Leadership

=Leadership=

The concept of leadership as an aspect of the teacher librarian role was introduced in ETL401 and more fully explored in ETL504. Initially, one of my greatest difficulties was seeing how the teacher librarian could have a leadership role if they were not an executive. The answer became clearer when I read Lambert (1998) and Hough & Paine (1997). They reconfigured my thinking on leadership and led me to reread many of the other readings for the subject.

One of the first things that became obvious from the readings was that leadership was many things. This is evident when considering the number of labels that have been attached to it:
 * * hierarchical || * traditional || * transactional ||
 * * quality || * transformational || * adaptive ||
 * * strategic || * shared || * distributed ||
 * * leadership density || * teacher leader || * sustained ||

As seen from this evaluation, my readings led me to unpack some of these terms and see how they apply to my understanding of the leadership role for teacher librarians.

Lambert’s (1998) reading was pivotal in enabling me to understand my previous thinking on leadership as only a “position of formal authority”. Tribus (n.d), Beare (1989) and Chang (2002) expanded thinking on this and gave meaning to terms such as hierarchical, transactional and traditional leadership. Knowing what something isn’t can be as equally helpful as knowing what it is, therefore, the contrast between traditional and quality management by Baker (cited by Tribus n.d.) was particularly useful. Both Cheng (2002) and Beare (1989) identified the traditional leadership as “transactional” in which people are followers who receive reward in exchange for satisfactory work. This type of leadership is restrictive, promotes mediocrity and doesn’t promote leadership in others. It limits the role of teacher librarians and fails to see their value, especially in the area of curriculum. The opposite I have discovered is

T**ransformational leadership**. Cheng (2002 p.52) identified a transformational leader as one who Beare (1989) also highlighted the role of Added to this, the Fullan (2004) reading brought
 * is proactive about vision and mission,
 * shape people's beliefs, values, and attitudes and
 * develops options for the future.
 * communicating vision
 * securing commitment from colleagues
 * embedding it into the culture of the school.
 * strong moral purpose as the driver of transformational leadership.

Lambert (1998) advocated that leadership can be taken on by anyone within the organisation through distributed or shared leadership. Hough and Paine (1997) talk about this in practical ways and I could see how the leadership teams would work and have worked. Beare(1989) and Cheng (2002) also gave insight into why shared leadership or “leadership density” is needed. Citing Sergiovanni (1984) they both include the following types of leadership It is the role of educational leadership I can particularly relate to as a teacher librarian. At this point, the subjects of the first semester became more relevant, and connections were made, particularly with teacher librarians taking a transformational approach to help building an information literate school community.
 * technical,
 * human,
 * educational,
 * symbolic (political) and
 * cultural