Getting the opportunity to join CESL - Certificate in Educational Studies in Leadership is one of the prevailing experiences I have ever had. The opportunity to meet up with remarkable people with diverse knowledge and educational background motivates me to learn more and work together making a difference in my school context.
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FOUNDATION OF LEADERSHIP
The First Face toFace Session- 27 February - 1 March 2018.
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My first 3 days face to face workshop on 27th February 2018 to 1st March 2018 has been a great learning experience. I was reminded that a leader needs to humbly let others excel and succeed. It is not our self achievement that determine us as a good leader but when you are giving a way for others to succeed.... that would be a great achievement of a leader.
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In work, I have encountered supportive colleagues who would obey and follow instructions from the authority without questioning. Some others are doing their job as requested yet they are upset of the policy made. There are also times that I found my colleagues critically questioning about how and why are things supposed to be done the way it is instructed. In my context, I need everyone to join in for transformation. I can't ignore those who are being critical. In fact, I need to embrace those critical people to keep me alert of different options and solutions.
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In this workshop I also learned that each and everyone of us has our own mental model. This will affect on our understanding and the way we see and solve problems. We can't rely on our own understanding to solve all problems, we need to embrace different people with different experiences (mental model) in order to see problems in different perspectives and be open for alternatives of solutions.
In terms of goal setting, we need the whole team to be in tune for transformation. We have to communicate our vision and goal very clearly as well as minimising different perceptions between one another. It is the job of a leader to make sure that everyone is aiming to the same direction.
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Before leading others, It is necessary for me to know what kind of leaders I am. Am I a qualified leader with adequate competencies and skills needed or am I just functioning as a manager? Do I possess technical skill, human - relation skill or conceptual skill? Am I a task oriented leader or more into relationship oriented leader? I realised that there are still lots of rooms for improvement on my side. Well, that would be my homework to work on.
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One of the surprising things I found during our discussion was the fact that efficacy of teachers plays more important role in successful teaching rather than their passion. So far, I was thinking that those teachers with a heart of teaching or passion in teaching will do extra miles for their students' improvement regardless their pedagogical knowledge. However, the research was showing different result. I started to think that efficacy should be the first priority of a teacher to be able to contribute more to the students and with passion in teaching attached, they will brings students into a better person.
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FUNDAMENTALS OF EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP AND CHANGE
26 - 28 April 2018, 2nd Face to Face Workshop
2nd face to face workshop had been quite enriching that we all learned
a lot more about transformational leadership. All participants seemed to be
building closer relationship with one another. We shared our experiences and
skills in certain ways as well as learning from one another. It turns out that
we are not only learning from our lecturer, Dr Vicente C. Reyes -who has been very humble
and accomodating-, but we also learn from one another.
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The visit and sharing experiences of Mr Yu Book Lim, The Head Foundation, was one of the inspiring moment in the workshop. His passion in making a difference regardless who the people are is quite fascinating for me.
Proff Gopinathan, was also an amazing speaker. It was very clear that he is passionately looking forward to a change in Education. He pointed out that "School should be a life-learning organisation. Teachers capacity should be strengthened. Students doesn't need "just in-case" learning. *) e.g. just in case they will need to calculate something, then we need to teach them Math; just in case they will experience failure, we need to teach them endurance and resilient. Instead, they need "just in-time" learning." *) to be prepared before its time.
In order to manage change, we need actors of transformation. We need to identify who the sponsors, champion and entrepreneurs are.
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Sponsors are those organisations or people who support the transformational plan to happen. It could be as a financial support, policy maker or simply someone who will allow you to make the change.
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Champion is the person who initiate the change. He / she is the brain of the entire transformational project.
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Entrepreneurs are your ally, who will work with you to make the change possible. They are the engine of the program who execute The Action Plan (TAP)
Referring to reference society in Educational Performances, none is without turbulences and problems within the transformational process. There have always been challenges and difficulties in making changes. To cope with the challenges, we need to gather our ally to work hand in hand toward the goal. Set a doable goal for the transformational change, get stratified sample, identify the tipping point and do at least 3 points / times of evaluations to measure the consistency of the transformation. Yet, we also need to collect evidences on the process, at the same time finding out if there are other factors influencing the evaluation result.
This process could be measured quantitatively or qualitatively.
Perspectives in Educational Leadership
25 - 27 June 2018, 3rd Face to Face Session
After all we have learnt in the 1st and 2nd face to face sessions, we come to the topic of "Perspectives in Educational Leadership". This time, we were exposed to the detail system of the current best reference society in Education, Singapore.
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Singapore has successfully built the nation with their education system. The "No one left behind" policy has brought the idea of collaborative learning where schools help one another in different ways and make progress collaboratively. The cluster system that the government apply seems to be a great move to all of the schools. With each school contribution in sharing knowledge and experiences, others learn from it. Thus, it gradually brings equality in the school standards.
Although each of the schools are competing in the market, inside, they work together. Each school is building their special characteristics within. One might excel in sports, others in art or science. However, in terms of education standards, they all progressing together. This unique yet effective system that Singapore government apply has drawn the eyes of education experts, scholars and practitioners of many countries to study further about it.
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The collaborative work that Singapore educators are developing, seems to be very challenging yet very difficult to be done inJakarta or Indonesia. I was quite pessimistic to the idea since we have so many different types / classifications of schools around the country. Here, we classify school in different ways, not only between public or private schools but also in terms of curriculum adopted, national - international, also in terms of the authority reference, whether the school is under the Ministry of Education or Ministry of Religion. Do not forget, that each of these schools are competing to survive. However, upon seeing the detail system that Singapore government is doing. it seems to be worth of try.
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In this CESL class, we are coming from different types of schools and we do different kinds of projects. Though some of the projects seems to be working on similar goal, we have different needs and face different challenges. At first, I was not able to see how could we do collaborative work for that until we were requested to do a group presentation regarding to our projects. Upon this assignment, we need to draw a red line to connect each of the project collaboratively and make our presentation coherence. Hence, I was able to see that we could impart so many people, teachers and students, and all of us are working toward the same goal, a better education system. We all are aiming for improvement in education. Although we did our projects in small scope, our school context, yet it gives impact to the society. I also found that I can make use of my colleagues expertise and learn form their projects for my school improvement. That is collaboration!
The studies that Mr. Reyes showed us in class was also an eye opener for me. I began to see how the world is changing rapidly into more uncertain situations. Nonetheless, we can't just do policy borrowing from those successful reference society without considering our own country situation and condition. Seeing them improving is good, but we also need to observe how they come up with such policy, what kind of initial problems they face, what is the culture and customs of the society, what the law said about it, etc.
In the Philippines LEAP program we can see how challenging a reformation is. Partnership has proven to become the most important component in education reformation.
Adopting policies of other country could somehow become a problem for us too. Therefore, we need to be wise in borrowing others' policy. Learn form it! What challenges they faced, why it happened, etc. Sometimes we need to make a little adjustment to it in order to gain similar success. We need to be critical and find good partnership with others to collaborate with, critical friends.
