to be generated, owned and supported by the whole school community including the pupils, parents and the local community. In other words, there is not a signature attached to the vision. The vision belongs to everyone in the school. However, before this could happen, two things would have to come first. One, the school vision is the result of an authentic exchange of views among all the parties involved (principals, teachers and stakeholders). Two, in order to enable the vision to be visible to everyone in the school, school leaders have to communicate and express (in the form of both speech and behaviour) the vision regularly and consistently.

In conclusion, I would like to draw an analogy. Having a school vision is like an athlete competing. Athletes compete with a clear objective in mind, that is, the aspiration to win. However, often, winning comes after hard work, sacrifices and commitment. Or worse, even after all these, winning never come. But with winning, it also brings sweetness and satisfaction.

In the same way, commitment to the vision only comes after conviction of the vision. And conviction of the vision only comes after painfully talking and walking the vision. Celebration will only come after a long period of commitment, conviction and talking the vision. However, there are also times that celebration seems to be far fetch.

The following is a model which I drew in view of what I had written above.