The Importance Of Leadership In Mendels

Mendels started off by discussing the simple history of the principal as a principal teacher, a teacher that took over some of the administrative duties. She modified the term principal to become a instructional leader thus, turning the job of a principal into one that “should center on instruction, not building management or other administrative matters”. The focus of the article was then on the five areas of effective leadership for schools which were shaping a vision, creating a climate, cultivating leadership, improving instruction, and managing data and people. Finally, there was information provided on how states were now shaping the school leadership positions through a series of state in acted legislation. This article was a solid reinforcement of the topics that we have discussed thus far in Standard 1. The five areas that the author focused on have all been discussed in our sessions thus far and continue to keep me thinking about how I could run a school. Shaping a vision is a real key to affect …show more content…
The administrative team meetings include principal, assistant principal, athletic director, 2 guidance counselors, and our campus ministry person but do not include a teacher. This has led to a lot of frustration from teachers as they feel that a large majority of instructional time decisions are made by people not in a classroom. In this instance the administrative team meetings could include a rotating set of teachers that have prep times available or even set up a teacher-leader meeting time to bring up some suggestions to the decisions that need to be made. I understand that administrators need to make the decisions but to model education reform of giving students choices in the classroom could easily be applied to involving teachers in school decision