17795076 JOSEF NIEDERMAYER

– ASSIGNMENT 2
Semester 2 (Spring) 2020

Western Sydney University

102098 Contemporary Teacher Leadership
17795076 Josef Niedermayer 102098 Contemporary Teacher Leadership

Part A: Proposal Presentation

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17795076 Josef Niedermayer 102098 Contemporary Teacher Leadership

Part B: Critical Reflection

Our group’s initial problem was establishing a project that we could each have some degree

of expertise in, seeing as we had four different KLA’s among us. What we settled on was a literacy

program from Merrylands High School since two members had been there in the past. Literacy, we

agreed, was a very valuable skill for all students, regardless of KLA or specialty of knowledge. We

agreed on this because we saw that literacy serves as a cornerstone for our very interaction with

others and the world around us and isn’t simply an ability to read and write (Wilinksy, 2017; ACARA,

2020). Because of this agreement, none of us considered any other person in the group as the expert

on the topic, and so we did not follow a hierarchical leadership model. In other words, we enacted a

collaborative leadership and brought our own ideas, knowledge, and experience to the group and to

the project at hand (Lee, Hallinger, & Walker, 2012). These differences often landed us in debates

and discussions as we fought about the finer details, such as what kinds of intervention strategies

would be most effective, but in the end these differences helped to strengthen rather than weaken

our discussions. This is reflective of the prompt our group had to discuss in our first week’s tutorial in

this unit from Shields (2014)—this was about encountering a diversity of opinions and backgrounds

as a teacher leader. Through the contention that we faced due to difference of opinion and

experience, we were able to grow from these conflicts and resolve them critically together.

Two challenges that our group did not handle well were the distribution of tasks and the

synthesis of our proposal. As much as our discussions were productive and effective, and we were

able to lay out a plan of action that we all agreed on, we struggled with pulling it together formally.

The plan worked in theory but was not pulled off very successfully as a formal document. A

combination of communication issues and a lack of clear and direct tasks given to each of us meant

that we were, for the most part, without proper direction individually; we knew collectively what the

goal was, but we were not able to bring that ultimate goal down to an individual level with the

necessary specificity. In his book, Employee Engagement 2.0 (2012), Kruse talks about the value that

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‘emotional commitment’ has on the engagement a person will have with their work. I believe this

was a fundamental issue with our assignment. Although we were able to agree to a common goal

and debate its details well, we struggled with committing to it by putting in the necessary effort to

make everything crystal clear and helping each other out. It is here I believe that some hierarchical

leadership, or internal expertise in the group, would have been beneficial for us; this would have

filled the gap that we did not fill ourselves by directing us individually with the knowledge that our

separate parts would come together to create a meaningful and coherent proposal.

The collaborative nature of this group assessment, as well as the cyclic nature of the

proposal that we created, has made it clear that when it comes to teaching and leadership, the end

product isn’t the end of the process: it is instead the beginning of the next part of the process. Hurd

and Licciardo-Musso’s (2005) lesson-study cycle model best exemplifies this in the context of

teacher led-professional development. The model describes the continuous nature of creating lesson

in an informed and data-driven way. The model cycles between four stages: studying the curriculum

and standards, planning the lesson with external research, conducting the lesson with data

collection, reflecting on the lesson, and then back to studying the curriculum again. This process of

gathering internal and external data, planning, and reflecting, highlights the major aspects of a

continuously updating (and hence improving) teaching practice. I believe that this process is

especially important for teachers since they are effective agents of change; capable to molding and

morphing the students that we teach and, hence, having an impact on our future as a society. And as

a future agent of change, I believe that we are endowed with the responsibility to use the power

that we have as such an agent, in a positive, sustainable, and empowering way.

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References
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