Maple Shade Middle School Leadership Essay

Introduction

For an educational leader a struggling school, such as Maple Shade Middle School, presents a unique opportunity. With the right leadership approach and a well thought out, well executed plan, a poorly performing school can be transformed into a thriving community school that provides positive learning and growth opportunities for all students (Frankl, 2016). As an educational leader tasked with effecting positive change for Maple Shade, I would consider three areas: the challenges and opportunities, the development of a vision for learning to include student performance goals, and the leadership approaches or style that would ensure positive changes in student achievement and outcomes occur.

Challenges and Opportunities

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(2008), transformational leadership, on the other hand, is relationship-based. The premise is that the leader uses their influence and energy to inspire commitment to a common vision, motivating the team to work collaboratively to overcome obstacles and reach ambitious goals. Northouse (2018) defines leadership as a process. The leader influences others to work toward the achievement of a shared goal. He also states that while management provides order, leadership is about producing change and movement. Certainly in a school setting like Maple Shade, one can equate achievement and growth with movement. It follows then that, if one of the primary functions of leadership is producing change, as stated by Leithwood and Riehl (2005), developing a purpose and ensuring a shared understanding of organizational goals is an important task of leadership. A successful leader must be able to articulate a vision for the organization, provide clarity of purpose, and guide the team to a shared understanding of the purpose and vision. From my perspective, this is a critical element because without clarity of purpose, there is no direction for the school. A school without a clear vision is a challenging place to teach and learn, with continually changing directions and inconsistent priorities. I have also learned that it is not enough to just have a vision and purpose. If the staff is unaware of them, then they do not exist. Therefore, after identifying and

The indicators clearly show a need for instructional improvement, but again, academic achievement does not occur in isolation. All indicators, all aspects, all stakeholders of Maple Shade are connected, like a web. A change to one impacts all. In order to successfully complete a “turn around” of Maple Shade, one must have the ability to not only see the connections, but work with them to leverage strengths and develop areas of weakness. This requires a leader with the ability to be both highly goal focused who also possesses the ability to build relationships, inspire, motivate, and effectively communicate with