Effective school leadership helps in building and improving the reputation of the school by achieving long term success. “Management is all about doing things right, but leadership is about doing the right things.”
Improving school leadership is one of the top priorities of school reform. The senior leadership team is the governing body that comprises of the management and the headteachers. It’s a coterie that possesses exceptional organizational capabilities, a healthy vision, a positive attitude, high expectations, and high standards.
A School leader is essentially the “crème de la crème” of the institution, who is capable of cascading responsibilities and also ready to take accountability for activities of the school system. The omphalos of the school leadership revolves around four indispensable factors- building an exceptional plan, executing the plan, making resources/ technology available for supporting the plan, and maintaining the whole process throughout the year for best results. The propitious efforts of the senior leadership team can be patulous to the teachers and the students. The ultimate success of education reflects on the teacher’s involvement and quality of delivering the content. A recent research stated that any senior leadership team, working closely with the teachers, by utilizing their data and analyzing the productivity reports, helped the teachers to be more involved in their duties. Weekly meetings can be held to address concerns, queries, issues, areas of improvement, and also encouraging the teachers to provide new ideas, improved the total outlook of teaching. Few innovative plans like rewarding the teachers with “The best teacher” award periodically, by assessing their overall activities like attendance, submitting data on time, maintaining student discipline, etc. assures them the space to grow. Fractionating the teachers into different teams and delegating them with more responsibilities makes them work for themselves than for others. Teachers, in turn, can build their teams by choosing their student leaders.
The student leaders can be segregated and actively involved for various activities like maintaining and promoting overall cleanliness of the school, encouraging the kids to engage more in sports and represent the school in various competitions, organizing educational events, helping the class to step forward for social activities, monitoring the overall decorum of the school, etc. These student leaders will be a role model for other kids who are working towards the goal of becoming a leader. It brings clarity, decisiveness, courage, and honesty among kids. They can meet up with their senior leadership teams for weekly updates, concerns, and suggestions. The cumulative effort of the leadership teams from the student community to the senior leadership team will lead the school towards excellence in every aspect. A leader is the one who knows the way, goes the way and shows the way. Best leaders are the ones who are capable of making the right decisions during the toughest times. Choosing the right leader is the secret of making the school achieve exponentially.
Hence coming together is a beginning, working together is progress and achieving together is success.
