Creating Leadership Niches for a Learning Community

How Open Is Your School? What type of leadership skills that you identify with?

The three key ideas of democratic leadership are; that everyone has a voice, has a responsibility, and learns together. Everyone has a voice, which means we will have circular leadership to allow everyone to share their ideas and input on the school's decision-making process. Everyone has a responsibility to make sure the goals or decisions made in the school are carried out and accomplished as set out by the school's leadership. Everyone learns together so that we can all learn specific skills and practices from each other and from others not in our immediate community. Democratic leadership is a "model that secures staff members' full participation in the school's decision-making processes, promotes meaningful collaboration and harmonious work relations, generates passion for accomplishing goals, and boosts student and teacher productivity." ( Dr. Vicky Giouroukakis , April 2010). In other words, everyone has a voice and responsibility and learns together.

This would be very visible in the community of the school. It would be visible in the classroom, hallways, teacher loungers, and department offices. It would be apparent in the structure of the leadership of the school. The school's administration will be structured as the United States Senate model. Where elections are made, and delegates are elected to become part of a larger assembly. The cafeteria staff, custodians, teachers, and administrators will all be part of the Senate. Each department participates in elections of delegates for each content area. These departments will meet weekly to give input to the representatives on the needs and concerns of the departments. These "delegates" will then each participate in the election of a Chair of this said Senate. Elected to this Senate will also be the Assistant Principals for each department as speakers of those departments.

Along with the chair will be part of the leadership cabinet. The principal will serve as the Parliamentarian of the Senate to ensure all the legal steps of the school decision-making process are met and followed through.

The Chair of the Senate will also be part of the Community Board in the district where the school is located. This will allow everyone to be involved and informed of the school community and the community surrounding the school. Every school year, elections are held to ensure the participation of all the staff and pedagogues. This will allow for the three critical ideas for everyone's voice to be heard, everyone has a responsibility, and everyone is learning together. These principles will be visible in practice as an instructional leader.

In "How People Learn," Donovan et' al; identified conceptual understanding as factual knowledge in democratic leadership roles has to be specific, and everyone must have a genuine or deep understanding of their roles. "The ability to plan a task, notice patterns, generate reasonable arguments and explanations and draw analogies to other problems are all more closely intertwined with factual knowledge than once believed" (Donovan, 1999). This means that in a democratic leadership role, a leader must be able to recognize or evidence if one of the members is not carried out as having factual knowledge of the subject.

I don't believe everyone is an expert in everything, and I don't think someone's role should be taken away if they do not have factual knowledge of the subject.

Having the ability to recognize and help the person acquire the conceptual understanding, having enough curiosity to instill curiosity in others to find new solutions in leading the school in its decision. These are examples of leader evidence in democratic leadership. We learn in three ways, we either research, we experience, or someone tells us. In democratic leadership, these three things must be intertwined to help the school's administration be open to learning.

What Are Some Challenges that Leaders Face Trying to Create a Democratic Community?

For each, identifies a strategy that would employ to address the issue.?There are many challenges a leader faces trying to create a democratic community. Three of these are some leaders who forget to listen, some members are louder than others, and some don't trust each other.

Some leaders forget that listening requires you to really have an open mind and genuinely care about what the speaker is saying. Find ways to connect to the speaker without your pre-imposed misconceptions and beliefs blocking the leader from really listening. A strategy that can be used to address this issue is to come into every conversation open-minded—not having a solution to the problem but to come up with one together with the speaker and leave them with the sense that it was their idea and only theirs. They now need to help everyone come aboard with their concept.?

The second issue is that some members of the democratic community may not be so democratic. They may have the most assertive personality and the loudest voice in the group. A strategy to help the community to address this issue can be through coming up with ideas through "popcorning." Popcorning is a strategy IBM uses to help them bring their ideas forward. A team leader will present the challenges, and the team comes up with solutions written on a sticky note with a pen "There is no battling over the best ideas or who owns what. Just get your thoughts out of the brain and on the wall" (Gilbert, 2014). This allows every voice to be heard without anyone overpowering the conversation. There is little to no talking, just putting ideas to form a solution to the challenge. Then all the sticky notes are arranged in order of overlapping concepts, and a clear, precise solution is developed. This is a great strategy to help the community remain democratic.?

The third issue is people not trusting each other in the democratic community. The community will never move forward adequately or become a democratic community if the people involved do not trust each other. For a democratic society to be prosperous, all the stakeholders in this community need to have confidence in themselves and their co-workers. Developing relationships, empathy, and trust with one another will help solve the previous two issues I mentioned earlier. Organization of ideas and solutions come more at ease. "I've seen that team members are pretty good at organizing themselves when they have established relationships." ( Phil Gilbert , 2014). In other words, if the trust is there, everything else will fall into place much more straightforward than if there isn't any trust.?

Trust allows for every voice to be heard, everyone to have a responsibility, and everyone to learn together to maintain the democratic community open to curiosity and allow for strategies to develop to solve any issues that challenge the democratic leadership.?

Work Cited:

1) Gilbert, P. (2014, December 6th). Hearing Every Voice in the Room. The New York Times, pp. 1-3.

2) Giouroukakis, E. N. (April 2010). When Teachers Run the School, Reimagining School. Educational Leadership.

3) M.Suzanne Donovan, J. D. (1999). How People Learn, Bridging Research and Practice. Washington D.C.: National Academy Press