Part 2 blog

Reflecting on Lambert’s assumptions on the vision of leadership (p4):
“Everyone has the right, responsibility, and capability to be a leader.” Having the right is a given. Having the responsibility to be a leader, especially in the school environment is not as easy to bring out in people. Everyday, I hear colleagues criticizing decisions made by our administration. I’ve done it myself. Criticism is easy. What is hard is to take on the responsibility challenging that decision and offering alternatives. We know it is easier to just sit back and do nothing and feel that it is not our job, but every decision made in our school environment, eventually will affect us or the student learning process. Well, maybe not all. Does it matter that the principal is letting a senior girl on dance court who is academically ineligible based on some obscure reason? At first blush, most would say that doesn’t affect me or my classroom. But if you think about it, it means our leader bent a rule that has not been bent for other students. If you bend one rule here and one rule there, what eventually happens? This leads into the other vision of leadership assumption that “How we define leadership frames how people will participate in it”. So if our leaders are bending rules, won’t the people participating feel that they can bend rules as well? Shouldn’t our leader be modeling leadership behaviors? If he doesn’t, does that mean he doesn’t want us to be leaders? Lambert says (p4) that real communities insist on integrity and truthfulness. I expect it of my students; they expect it of me; I expect it of my colleagues and most importantly, I expect it of my leaders.